I don’t know if we had H1N1 or not, but the week before last LittleJ (my 7 year old) was out for 2 days with something virusy-flu-like, and feverish, and last week BigJ (my 10-year-old) was out 3 days with the same.

Me, I had a little fever, too…but I went on in to school. I can’t be out 5 days in 2 weeks with my kids and let a little old fever stop me.

When my kids are sick I relax the screen-viewing rules. Normally the rule is this: no screen time (meaining TV or non-school use computer) on school days, screentime on weekends only after rooms are cleaned to momma’s specifications, and limited screentime on those days. Like not all day. Not even all morning.

But when a sick, feverish, headachy little boy is home for the day then I allow unlimited screen time while brother is off at school. Sometimes it’s part of the cure. Zoning and dozing in front of the TV for a day or two is fine in this situation.

But the boys surprised me. Sure, there was plenty of TV watching. But there was also plenty of reading. BigJ reread The Last Olympian twice (perhaps his 5th and 6th readings of these books?), and started D’aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths for the third time. He also got a ways into the relevant section of Bulfinches before he became frustrated with the Roman names for the Gods. And his 3rd day of being sick, when he wasn’t sick at all (we were obeying the 24-hour fever free rule of school), he read the most recent Cressida Cowell Hiccup Horrendous Haddock book as well as Syren, the most recent Septimus Heap.

Yes, the kid can read.

Now, LittleJ is in 1st grade and just jumping on the read-to-himself bandwagon, but he is certainly very text aware and he looks at books all the time. He especially looks at graphic novels - mostly his brother’s. He has memorized every picture in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, loves his Scooby Doo and Batman graphic novels/picture books - really more the length and size of chapter books, but not comics - it’s hard to categorize exactly what these are. His interest match up exactly with the interests of many of the 6-9 year old boys at the school in which I work - most of whom are both emergent readers and English Language Learners. It convinces me that we need LOTS and LOTS of this kind of text in our library…but I digress. The long and the short of it is that LittleJ also spent a lot of his sick time looking at books. Lots more than I’d have thought for a very early reader. I read one or two to him, but that wasn’t what he was interested in. He was making sense of the books by himself.

I am convinced that the reading was what cured us of our flu so quickly. And me? I was cured by the happy little readers at school…and at home.