If I didn't know better, I could swear you were adopted...

I am constantly amazed at how different our boys are from each other and how different they can be from me.

This is the last week of J's summer camp before school starts. He and I have spent most of the summer together in an extended commute to and from school. In that time he has taken up some new habits.

The first new habit is reading voraciously. He started with Captain Underpants and moved on to Encyclopedia Brown and then jumped straight into the Hardy Boys. While we know that he skips the hard words, he's getting the story and plot and is energized to learn more. He clearly gets the "love of reading" part of reading that it took me YEARS to find. I remember reading Encyclopedia Brown in 4th grade! It wasn't until High School and Robert Heinlein that got me into real reading for pleasure.

J's second new habit is listening to NPR. I was putting NPR on when he started reading because I figured he was busy and I like to listen to NPR to keep up with events. But recently I noticed that he's not reading, he's listening. And this morning I asked him if he wanted to listen to music or the news, he said "news".

This week we got a new shower radio for our bathroom and I put the old one in the kids' bathroom. J and I were talking about how now he and P could listen to music while they were in the bath. "or the News" he added.

Again, many years did it take me to learn to read the paper, watch the news, listen to NPR. "So boring, so mind numbing" was how I thought about it as a kid.

I am sure that Ryan's scary love of reading and news has influenced J's genetic makeup, but I still marvel at what an individual J has turned out to be.