With all the distractions thrown at today's parent — especially a single-one, the idea of reading aloud to your child for 3,218 straight nights is beyond the pale. It borders on super-human. It also made for a super-bond. Below is an excerpt from The New York Times story on this unusual duo, along with a link to the complete article.

A Father-Daughter Bond, Page by Page

By MICHAEL WINERIP, ©The New York Times, 2010

MILLVILLE, N.J. — When Jim Brozina’s older daughter, Kathy, was in fourth grade, he was reading Beverly Cleary’s Dear Mr. Henshaw to her at bedtime, when she announced she’d had enough. “She said, ‘Dad, that’s it, I’ll take over from here,’ ” Mr. Brozina recalled. “I was, ‘Oh no.’ I didn’t want to stop. We really never got back to reading together after that.”

Mr. Brozina, a single father and an elementary school librarian who reads aloud for a living, did not want the same thing to happen with his younger daughter, Kristen. So when she hit fourth grade, he proposed The Streak: to see if they could read together for 100 straight bedtimes without missing once. They were both big fans of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, and on Nov. 11, 1997, started The Streak with The Tin Woodman of Oz.

When The Streak reached 100, they celebrated with a pancake breakfast, and Kristen whispered, “I think we should try for 1,000 nights.”

Mr. Brozina was delighted, but what he was thinking was, a thousand nights?! “I thought, we’ll never do it,” he recalled. “And then we got to 1,000, and we said, ‘How can we stop?’ ”

For 3,218 nights (and some mornings, if Mr. Brozina was coming home too late to read), The Streak went on. It progressed from James Marshall’s picture books about George and Martha (two close friends who happen to be hippos) to middle-school classics like When Zachary Beaver Came to Town to the 14 Oz books (which they read four times each), to Harry Potter, Agatha Christie, Dickens and Shakespeare, continuing on, until Kristen’s first day of college.

In those nine-plus years, they survived many close calls . . .

The rest of the March 21, 2010 article can be found at The New York Times site: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/fashion/21GenB.html

 

For yet another look at what a parent can do when he or she sets a mind to reading aloud, see Erin's List.

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