Measuring Time
Marking the passage of time by the size of our books
by Kristen Pittman
Nearly 10 years ago, when my oldest child was just a toddler, I snapped a photo of her new Mary Jane shoes resting on the bay windowsill and sent it off into the social media ether with the caption, “These days we measure the passage of time by the size of new shoes.”
Just a few weeks ago, in a time when my oldest is about to leave her elementary school days behind, I watched my youngest child pick up a copy of The Balter of Ashton Harper to read to herself. It’s the longest book I’ve seen her want to read on her own so far, and I thought, “These days we measure the passage of time by the size of our books.”
It’s been a long time since I’ve stopped to consider all the ways we unconsciously measure the passage of time, but something about getting ready to close one chapter of our family’s life and transition into another has brought those things back to the surface. It’s true that just as the clothing size has changed in my children’s closets over the years, so too has the book size changed on our shelves.
The early days were marked mostly by board books. Books with bright, bold pictures and few words. This was the season of cradling littles in my arms or holding them on my lap as I endlessly read and re-read How Do I Love You; The Going to Bed Book; Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do you See? and more.
Before I knew it, I was reading Each Peach Pear Plum to busy toddlers who recited the words with me as they tumbled on the playroom mat then raced to look over my shoulder to find the fairytale characters hidden in the illustrations I Spy style.
It didn’t take long for the stack of reading-time books to whittle down from 10 or 12 little books we could breeze through in 20 minutes to five or six that took us even longer to finish. The picture books became real stories with full-fledged plots, characters, conflict, and resolution. Rosie Revere, Engineer was teaching my littles how to try big things unafraid of failure and AdoraBull was teaching them about the importance of communicating instead of making assumptions.
Somewhere in all of this, my children learned to read for themselves. Before I knew it, early readers and simple chapter books stood in stacks by their beds and were piled in baskets on the fireplace hearth, the upstairs landing, and the playroom bookshelves. As they grew more proficient, reading aloud to them morphed from an every-moment-of-the-day thing to a pockets-here-and-there thing. We began reading longer, more complicated stories together, finishing a few chapters of Stuart Little or Little Pilgrim’s Progress, among others, each day.
These days, school and activity schedules relegate family read-alouds to bedtime. More often than not, my oldest daughter is now the one reading out loud to the rest of us. So you can imagine the nostalgia that washed over me when my youngest daughter recently curled up on the couch next to me and asked me to read Oh the Places You’ll Go! to her.
Not long ago, one of my favorite songwriters released a song about his world changing. In it, he says, “I heard that healthy things grow, and growing things change.” As hard as it can be, it is good and right for my children to grow and change. It is good and right for our reading to grow and change with them. It is good and right to notice the change and mark the growth along the way.
So, these days I am measuring the passage of time by the size of our books, by the length of our read-alouds (and who is the one doing the reading), by the time of day that magic gets to happen. And I wonder, how do you find yourself measuring the passage of time?
June 24, 2025 - Release of mystery novel for older readers by Katherine Ladny Mitchell, Not to Be - Preorders OPEN
July 18–20, 2025 - Bandersnatch at the Realm Makers Expo in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Learn more
September 23, 2025 - Release of middle grade fantasy novel by Glenn McCarty, The Song of the Stone Tiger
November 2025 - Release of illustrated children’s poetry anthology, I’ve Got a Bad Case of Poetry - Preorder on the Kickstarter Platform
November 2025 - Release of lower middle-grade novel by Mary Barrows, Joe the Fourth and the King’s Crown
We had a laugh this week when, in one night, we got an order for Wandering and Promise together from someone who bought Exile a few weeks ago, an order for Wandering from a customer who ordered Exile a month ago, and an order for Exile from a new customer. So we made a little reel. It’s going to happen. We all know you’re just going to come back and get the rest of the trilogy.
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“May we ever tell the stories of these days.”
Richard Adamaris, Rosefire by Carolyn Clare Givens
