Happy 4th birthday, Can we read! 🎈(with gifts for you)

Can we read is FOUR 🎂

It’s often difficult — sometimes close to impossible — for me to remember beginning this newsletter.

I have a vague memory of where I was sitting, at a desk I’d set up in my living room, in the dark, late on a Friday night two and a half months into pandemic lockdown with a 3yo and a 5yo and a husband who, as an essential worker, left the house each day, while I tried to figure out, every hour, Monday through Friday and many hours beyond that, how to work full-time from said desk in said living room with said small children.

Have I ever mentioned that I was also struggling hard to claw my way out from under a mysterious illness I’d been dealing with for several years, the main component of which was crushing fatigue, and I had just embarked on an insanely restrictive medically prescribed diet that was so soul-crushing and impossible, I depended on my husband to feed me, or simply didn’t eat? (I will never not eat cheese ever again. I don’t care. EVER.)

Maybe I started this newsletter to feed my mind when I couldn’t properly feed my body, at a time when my mind was being starved in somewhat equal measure. I needed a project, and I needed it to be just for me, something completely separate from my life as a wife, mother, and virtual employee, and I needed to spend the next couple of years writing through all the things that happened next, like the traumatic loss of a baby at the small in-home daycare our children had attended since they were infants themselves, the family fallout after my sister’s then-partner tried to kill her, a year of homeschooling (legit homeschooling, not “virtual Covid homeschooling with actual teachers on the other end of a computer”), my youngest child’s Lyme disease, my own emergency surgery that I went through entirely alone, my mom’s cancer diagnosis and treatment, the final months of my grandmother’s life and her subsequent death, my mom’s nearly-catastrophic car accident two days before last Thanksgiving, and most recently, an active shooter at my children’s schools.

I started this newsletter to feed my mind and it worked, that happened: but somewhere along the way and without my planning it, it has also fed my heart.

It has given me deep delight.

It has given me something to explore and explore some more.

It has given me good work to do (and sometimes, a place to go mentally and emotionally when I have needed to believe good work, and good things, still exist).

It has given me a way to feel useful, and friendships with people I never would have met otherwise.

Last year on Can we read?’s 3rd birthday, I had 2,997 subscribers. Today I have 4,629.

I started with 19.

I don’t take any of this — not one single part of it — for granted.

(I also don’t take for granted that when I changed the subscription model here — removing the paywall and making paid subscriptions a means of showing support rather than a requirement for greater access — the risk was worth it. The model works, but only because you have made it work.

If you’re interested in how well it has worked, I wrote a little about it on Notes the week before last):

Thank you for being part of this, and for your ongoing enthusiasm, kindness, and support. It’s a gift to me — a real and actual gift — and I’m continually grateful to you and for you.

🫶

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A quick look back

Here are some of the most popular issues since last May:

• Children’s books about cooking and baking

• Spotlight On: Mindfulness and meditation

• Ask Me Anything

• First chapter books

• A book gift guide for readers 10 and under

• Reading routines

• My own reading routines

• 5 ways to overcome obstacles to reading

(My favorite thing from the past year is the Can we read? Children’s Poetry Almanac — mostly because it’s an idea I’ve had in the back of my mind for years and years but didn’t know how to make real, until one morning in the final days of December, I woke up and just knew, and then it poured out of me in less than 72 hours. Sometimes it happens this way, and the wonder of that — Big Magic, for sure — is part of what keeps me writing and creating.)

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What’s a birthday without presents?

Thanks to those of you who entered the giveaway and left me some excellent feedback! I appreciate your honesty and support.

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With gratitude and love 💕
Sarah