Archie comics, I can't even think of them without thinking of my friend Wendy and how we spent part of the '70s lying on her scratchy "health" rug reading all about Archie and the Riverdale gang.

It's hard to believe that they even exist outside of my childhood. But Archie does and it seems that Riverdale has grown up a lot in the last 30 years.

Archie has big event coming up: he is attending a wedding - a gay wedding.

It is Family Literacy Day. Which kind of begs the question: isn't everyday family literacy day?

Does a day go by in your family without talking about books or reading? Or at least yelling at your kids to get their reading done?

Yesterday, my son threw the French reader on the couch and said "I hate reading!"

Oh kid, I hear you. Those readers are so, so boring. They could make a librarian hate books. But that is reading in primary school which is dominated by acquiring skills not by enjoyment (this is worse in French Immersion but that is another topic).

I hope that once he gets up to speed in both languages that he will learn to love to read, just as his brother did. But then this study came out that says only half of students like to read for pleasure, which is approximately a 25 percent decline from 10 years ago.

Did you line up to see Harry Potter this weekend? Did you cower at Voldemort? Cry at the end? Revel in all things Potter?

Harry is like a member of our family. We even discussed naming our puppy Sirius or Patronus after a character and a protection spell. (We settled on Joey for no reason other than that it is what we came with.)

My husband read each book to my now 11-year-old. The two of them lined up at midnight for the last book to be released. They have been part of a cultural moment that I don’t know will ever happen again. It was a journey they took together and I love J.K. Rowling for that gift. In fact, that reason alone has made me a Harry Potter fan for life.

I am scrambling to go away for a few days with my mother and sister and I get an email from the Pizza Day coordinator at school: "Can you come for pizza lunch? We lost a volunteer."

So I did. One of the many parents at school giving up our lunch hour to dish out soggy pizza to the kids. I didn't have the time and not really the inclination, but I showed up. But I don't do much when it comes to school activities. After three kids, I'm burnt out.

I remember it well. I was walking past my son's room and I could hear my husband singing:

"The drunks go walking two by two, hurrah, hurrah. The drunks go walking two by two, hurrah! The littlest one smells like skunk, and they all go marching down around the town boom, boom, boom."

The fantastic lyrics went on from there and I can tell you that they are unprintable.

Oh Scholastic, how I hate you with your TV and movie tie-ins, your copious amounts of stickers and little dolls masquerading as learning experiences.

But how I love the opportunity to get cheap books, and see the kids' excitement to rifle through your newsprint pages. And their smiles when they return home with bags of books.

I hate the feeling of guilt that I am somehow robbing my bookstore of our patronage, but like how the teacher gets a kickback for school supplies (or do I hate that because it is kind of blackmail?).

In the summer of 2000, our close friend's father received a letter from Japan. The letter was from a young woman who worked at the Tokyo Holocaust Centre, "I have your sister's suitcase" it read.

Fumiko Ishigoka was trying to teach children in Japan about the Holocaust in order to foster tolerance and compassion. She wondered if an artifact from a European child would help Japanese children feel empathy for the children who perished long before they were born.

The Auschwitz Museum sent her a child's sock, a sweater, a shoe, a canister of Zyklon B gas and a suitcase. In thick white paint, the words "Hana Brady, Waisenkind [orphan]" were written on the scuffed brown leather. 

Goodnight air

Goodnight soup bowl

Goodnight Mr. Nobody

Goodnight garage that needs cleaning

Mama! It does not say that!

What? Huh? Oh sorry, honey.

Nothing like reading one of the classics for the hundredth time after a long day and a big dinner to have the snoozes hit you like a ton of bricks. Your eyes start to water, the head bobs set in and then the incoherent babbling starts.

At the age of four, my son was running around with a pretend guns shooting everyone in his path. I was panicked and asked his wise nursery school teacher what to do. She explained calmly that kids at the age of four play with archetypal gender roles as they learn to define themselves in a complicated world.

But she didn't say it like that; she said not to worry, all kids do it -- boys are superheroes and girls are princesses.

I think of that often as I see my daughter dressed up in her full princess regalia, as I have to fight with her over my blush and lip gloss, as she tells me that when she is grown up that she is going to be married to a prince.