This is what we’ve been doing for the past week…
Staying in our PJ’s all day, reading. Except today we all got dressed and went to Bible study, where I managed to last two hours without blowing my nose. Poor Derek has it the worst now. My laundry basket is full of handkerchiefs.
So I’m awake enough to try to remember what exactly we’ve been reading lately.
Tommy’s doing a lot of Tintin (SO fun to read French with a stuffy nose) and Tasha Tudor (especially obsessed with Corgiville Fair). Elizabeth’s on a Richard Scarrey kick, especially The Polite Elephant (which she’s reading above), and has just discovered Ezra Jack Keats (especially The Snowy Day, because she has some of those pictures framed in her room).
I started being sick by rereading the Anne books and Shirley Jackson’s family memoirs (which always make me glad I’m a housewife in the 10’s, not the 50’s) then was inspired by Elizabeth’s fascination with the cover of The Silmarillion (?!) to do a re-read of The Hobbit and LOTR, after which I tried to start The Silmarillion and remembered why I always get too bored to finish. I then got to the library over the weekend and picked up a good bit of light reading–some Georgette Heyer regency romances (she’s a new discovery–Cousin Kate had flickers of Northanger Abbey and Jane Eyre, which was fun, but she seems to be uneven from book to book). She also wrote a murder mystery praised by Dorothy Sayers–Death in the Stocks, which was very much in the Sayers/Tey/Allingham vein and quite enjoyable. That reminded me to look Sayers up again, and I blasted through about six Lord Peters up through last night. I think Derek thinks I’m enjoying them too much to really be sick anymore, but I assure you, if I were feeling well, I’d be cleaning the bathroom.
This afternoon, the agenda leaves no time for reading–I need to get out to Walmart and buy more kleenex, as we’ve gone through five boxes in the past week. And maybe some more vitamin C.
In addition to everything else you listed, did you just say you read the entire LOTR trilogy this week?!?! I think I might have counted a minimum of 14 books in this post. I didn’t know there were enough hours in a week to read that much! WOW!
Haven’t heard of half the books you listed. Time for a library trip!
HOLY COW. That’s all.
So does Lizzie actually sit and “read” an entire book? Maybe she has your reading genes (I am doing well if I get through one book in a week-most weeks I barely read anything outside of work. I can’t get Christina to sit still long enough to even flip through the pages of an entire book before she is on to the next book, or something else entirely (although Nathan claims if he reads fast they can get through a whole book during the day).
Elizabeth is adorable “reading”! Okay, she is adorable no matter what she is doing, but she is particularly adorable in this picture.
How amazing that you can get your children to sit still for such a long period of time! Aidan will quietly sit for just a little while and read several books, but days and days of reading? No way! 🙂
Alison, Elizabeth has just recently latched on to books, so Christina’s probably on the cusp, too. Tommy would always sit and look at them for an hour while I was making dinner or whatever, so we were worried that his sister was going to be the black sheep of the family!=) But she sees me reading to Tommy every day and we just keep trying to read to her (really short board books) every day, and one day it clicked and she sat and “read” in front of the bookshelf next to her brother for about half an hour. I was seriously concerned because silence is always deadly in this house–but they were fine.=) I think the big thing is to keep exposing, exposing, exposing, and it sinks in. While being read to, she’ll usually sit through one book, wiggle around, come back for another, wiggle around, and come back for a third. At which point Tommy is sticking something with less pictures under my nose, so she goes off and pulls tupperware out or something.
And to everybody else, no, I certainly do not read this much on a regular basis! Anyone notice the same “books in my queue” for the past several months? Who has time when you’re cooking and cleaning? I was doing neither while sick, and we don’t watch TV in front of the kids (unless they’re feverishly sick), and the computer was giving me a headache, so the only way to make myself stay on the couch was to get a stack of really engaging books and plough through them. And I’ve read most of them before (I’ve been reading Anne and LOTR and Austen and Little House every year since jr high), so the speed thing is not quite as impressive as you’d think. If you literally do nothing except change diapers, warm up soup, and blow your nose for 10 days, that’s over 100 hours of reading time, easy. =)