Craving Normal

 Happy Friday!  I wanted to pop in and say hello.  Continuing in the theme of our busy, family-oriented August, my mom has been staying with us for a few days, which is why I've been pretty quiet this week.

And August really has been busy: Both kids started school and started soccer practice, we took the Morro Bay trip for my in-laws' anniversary, and now my mom has been our houseguest for most of the week. It's great to be busy, to have the opportunity to travel and spend time with both of our famillies, but....whew.  I'm ready for a break from all the busy busy. (And the piles of laundry.) 

One casualty of our busy life has been our nightly reading schedule.  I prided myself on reading to Lily nearly every single night of her life (sans some weekends and vacations)  from age one through about age nine.  And I still get plenty of requests to read aloud to her, even though she's 10 and a voracious independent reader herself now. (This week, she was reading Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.) 

But Tucker is a different story.  People say, "oh, boys are different about books," but I don't buy that. I do accept that he's not going to be the crazy-intense bookworm like his sister. Still, he does enjoy books, and I've really dropped the ball this summer on our nightly routine of reading aloud.  He's a good reader, reads higher than his grade level, and has a great vocabulary.   But he's only seven, and I should still be reading to him, much more than I have.  It's at the top of my mom-guilt list right now. There were many, many nights this summer that he requested to be read to, and I was too tired and/or lazy to do it. (It didn't help that summer bedtime was around 9:30.)

Up there is his stack of library books that were due this week.  He read all the illustrated books on his own, and flipped through the "Dangerous Book for Boys," which he insisted on getting, even though it's a bit over his head.  But we never even cracked open Charlotte's Web, which I was really looking forward to reading to him.  We fared only slightly better with Stuart Little: I read him a few chapters (that he loved), and then we got busy and I stopped reading and eventually had to take it back to the library, unfinished. 

Not acceptable!  So, after this last long holiday weekend of the summer, I'm looking forward to next week, and all the weeks after that, and hoping we can all fall back into a more regular, less hectic routine.  I'm looking forward to cooler autumn evenings and diving into the books of E.B. White, C.S. Lewis and Roald Dahl with Tucker, just like I did with his sister.  (I wonder if he'd like some Laura Ingalls Wilder, too?)

Until then...Happy Labor Day!  We have no plans for this weekend, and I'm very okay with that.