Love of Books

Last night, I spent the entire evening reading books to Gavin. I picked him up from daycare, and he was reading books with the provider. They told me he'd been doing so all day. When we got home and I put him down, he immediately grabbed The Biggest Cookie in the World and crawled into my lap. We read it five times before Kevin came up for dinner. Well, we read it twice. The rest of the time he flipped through willy-nilly, stopping on the pictures he liked and stroking Cookie Monster's fur. (There is no fur to stroke, it's just a picture book. He does this with pictures of cats, too.)

After dinner we moved on to his current favorite, Llama Llama, Red Pajama. Then he grabbed Quantum Physics for Babies from the couch and we read that one, too. When he'd exhausted his appetite for those books (and the cookie one again) he ran to his room and came back with another book.

I have to say, it gets a bit tedious reading the same book over and over and over again. We cycled through five or six books. Each of them takes less than five minutes to read. But we sat on that couch for nearly an hour, working our way through them again and again.

Sometimes Kevin took a turn reading. Sometimes Gavin grabbed a book and flipped quietly through it by himself for a while, until he decided he wanted one of us to read to him again. It was an evening full of books.

This feels like my biggest success as a parent so far: Gavin's love of books. I'm not entirely sure how I managed to instill it in him. Some combination of reading to him all the time and reading in front of him the rest of the time. I hope it continues for the rest of his life. I'm looking forward to telling him that he's always been a reader, right from the beginning.

Year in Review

This is late, but the holidays got a bit crazy. We hosted people, then we left town, and my computer broke. I'm hoping to start blogging more regularly again in 2018. In the meantime, here's a look back at 2017, since I wrote very little this year.

• What did you do in 2017 that you’d never done before?
• Can I say parenting? Technically Gavin was born in 2016, but he didn't really start turning into a human until 2017. He did everything from learn to roll over to start running around and climbing on things this year, and I learned how to constantly readjust my expectations, savor the moment, and carve out time for myself. There were so many firsts this year that I can't even count them all, but they almost all come back to Gavin.
• Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
• I don't remember what my new year's resolutions were last year. I'm not sure I made any. I think I was still in shock and doing my best to ignore the world at large. But over the year I slowly remembered who I was before I was a mother and re-integrated most of that back into myself. For this year, I'm planning to speak up more in the moment.
• Did anyone close to you give birth?
• A few Facebook friends from high school did, but no one in my immediate circle.
• Did anyone close to you die?
• My husband's grandmother
• What countries did you visit?
• Mexico, right at the end. Though we also made it to both Hawaii and Alaska, which kind of felt like different countries. America is vast and contains multitudes.
• What would you like to have in 2018 that you lacked in 2017?
• Someone to clean my house for me.
• What dates from 2017 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
• I should probably remember things like Gavin's first steps and all that. The truth is that all of his learning has been more of a process than a sudden thing, so it's occasionally hard to point to a definitive first. The eclipse was amazing. Gavin's first birthday was a lot of fun.
• What was your biggest achievement of the year?
• I got a promotion/raise at work. I did a decent job of balancing my life as a parent and the parts of my life that don't include Gavin.
• What was your biggest failure?
• I didn't always ask for help when I needed it.
• Did you suffer illness or injury?
• I was sick so many times I lost count. Damn those daycare germs. Mostly it was just colds of varying severity. There were two bad stomach bugs, though.
• What was the best thing you bought?
• The Switch and Zelda: Breath of the Wild were great, though Kevin definitely got more joy out of them than I did. We also got this fantastic beanbag chair that converts to a Queen mattress. Kevin remains skeptical, but I love it.
• Whose behavior merited celebration?
• Gavin. He's moody and mercurial and he can get crabby like any toddler. But he's mostly happy and loving and easy-going. 
• Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
• Trump, and pretty much all of the currently elected Republicans
• Where did most of your money go?
• The house. We spent a ton of money on new windows, but also the mortgage and various smaller repairs. 
• What did you get really, really, really excited about?
• Hallowiener. It was fun to come back to it after a year off. Also traveling to Hawaii in the depths of winter and Alaska during the summer helped balance the extremes of those seasons. 
• What song will always remind you of 2017?
• I will always be a bit bitter that Sia's "The Greatest" wasn't a bigger hit, because I think it would have been the perfect song for 2017. The truth is it's hard to know this until a few years have passed. But my hatred for Ed Sheeren really crystallized this year with his three singles that got played constantly, so maybe it'll be that?
• Compared to this time last year, are you: (a) happier or sadder? (b) thinner or fatter? (c ) richer or poorer?
• I am happier, thinner, and richer. So a win on all counts.
• What do you wish you’d done more of?
• I wish I'd found more time to ride my bike and write in this blog.
• What do you wish you’d done less of?
• Cleaning the damn house. It wasn't a big deal when I was only working 18 hours/week. But now that I'm back up to 30 it seems to be eating up all of my free time.
• How did you spend Christmas?
• We hosted Christmas with my mom and brother and Kevin's mom and sister. It was fairly low-key with lots of food and booze and very little sleep.
• Did you fall in love in 2017?
• I keep surprising myself by loving both Gavin and Kevin more with each passing day.
• What was your favorite TV program?
• One Day at a Time, which I mainlined last January. It made me laugh and cry and was basically a perfect sitcom. I cannot wait for the second season.
• Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
• Probably, though no one specific is springing to mind
• What was the best book you read?
• I'm not sure I can pick just one, so here's the top five instead
• Radiance by Catherynne M Valente
• Among Others by Jo Walton
• Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
• The Likeness by Tana French
• The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuin
• What was your greatest musical discovery?
• Nothing new, but I started a Britney Spears Pandora station and have fallen in love with her more recent work, and also with Kesha and Rihanna. It's been a pretty solid station.
• What did you want and get?
• a flexible work schedule, time to read and travel and visit with friends and family, a ton of snuggles and kisses from Gavin
• What did you want and not get?
• Paid sick leave and paid holidays
• What was your favorite film of this year?
• I didn't see very many. Probably Thor: Ragnarok? It was a lot of fun.
• What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
• I turned 31. I don't remember what I did. Kevin and I probably went out to a nice dinner, because that's what we always do.
• What one thing made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
• My kid could always make me smile and laugh and forget about the world at large for a bit, no matter how bleak it got.
• How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2017?
• Comfort. Though I did manage to trade in the yoga pants for blue jeans eventually. And I even got back to heels, block not stiletto. But I'm a mom now, after all.
• What kept you sane?
• Finding time to read, giggling with my family
• Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
• I've been actively trying not to hero-worship any celebrities of late, and this year certainly proved the wisdom of that goal. 
• Who did you miss?
• We have a ton of friends that we don't see often enough, particularly the ones who don't live within driving distance.
• Who was the best new person you met?
• One of our neighbors up the street. He seems like a genuinely good and thoughtful and fun person, and I'd really like to get to know him better.
• Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2017.
• Life keeps going and things change faster than you expect them to. All you can do is keep on keeping on.
• Quote a song lyric that sums up your year
• This phase is gonna fly by/So baby just hold on/It won't be like this for long