decisions, decisions

For roughly the next 3 hours, all three of my kids will be at musical practice.  The moms have been banned from practice since we can't seem to keep quiet and keep from disturbing the kids, so I find myself with a little time on my hands.

What to do,

                  what to do?!?


On the one hand ...

      we went out of town this weekend and now my house looks like a bomb went off in the living room...

the remnants of last Friday night's baseball game followed by frantic packing for our early departure on Saturday morning are all over the place ...

(Marie, you would have been ashamed of me for leaving my house looking like that!)

...added to that, is the fact that we walked in the door last night, changed clothes and headed back the baseball field for practice and so now, added to the already totally trashed living room are a couple of suitcases waiting for someone to unpack them AND a couple of boxes of new curriculum (which makes me smile and will have a post all to itself soon) and who knows what else is hiding underneath the top layer of junk ...

And then there is also the laundry that needs to be done ...

Not to mention the fact that I am supposed to be working on the program for the kids' musical ...

I am sure that there are at least half a dozen more things that I could think of that I need to be doing ...


however ...


sitting on my bed are three new mysteries I just picked up from the library and they,

        along with the quiet,

                       are calling my name ...

...wonder which voice will get my attention...

who flipped the switch?

Something amazing has happened in our little family.  It means much more to me than to anyone else, mainly because I never thought it would happen.


LB has become a reader.


Okay, of course she's known how to read for years and has never had any trouble reading at grade level.  But she was missing that spark, that desire to lose herself in a book and it made me sad.


You see, I didn't read books as a child, I devoured them. 
My favorite teacher was the school librarian, Mrs. Puckett.
By the time I was in junior high, when I had read everything else in the house that Mama deemed appropriate, if I had no new library books, I would read my older brothers' school books (okay, I know that is odd, but I promise it is true).  I still remember reading I Heard the Owl Call My Name.  I don't remember much of the story, but I do remember that it made me feel things that I didn't understand at the time ... hmmm, maybe I should go back and read it again ...


Anyway, back to LB ... I am not sure exactly what happened, but it is like someone flipped a switch in her brain labeled you want to read a book!  I took her to the library last Friday while the boys were getting haircuts with their Daddy and she checked out two books, both of which she had read by Monday.  Granted, they weren't challenging books, but suddenly something is different and now she wants to read more than a chapter at a time and when it comes time for her to read during school she wants to know how many chapters she can read, rather than how many she has to read.


In case you can't tell, I am very excited about this new development in LB.  I can't help it because I know how wonderful it is to be able to just lose yourself in a good book and not even realize what is happening.  I am also thinking about books that she and I can read together ... books like Little Women and Anne of Green Gables come to mind.


Now, my husband wants to know where that switch is and if we can turn it on for him ...