When is your favorite time to read?

Is it first thing in the morning, before anyone else is awake before you have to start your day?

Do you find quiet pockets of time here and there throughout the day to slip in a page or two?

Do you read while waiting at appointments, or waiting to pick someone up?

Do you read at bedtime?  Or just before bed?

For me, it’s anytime I can sit down and pick up a book, whether I am disturbed or not.

There is no early morning before the household wakes up alone time.  My husband usually wakes up first.  If I get out of bed, my son is right there at my side.  Period.

I used to enjoy reading in the morning.  I would read a short meditation or a chapter from whatever inspirational book I had for that reason.  I would write out my morning pages.  Drink some tea.  Decide what needed to be done that day…ad then get started.

For several years now, my reading has been minimal at best.  Knitting books.  Craft books.  Art books.  Relatively few novels (which I love).  It’s been a morbid and hectic few years here.  I’ve just not had the heart nor the energy to do anything.  Now, this year, I am starting to get myself together once again and starting to be me, a tiny bit at a time, and I miss reading.  I am also engaged in a tug of war with my youngest who doesn’t want to do the sit-down and learn to read thing — he prefers and works better with the picking things up on the fly thing.  Luckily, he loves to be read to, so I can read to him and that has helped him pick up more than we seem to realize when it comes to his reading.

We are both subscribed to Owl Crate.  He gets Owl Crate Jr and I get Owl Crate.  OCJ won him over with his very first box when they sent him a Harry Potter themed knit hat.

We’ve been through a number of subscription boxes with him…a geography box, Kiwi, a computer coding box, a couple others I no longer remember…not one of them really wowed him.  We still have three or four Kiwi boxes that he never got around to opening.  I keep them to bring out when Dad is there to help him build something. These boxes usually have a couple projects in them.  It never fails–the boy does one and then he is no longer interested.  That says a lot right there.

This is a child who LOVES getting mail of any sort.  Once he starts receiving boxes and has no desire to open them in the least–you know you can cancel that subscription.  Owl Crate Jr is our longest-running subscription to date.  He never tires of seeing that Owl Crate Jr–or even my Owl Crate box.  He LOVES all the goodies that come with the books…and he loves the books.

This month he got a book of frightening facts and he has carried that thing all over the place, reading what he can, asking me to read to him.  It’s terrific.

As for me, Owl Crate has been a blessing.  I devour these books.  Yes, they are YA books, but they are good YA books.  I’ve only ever had to stop reading one book that I have received from them before I finished it because it was on a real historical topic that I know far too much about and the author decided to add in a faery twist and a changeling swap to it (to simply put it)–and even though it is a work of fiction, I could not get past the whole–that’s not how the historical record says the story goes…so I had to stop.

I cannot recommend Owl Crate and Owl Crate Jr enough.  I tell you.

Now, did I answer my own question after going off on that tangent?

Nope.

Mornings used to be for meditation/inspiration.  Evenings, before bed, used to be for fiction.  Great fiction meant I stayed on the couch and read to the end no matter time nor place.

That’s what I do now.  I pretty much read when I can, any downtime, and I read as much as I can until I need to do something else…and then I came back to it when I can.  Unless it is one of those books (like any Dresden book, I thank you so deeply, Jim Butcher, for writing these books) that I pick up and the outer world stops and I am sucked away into the book–then I just read…and pray someone else picks up the slack…lol…

Thanks for listening.

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