The Year Of The Books!

Yes, I know I'm totally behind on my blogging. December is always such a crazy busy month that I have a hard time keeping up.

Christmas was awesome and we're having super relaxing week around here. I love Christmas and I always go overboard with gifts. I love seeing my kids faces on Christmas morning. It's one of my favorite parts of parenthood.

Everyone is home until after New Years so we're relaxing, having some fun family time and the kids are busy playing with their new Christmas stuff. The boys got several Wii games that they have been glued to and they also got Lego Diagon Alley, which has over 2,000 Lego pieces, so they're going to be busy for weeks!

Ok, so now I'm excited to share the great idea I had today! So, if you've been reading my blog for a while you know how I like to theme my years. I don't know why I do that, I just do. This year was our year of adventure and even though we didn't accomplish everything on our list we had a really great time with the adventures we did accomplish and I still think the project was a success.

This afternoon I was thinking about what I wanted to accomplish next year and I decided that lately we don't read enough. When I was a kid I LOVED to read. I read every single thing I could get my hands on. As an adult I don't read nearly as much as I used to. I go through spurts and sometimes I do pretty good but for the most part I'm really not reading as much as I wish I was. My kids also aren't reading as much as I wish they were. Matthew loves to read and reads a lot at night but lately I'm having a hard time getting Josh to read for pleasure. He likes to read but he has a lot of other hobbies that take up a lot of his attention and he's pretty busy these days.

So my big idea is to make next year the Year Of The Books! We had a family meeting today and came up with a plan. For one hour every night next year we're going to have reading hour. The whole family is going to stop what we're doing from, lets say, 7:00-8:00 and read. Now, that's a pretty big plan because we're busy and I know that not everyone will be able to participate every single night, but we're going to try it and do our best. I may have to make adjustments to the plan as we go but we're going to start out with that as our goal. If we can't fit an hour into our night maybe we'll shoot for half an hour. We'll just start out and see how it works. I learned from our year of adventure to expect changes along the way. We'll adjust as we need to.

And as we go we're going to keep statistics of how much we read, not just during reading hour but everything we read during the year. We might have awards for the most pages read, the most books read, etc. We're going to set periodic family goals and then have a party when we hit like 1,000 pages or whatever. At some point during the year we also want to pick a book that has been made into a family friendly movie that we haven't seen (we haven't decided on that yet) and then we're all going to read the book as a family and then have a movie night party and watch the movie when we're done.

I have some other ideas to make it fun as well. Periodically I might make a special treat to eat while we read or do something else to make it extra fun. We'll take family trips to the library and try different types of books we've never read before and turn it into an exciting experience. I want to make sure that the kids view this as a fun adventure and not a boring chore.

So I'm super excited about this! I think it's going to help me rediscover my love of reading, it's going to encourage the kids to step away from the electronics and spend more time with their noses in a book and it will be a fun family bonding experience for all of us!

Yay for the Year Of The Books! More info to follow when the project gets underway!