The adventure begins!

We celebrated day of of the Year of The Books today! We all chose a book, got comfortable and read for an hour. For my First book I chose The Midwife's Confession by Diane Chamberlain, Shawn is reading The Confession by John Grisham (there is apparently a lot of confessing going on, lol), Josh read the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid book and Matthew is reading the third Big Nate book. Between the four of us we read 344 pages in an hour. I originally said that we'd have a party when he hit 1,000 pages, and I'm still sticking with that, but at this rate that will probably be by the end of the week, lol. After that I need to start making longer goals.

The boys also need to start reading books that are more on their reading level. Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Big Nate both have illustrations in them, which means the pages go by fast. They do have harder books, Matthew is actually in the middle of the Harry Potter series and Josh is getting ready to start a new series written by the Percy Jackson author. I'm not sure why they chose easier books for tonight, but for day one I decided to let it go, I was just happy we all managed to get this thing started.  When they get back to their bigger novels the daily page count won't be quite so high.

I tried to make it silly and fun because one of my children *coughJoshcough* isn't entirely convinced that he wants an hour of book reading to take over what used to be an hour of TV time and playing Minecraft in the evening. So every now and then we would stop and do something silly like announce the 15th word on the page we were reading and then try to make a silly sentence using everyone's word. I'm determined for the kids to not feel like this is homework. It's fun! :)

After we read for an hour we celebrated our first book night by eating pie. And for some reason we decided to talk in really bad Southern accents while we ate our pie and that made us laugh until we cried.

And that is the story of day one of the Year of the Books.

From now on we will not be doing a daily page count. We're not just counting pages and books read during our reading hour, we're counting any book that is read by us any time this year. I have assigned Josh to be our recorder, because there's nothing that kids loves more than charts and graphs (he gets that from his father, by the way), and we decided that every time we finish a book we will report the name of the book and the number of pages to him to keep track of. I'm hoping that we're all reading at least a book a week, but we'll see how it goes.

As far as how Clarissa fits into this project, well, that's tricky since she can't read. We did sit her down with some books and she looked at them for a bit and then she sat on the floor and played with her ponies. That's fine. We're not counting her pages at this point but whatever book reading she does is awesome. Some nights I'll probably sit and read to her during reading time instead of reading my own book. She likes to be read to, I read to her during the day and at bed time. I'll find ways to involve her in the reading project.

Here is a photo of us embarking on day one of our book journey! :)