Strategic Serendipity

I am not a purist when it comes to reading. I count books I listen to on audible.com as books I have read.  I encourage my child to listen to books on audible.  We often get the paperback so he can follow along, but it is not required.  In my house reading is for fun and learning. We listen to books together as a family in the car and many nights when we come home, he asks to keep listening to his book instead of turning on the tv.  It is a constant challenge to find books we will both love. We just finished one such book together on audible.   Ben Garrod’s A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs is an amazing family listen!  Don’t be fooled by the title, my seven year-old was completely engaged.  It was easy to listen to in small 15-minute drives and the production quality was good!  The author includes pop-culture references to Jurassic Park for those who only know dinosaurs from there.  We even learned a few things the movie got wrong! If you are a parent who has seen every episode o

This is a hard post to write.  I have been dreading July.  My dad would have been 85 this month.  For those who don’t know me, I worshipped my dad.  But just about one year ago he entered the hospital.  He would be released to assisted care and fight like hell to get out of there.  A hole in his lung would send him back to the hospital in September.  He would fight like hell to get out of there, too.  Surviving a surgery the doctor told me he couldn’t.  But he wouldn’t be released.  So as July starts and everyone celebrates our country’s independence, my sense of dread grows. From July through September I worked, fed my son, visited my dad, slept, and repeat.  You will notice cooking and cleaning we’re not mentioned in there.  Laundry was washed, but I only folded dad’s and that was because he liked things folded.  I figured he had earned that.  In October when he died, my world fell apart.  I worked and took care of my son, but that was really autopilot.  Laundry got done and fold

All my life I have been a voracious reader.  I love series and can binge read them with the best.  When I found out I was pregnant at 40, I was elated.  I threw up every day the whole pregnancy (but it was so worth it) so when I struggled reading, I thought it was just from feeling sick.  After my son was born, I was all about him, feeding him, feeding myself, and sleeping. Maybe showering.  So I still didn’t notice anything. When I went back to work, in a job that required reading, it was a struggle.  I told myself I was just tired.  Three years in, though I started to worry.  I got a job where I was commuting three hours a day, and turned to audible.com and books as the best carpool buddies ever.  After six months of that commute, however, I moved five minutes from work and my reading sharply declined over the next year. So in 2016 I made a New Year’s Resolution to read more.  I found a reading challenge to help me search for books and partnered with other reader friends. I rea