Day 20 of My Month of Gratitude

How are we on the 20th March already?! Wow, the month is flying by.

1. My Husband
2. My Children
3. My Step-Children
4. My Step-Grandchildren
5. My Family
6. My Friends
7. My Home
8. Our Utilities
9. Our Health
10. Education
11. Coffee
12. Technology
13. Being Alive
14. Baby Smiles and Laughs
15. Special Occasions
16. Healthcare
17. Being Irish
18. Being a SAHM
19. Chocolate
20. Books

I love reading. Reading has been an important part of my life since I was a small child, and I still love reading and I am so glad that my children also love reading.

Reading has always been my safe place, the place that I can escape off to. I feel that books helped me through my childhood, and that they opened my eyes up to different lives and different types of people. I am very understanding of different views to a situation and try to help people look at things differently, and I believe a lot of that came from reading so many books throughout my life.

One of my favourite things to do is to get in to the bath with a good book and just sit in total uninterupted peace and quiet reading my book. My husband knows that when I say I want a bath that I really mean I want to lie in the bath reading my book for about two hours.

I recently had a friend comment on the fact that I had brought along a book in the baby bag when I was meeting her. She was jokingly insulted that I thought I might need a book because seeing her would be boring. I told her I always have a book with me, because you never know when you are going to get five minutes of a chance to read – for example, the person you are meeting might be five minutes late, or Q’s football training might run over by five or ten minutes. Or even the car might break down and I might have to sit for an hour until someone gets there to fix the car.

I get genuinely involved in people’s lives in the books, and often I would find myself thinking about those people a few weeks later as if they were real people and wondering what they are up to now. Crazy I know. I like light enough reading, as I don’t have the concentration for much more, and I tend to judge a book by the cover – if it looks good I will start reading it, I will rarely read the blurb on the back. There was one particular time in my life where I was going through a few issues with a really good friend and I was hurting badly – and at that time I had to run through the backs of books because I had to check whether there was likely to be a theme of friendships or betrayals or loss in the book, because if there was I just couldn’t read it because I couldn’t escape and my mind would just keep going back to my issues with my friend. It was the first time I think where I had to chose my books carefully and make sure that reading them wasn’t going to turn into a negative experience.

I am really grateful for having the escape of books all through my life, I could say I am thankful for the fact of being able to read at all, or that I have free access to so many books without censorship – but the bottom line is I am grateful for books, and the fact that there are so many books out there and so many still being written.