A year ago I had already completed my first month of maternity leave. Despite what everyone said, I had high ambitions for my maternity leave for all of the things I would accomplish - I forgot that I would have a tiny little person who would depend upon me for comfort, food, changing, entertainment, and possibly a million other things. 24 hours a day. 7 days a week. Okay - maybe not every single minute, as I had lots of help from my husband and family and friends, but a good portion of each of those days were spent tending to her needs.
One of my lofty ambitions was to read. And by read I don't just mean a book here and there, I mean I planned to polish off the books on my curriculum list that I had never had the chance to get to because I was too busy as a new teacher. I mean the "classics" that I had somehow missed in my education and training. You see, as a former English teacher, my life revolved around books. I constantly had a stack of books by my bed, on my desk at work, on my desk at home, and on my shelf that I was either reading, just finished reading, teaching or planning to read.
But last year was a desert. I think I read 4 books - and one of them was to simply finish a book I had started a few years prior. They were good books, including an old faithful, Pride and Prejudice. But it was nothing like I had imagined. My library card sadly (and even embarrassingly so!) received zero use. When people would ask what I had read lately I would tell them newspaper articles (and often just the headlines!) and blogs because short articles were all I had the time and the attention span for because I was completely and utterly exhausted.
This year, however, I have renewed my goal to read. I have already finished The Path of Daggers (Book #8 in a series I started 13 years ago - eek - but at 672 pages, it is nothing to sniff at) - my previously unused library card is waiting for the next book in that series. I have started reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to my one year old as I needed some variety in between the countless renditions of Five Little Monkeys and The Gruffalo, and I am almost finished another book that I received as a gift for Christmas 2012 - in preparation of my ambitious year - From A to X: A Story in Letters.
January has been a fantastic start to this goal of intentional reading this year. Bring on February - and hopefully another eleven more months of getting LOTS of use out of my library card!
