A String of Pearls

Habit- the stuff of the every day is this week’s photo challenge. The “stuff of every day” is most precious to me. I love the big picture of my life and each specific day and don’t wish for anything to change, really. Whenever I think about what I would do if I only had one more day, one more week, one more year, I usually conclude that I would prefer to just carry on with what I’m doing now — contributing what I can to this world and appreciating everything that it has to offer on my amazing, ordinary every days. This was especially true when my daughters were younger. I didn’t want to miss a single second of their lives and every moment of every single ordinary day with them was extraordinary beyond description.

My photo shows my youngest, Amy Claire, involved in the most rewarding, valuable, and memorable daily habits I had with my children for the first ten or so years of their lives — reading together, at any point in the day, but especially before bedtime. Now that the girls are teens, they rarely read with me and they don’t necessarily read every night before bed, unless you consider scrolling through instagram and tumblr as reading. I most certainly do. Even I, who have read from a book every night for the past several decades, now sometimes find myself reading blogs and other reading material on my laptop or my phone right before falling asleep. It’s just the way it is and, of course, the way of the future.

It’s not what we read or how we read it, or when even, but the habit of reading. It’s a good one.

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/11/08/weekly-photo-challenge-habit/