Get your bedtime stories ready!

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It's National Sleep Day!  Of course you can't sleep without a bed time story.  I love bedtime stories, both with my kids and for myself.  My husband grumbles about the hour plus I spend getting the kids to bed at night, but I just love spending that time reading with them. I get to spend real time with them, sharing something I love with each one.  I usually read a separate story to each child, and I mostly let them choose the book.  I sometimes get tired of reading Magic Tree House or Rainbow Fairies books, but that's when I step in and say "I have a really good choice I want to read and when it's over you can choose the next book."

Right now I'm reading chapter books with my girls, and picture books with my son.  Actually, to be honest about last night, my eight year old read several books to my five year old.  She is an excellent reader - there's really nothing she's incapable of reading now - but she's decided she only wants to read aloud to people who are younger than her.  More directly, she doesn't want to read aloud to me.   The teacher in me knows it's still important for her fluency to read aloud though, so rather than letting her slide or fighting her over it, I ask her to read to her brother several times a week.  Last night she read the excellently hilarious Knuffle Bunny series, as well as several other wonderfully fun books from Mo Willem's Elephant and Piggy series.  She read for well over half an hour and her brother went to bed a happy boy.

When it was her turn for a story, I continued reading Tuesdays at the Castle by Jessica Day George.  We've been reading it for a few weeks now because between a vacation, two family birthdays and the holiday's, our bedtime stories have been unfortunately intermittent.  She's really enjoying the story of a magical castle and an attempted coup.  It's more of a real older kid book than she normally chooses (even though she reads on almost a 5th grade level, she's been choosing Junie B. Jones type books lately), so it's refreshing for me to read something with actual plot twists and intrigue.

For my 11 year old I continued reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  We started reading the Harry Potter books together when she was six, and at first we read one every summer.  Of course we reread the previous books before starting the new one, but at this point it means we're reading Harry Potter almost year round.  Neither of us is complaining though.  They are such rich, enjoyable stories, it's a great way to relax together at the end of the day.  (She is also a voracious reader and reads several other books on her own all the time.)

My own bedtime story was again Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half.  This is the perfect book if you only have snippets of time to read.  It's actually a collection of funny vignettes that are just right to read before I finally crawl between the sheets.  I look forward to having a bit more time to read more of it today.  Having a little chuckle throughout the day is always a good thing.

I hope you all have a good bedtime story, especially for today!