Fiction.

Jim has set a pretty specific routine with our kids at night over the years.  Bedtime has not ever really been my territory.  After everyone's made every preparation for bed, there's Bible reading and discussing, praying, singing, silly song singing, and then there's time for a chapter or two of some good fiction.  They've read books like Anne of Green Gables, or Uncle Tom's Cabin (Jim retold that one, I think)- honestly I don't know much of what they've read together, I'm so far removed from it.  But now they're somewhere in the middle of Narnia.

When I was young, I absolutely devoured fiction books.  I was always reading something.  As I grew up, particularly once I got to college, I completely lost my habit of fiction, apart from the scores of books I was required to read (this is of course what happens when literature becomes your major course of study), and when I did read of my own free will, it was non fiction.  Biographies, and thinking books.  These are valuable too, but even then, I sort of mourned my loss of love for the novel.

Now here I am, a full-out adult, a mother who still remembers being a child- mostly because my children keep reminding me- and the circle has come around.  I find myself absolutely in love with fiction once again, and I make it a practice to fit it in between all the other kinds of things I read.  Between what I read to my children, and what I read for myself, fiction is absolutely back in my life, and I doubt it will ever leave.

Perhaps it's because, as I grow older, I see the necessity of it.