I’ve seen this on a couple of friends’ blogs and thought it’d be fun to post. Then I realized I haven’t read many of these “classics.” I really am a pretty well read person, but recently I just don’t get the time I wish I had for it. And I’m hard to please, too. Lots of times I’ll pick up a hyped book and think to myself that it’s not all that. Also, I’d argue that Night by Elie Wiesel belongs on the list. Anyway, here goes:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read. (I’m including any books I’ve started but haven’t finished. Has anyone I know ever finished Ulysses? Please speak up so I can bow at your feet …)
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE. **I can’t figure out how to do this. I am officially a blog-tard.)
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman Have read the first of the trilogy, but not the rest.
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller6
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (started, couldn’t get into it)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – didn’t like it much
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

After Alex went over the crib again last week and limped for three days, we thought it best to either put on the crib tent or convert his crib to a toddler bed, which meant just removing the front and replacing it with a small rail to keep him from falling out. So Saturday morning, Alex & Daddy brought out the tools and put on the rail. We also gated his room off so even if he opened the door, he wouldn’t have the run of the house. Here’s how the transition went.

Saturday: Nap was perfect, and so was bedtime. He climbed right in and stayed there. I was beyond shocked that it was this easy.

Sunday: Just like Saturday. So I was thinking this was going to be a breeze. No adjustment issues for MY son.

Monday: Nap was great, but somewhere around 2 a.m. it finally occurred to him that he could get out of the bed whenever he wanted. Like 2:00, to pee. And 2:10, to say he had to poop when he didn’t really. And 2:15 to open and close the bedroom door a few times. And 2:17 to play with books and stuffed animals. By then I said forget it about getting up and putting him back in bed – let him play and he’d eventually fall asleep, be it in the bed or on the floor. But I was tired, so I went back to sleep.

Tuesday: Woke up around 7 and stood at his door, saying “Mommy? Mommy! Assah wake!” Another good nap. And finally, a night when it took him a while to fall asleep. I am not remembering anything in particular, but I am sure he didn’t just stay in bed at bedtime.

Wednesday: Alex woke a little earlier than usual and knocked the gate down to come into Adam’s room and tell me he was awake. I made a mental note to tighten the gate. Naptime was fine. Bedtime was nuts. We could tell he was probably out of bed, but were letting it slide. Finally, at around 9 I went back in to tell them both to stop giggling and go to sleep. I found Alex sitting outside Avery’s crib, laughing, and Avery sitting on top of every freaking book they own. He’d thrown three little crates full of books into her crib. Oh, they thought it was hilarious. She couldn’t have gone to sleep if she wanted to – there was no mattress even visible. So I cleaned them out and put him back to bed and told the kids to GO TO SLEEP!

Thursday: Alex woke before 7. I snuck into the shower and planned to get him once I was clean. The gate was extra tight to prevent him from knocking it over. So, showing great ingenuity, he hauled over a chair and must have stood on it and gone over the gate, because he greeted me in the bathroom, and the chair and gate greeted me at the door to their room. Lovely, no worries for broken legs there, right? (Which is what the whole bed thing was about in the first place.) No nap because we went to the zoo. At bedtime, they were so exhausted, they did pretty much go right to sleep. But at 8:45 or so, Avery cried out, so I went to check on her and damn near stepped on Alex when I went in. He was crashed out in the middle of the floor with his binky in his mouth, so I moved him back to bed and he stayed there.

I cannot imagine trying to do this with them both at the same time. For now, I am thankful that their new pet fish, who live on their dressers, haven’t been upended in his wanderings. I’ll worry about Avery being in a bed in, oh, a year or so. And Adam will never have this transition because at this rate, he’ll be sleeping in a swing til he leaves for college.

No, we’re not wasted away in Margaritaville. But a mom can dream…

Earlier this week, we had a playdate at a friend’s house and rushed home just in time for a quick lunch for the twins. Adam was very tired, so after plunking the twins down at the kitchen table with some munchies, I took Adam to his room to feed, rock, and put down for a nap. It’s a quick and easy job when he’s so sleepy, maybe 5 minutes. And the twins are used to eating on their own at that table while I deal with the baby. They’ll wander in with messy hands to tell me if they need something usually.

In hindsight, I should have known it seemed too quiet in the kitchen, I suppose. But I enjoyed the peace and time with Adam. I walked back into the kitchen ready to wipe them off, hit the potty, and do the naptime routine. But I found piles of salt. Everywhere. Like a whole shaker full. On the floor. On their plates. On the table. On their clothes. On their hands and faces. In their hair. Oh, and they were sooooo pleased with themselves. And they were already headed for a late nap even before the mess.

“Who did this????” I asked.

Avery proudly replied, “Avery and Alex did this!” Huge smile. She was thrilled.

Alex added, “Assah needed peppah sauce.”

Oh, well, that explains it.

The real problem is that the salt shaker had been clogged. And I clearly remember last week when Don went to salt something on his dinner plate, found the clog, and cleared it. A little too well, I guess.
Lesson learned.

We made it back from the beach late on Tuesday night at around 12:30 am.  The drive home wasn’t bad at all.  We left the Outer Banks at maybe 7:30pm so we definitely made good time.  Luckily even with road construction in various places traffic never slowed down at all.  Alex and Avery took a little while to fall asleep but did pretty well once they were asleep.  Avery screeched every 45 minutes or so but it didn’t take much to get her back to sleep.  Adam surprised us all and slept from home all the way to my dad’s house on Friday, which shocked me and Jen.  I kept asking her if she was sure that she put him in the van.

The vacation itself was great.  We got to spend a lot of time with grandpa (my dad) and the kid’s aunts.  The action pretty much consisted of going to the beach and swimming in the pool.  Luckily we were blessed with good weather the whole time, so we didn’t have to spend any of our short trip couped up in the house if we didn’t want to be.

Here are the pictures from the trip.  I didn’t take as many pictures as I wanted too, but the ones that I did take I think were pretty good.