After A Brief Hiatus, I’m Back!

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted here on Beltwayliterature.  As I mentioned in my last post, Last Weekend Of Free Reading?, that I felt, with our baby getting closer to arrival, that it could quite possibly be my last weekend of free reading.  Well, that certainly has been the case!  On Wednesday, June 20th, at 11:11pm, my wife gave birth to our son, Logan.  He came quickly, and two days early.  His arrival early came as quite the surprise to both my wife, and myself, as she had her last appointment with her doctor on June 19th, and she wasn’t anywhere close to looking like she was going to have Logan on the due date of the 22nd, but quite possibly a week, maybe two late!

So it came as quite the surprise to me, that while I was at work on Wednesday, the 20th, when my wife called me to tell me she felt like she was having some contractions around 9:00 am.  I told her to keep an eye on it, and to let me know if it got any worse, we both agreed they were probably Braxton-Hicks.  Around noon, she called me again, telling me she phoned the doctor, and they instructed her to head to labor and delivery at the hospital.  So I rushed myself home, quickly changed, and got her to the hospital around 1:30.  Needless to say, we didn’t leave until a day and a half later with our son!

I’ve gotta say that witnessing the birth of my son has to be the most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.  I don’t think I can really put it into words all the emotions I was feeling that evening.  I’m still pretty much in cloud nine two and a half weeks later.  I was able to take the last two and a half weeks off from work to help my wife out, and for all of us to get used to being an expanded family.  It’s had its ups and downs, but, far more ups than downs!

You would possibly think, that with me being home from work, that I would get a lot of reading done in the last two weeks.  But that simply wasn’t the case.  There has been a lot of sleeping and bonding the last two and a half weeks.  It will definitely be difficult for me to get back into my normal routine with this dramatic difference in my routine for the last two and a half weeks.

During this time off, I did manage to complete another book on my Classics Club list, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.  I’ll have a post with my thoughts on that in a day or so.  I’ve also managed to complete another 200 pages or so of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind.  I’m on Part IV of the book, and a little more than half-way done with my reading of it.  I’ll be focusing my free time with completing Gone With the Wind.  It is my hope to have it completed before the book is due back to the library in the next week or so, but we’ll see, depending on how much sleep both my wife and Logan get this upcoming week.

For the rest of July, I’m going to take a brief break from my Classics Club list, and look at another Agatha Christie novel, Secret Adversary.  After that, I’m not quite sure what I’m going to read!  Just wherever my interests take me!

What have you been reading the past week and what do you plan on reading this upcoming week!  I hope everyone has been dealing with the excessive heat fairly well!  I know it’s been quite hot here in VA for the last several days!