Tuesday Coffee Chat - At the End of the Day

It feels so great to link up again with Les over at Time Out for Mom.  Les was one of the first regular followers of my blog, and I've always been grateful; for her support.  She's an awesome lady with an awesome blog, so go check it out! Now back to this week's Tuesday Coffee Chat Topic: At the end of the day, my favorite thing to do is...
As Les pointed out in her post, when you're a stay at home mom, there really isn't an "end of the day".  Even when the kids are in bed, you're "on call" - getting things ready for the next day's school/activities/day of kids at home driving you nuts.  You need to have your hear out for nightmares or, in my case, a child that almost sleepwalks and gets lost in the hallway when he has to go to the bathroom.  There's no real end of the day. However, by 8:30, I can relax a bit more.  The kids are in bed, things are ready for the next day (at least, most of them are) and I can just keep an ear out instead of having to answer "Mommy, can you put this Pokemon DVD in for me?" or break up fights over who gets the blue plate and who gets the green one. Those are the moments I live for.  It's not that I don't love my boys.  I do.  And I love being able to stay home with them.  They're what keeps me laughing, what fills my heart with joy.  But they can also be too much of a good thing.  So at the end of my day, when I've got my "me" time, I pick u[ a book and just start to read. Reading has always been my outlet.  When I was a kid, being teased for being too smart, too poor and too fat, books were my escape from the real world.  I'd dive into the mysteries of Agatha Christie, the prairie home of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the March home created by Louisa May Alcott.  I'd follow my own path with Choose Your Own Adventures, or follow the same path taken by a young pregnant girl in a book whose title has escaped my memory with time.  These, and many others, were the stories that got me through the difficulties of growing up.
Even after I passed through the difficulties of middle and high school, reading was still what I turned to when things got tough from day to day.  When I was living in St. Pete, I regularly stopped at a Used Book Store, picking up ten romances for a dollar so I could lose myself in them when my own romance was more heart ache than heart burst.  When I hurt my back and was stuck in bed for a week, I ended up reading through the first four Harry Potter books (the only ones out at the time) twice.  It helped me get outside the four walls I was stuck within and travel somewhere fantastic.
My life is pretty good now, but books are still a part of it.  I don't have as much time to read as I'd like - not with two kids, a husband and a cat to deal with on a daily basis.  But I do find time to read every day.  Right now, I'm lost in a world of supernatural steampunk (Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series, for those curious) and I'm looking forward to the end of my day so I can snuggle under my covers, book in hand, and see what kind of trouble Alexia is getting into now.