I am about ready to kill my dogs, especially Mette! Tage just went down for his nap, and for some reason the dogs have chosen right now to go into a barking frenzy. They barked like crazy at Lydia when she came home from school, and now they’re standing at the window in the living room barking at passersby. So far the baby is still asleep, but he won’t be for long if they don’t shut the hell up.

I’ve been fiercely guarding his naptimes lately, because they finally mean some free time for me. We stopped nursing about three weeks ago, and before then he always nursed to sleep and napped in my lap, which meant that I was effectively trapped for as long as he slept. If I tried to move him, he woke up immediately and wouldn’t go back to sleep, so I learned to have a book and a cup of tea close at hand whenever it was time for his nap and just to try to enjoy the quiet and relaxation of it. These days, though, he goes to sleep more or less on his own and on a good day he’ll sleep in the bedroom for a couple of hours, which means blessed freedom for me!

I got my favorite kind of package in the mail today — a book-filled one! I love AdLibris. I ordered these books from them Monday afternoon and had them delivered to my door on Wednesday morning. Pretty good service, I think. I got the four books in the Chesapeake Bay Saga by Nora Roberts (I like a good romance novel as much as the next gal), and On Writing by Stephen King. I’ve read, but didn’t own, the first three Nora Roberts books, and when I saw recently that she’d published a fourth book, I decided I’d better buy and reread them all. The Stephen King book I’ve thought about reading for a while, but I recently had it suggested to me again by a writer who submitted a great story for the upcoming issue of Mosaic Minds and decided to give it a go, finally. I really love the way he writes, although I can hardly stand to read his books (they’re so sad … it took me literally weeks to get over Bag of Bones and I can hardly bear to think about The Green Mile). He has a wonderful gift for storytelling, though, and a way with words that I’m green with envy over.

I can’t wait to get started reading these new books, although I really should finish the book I’m reading now, Gail Godwin’s Father Melancholy’s Daughter. I really like Gail Godwin and this is a good book, but it’s just incredibly slow-moving for some reason. I’m tempted to start up another book and read two at the same time, but I’m afraid I’ll end up leaving the Godwin book entirely if I do that, and I really do want to read it. I’ve bought so many books lately and I’m getting hardly any of them read. I just don’t have the time these days. At least when I get the chance to get back in the reading groove I’ll have plenty to choose from.