World Book Day – 4th March 2021

I have been an avid booklover since being very young. I’m pretty sure my parents have photos of a little preschool me, sat up in bed pretending to read to my teddies and I actually once heaved the full bible in to their bedroom to read it to them at about 5 years old. Just call me Matilda.

I’ve always loved Roald Dahl as an author and had many of his books growing up. George’s Marvellous Medicine was probably one of my favourites and even inspired me to create my own “medicines” in the garden… I’ll let you join the dots with that one. I even had many of these stories on cassette tape and just writing that I now feel incredibly old.

So, as you can imagine, World Book Day has always been a source of excitement for me. Especially the presence of the book fair in the school hall where I got to excitedly spend my book tokens, spending an age browsing through the shelves for that perfect read. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that my idea of a fab trip out on a Saturday morning is to head to the big library in town. My husband is just as big a book nerd as me so this is truly an epic family adventure for us.

As soon as restrictions are lifted and the libraries reopen fully, we’re going to take our little boy again as he also loves books. As soon as he goes in to his room, the first thing he does is run straight to his bookshelves and start choosing a pile to look through.

It’s a beautiful sight seeing our precious boy lost in the colours and pictures of all his lovely books and these books, among other resources, have contributed massively to his ever-growing vocabulary. My husband Tom has spoken about this in his latest blog post too. We’re obviously both a little bit obsessed with how much our little lambchop is growing and developing.

One kind of book I do love is a self-help, real life kind of book. A book that you can read and think “yeah, I get that, I feel you!”. One book that I have been lucky enough to get my hands on this year is “Happy Planning” by Charlotte Plain, a.k.a The Princess of Princess Planning. Charlotte covers holidays, birthdays, Christmas, house moves, new babies and day to day life in her book and honestly, it changed my whole outlook on how unnecessarily stressed I get around big events and celebrations.

I’m often asked what my favourite book is. That is not a question I feel I can answer because I have a number of books that have truly left their mark on me over the years. There are the Harry Potter books which were first introduced to me in about Year 4 of Primary School. These books will stay with me forever and I hope that Noah will be just as excited to hear them as I was. The Babysitters Club was a firm favourite as a pre-teen too and I always wanted to move to live near the beach; complete fantasy as I’m not really a beach fan to be honest.

As an adult, I’ve loved a huge number of books and I really enjoy tracking everything I’ve read on my Goodreads account. Myself and Tom also take part in the Reading Challenge each year on Goodreads. We set ourselves a personal target and then off we go in to another 12 months of discovering and (hopefully) loving stacks of new books.

A few months ago, I joined a lovely book club on Facebook which is run by an Usborne seller called Danielle. We’ve had mostly young adult reads so far but I find them really refreshing after some of the crime and real life novels that I tend to lean towards.

Noah is going to his childminder’s tomorrow in a Gruffalo T-shirt to celebrate World Book Day. They will play lots of fantastic party games, explore the outdoors and enjoy lots of lovely stories. I love how much he is experiencing between his childminder, us and the two days he spends with my family. Lucky little boy.

For now, I’m off to read my book with a lovely hot Bedtime Brew

lots of love

Manic Mama M x