The 3rd Annual Curry Read-A-Thon!

We had our 3rd annual Curry Read-a-thon.
We stay in our pajamas all day, and I read them every kids book we own.
We do it every January, and the kids really look forward to it. They ask every couple months if it's time to do it again.
The first year it took us about 6 hours. The 2nd year it took us a day and a half, and this year it took 3 days. (There's a whole nother layer of books under that pile.)
We started on Tuesday at 9:38am, with "Blackbeard's Treasure," "Fancy Nancy goes to the Museum" and "Big Bird's Basket," and we read until about 6:30 pm that night.
We of course took breaks to eat, go to piano lessons and play a little bit, but the majority of the day was spent reading books, or being hit in the face with books by Winston. (He wanted to read the same book over and over and over, so he kept hitting us in the face with it to get his point across. He is very sweet though cause he came right up and kissed us everytime after we said "ouch.")

We ended up reading a lot of books outside to keep it interesting. I kept asking them if they were sure they weren't tired of listening to me read (cause my throat sure was) but they kept saying they wanted to keep going.
Noelle walked around the room while I read some of the books, but she proved she was listening when I would try to skip pages, and she would catch me.
So by the end of the 1st night, we stacked our day 1 books up in a pile, and this is how many we read.
Noelle said it looked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Then she knocked it down.
The 2nd day we only put in about 3 hours of reading here and there cause we had some other plans, and my throat was very thankful. Grandpa informed us that it was backwards day (2/1/12) so we even read a few of our books backwards. Good idea Grandpa!

And on day 3 we read for 3 hours straight to finish the books up. By this time, I wasn't doing any great different character voices, and Robert's mom kept laughing from the kitchen because of how super, super fast I was reading.

We only stopped to keep up our tradition within a tradition of eating fun treats during our read-a-thon. So we refueled with some dinosaur/tulip/fish/bunny shaped sandwiches, some letter shaped cookies that grandma got us and some sprinkle rimmed glasses of milk.
That got us going again.

We finally finished up our read-a-thon at 4:52pm with our last 3 books, "Grandpa's Teeth" (their favorite cause I have to talk with a lisp when I read it) "Five Little Chicks" and "Dream Big Olivia" (which we didn't know at the time we bought it, was actually a book of quotes, so we crossed out all of the weird quotes and wrote our own story together. It's way better!
Olivia goes to Egypt, where she meets Moses and a dragon. Then she dances on a camel and goes to the circus, where she pulls on an elephant's tail and it pops right off, so she uses it as a whip to tame the lions, but she didn't want to hit them with it so she decided to use it as a fishing pole, and she took them all to the beach to catch catfish, etc, etc.)

Anyhow, we were all very excited to finish the last book, and then we did the official count. Last year we read 158 books, and this year we read, drum roll please...298 books!
(That means I bought 140 books in the last year, so I feel the need to explain myself. Most of them were like 10 cents at garage sales, and a giant box was just given to me, so it's not as overboard as it seems.)

It was so much fun! I'm happy they love reading, and I'm happy we had so much fun doing it together! I must say though, I am very nervous for the 4th annual Curry read-a-thon. I hope I get my book-buying under control by then!