Did you know newborns eat every two to three hours. Also known as ALL THE TIME? the timer for eating starts when they BEGIN eating, not when they finish. So if sweet baby starts eating at noon, they’ll probably finish around 12:40, then be ready to eat again at 2. I’d like to see YOU try to get something done when you’re feeding an infant 8-15 times a day.

When David was about a week old, I started doing some research. I needed to know when babies ate less because there was no way I could keep up this nonsense. I Googled, “When do babies start eating less?”

I got 2,580,000 results, all of which said the same thing: around four months, they’ll eat less frequently than every 3 hours.

Um, no thank you. I had just one week of this under my belt. I wasn’t sure I could keep it up for TWENTY WEEKS.

So I tried rephrasing my search. “How often do babies eat”…”Baby feeding schedule”…”When can I feed my baby less?”

They all said the same thing. I had to accept it; Google never lies.

I resigned myself to sitting on the couch and watching TV. I watched the first season of Glee, re-watched The Hills and Laguna Beach, and about three months of the Colbert Report in about a week.

Then I remembered something. I remembered my sister-in-law talking about reading while nursing.

I love to read. In fact, one of my goals in 2010 was to read 52 books. I did it, and swore I’d never do it again. I loved bulldozing my to-read list, but reading at that pace sort of took the fun out of reading. Every time I started a new book I’d divide the number of pages by seven to see how many pages I had to read a day. If I missed a day I was ruined. I couldn’t read really long books, and I neglected reading other things…things like  magazines (I’ve read every word published by Runners’ World since 1996) and (more importantly) my Bible.

In 2011 I slowed down…that is, until I started spending so much time on the couch. Thanks to David, I read 49 books this year, just three short of my 2010 goal.

BUT I read 17,534 pages in 2011, 15,561 pages in 2010. That’s because after David arrived I started reading books with 500 or more pages in week. Do you know how much reading you can do when you’re awake most of the night? I read most of Lonesome Dove between the hours of 10pm and 6am. Depressing.

Here’s the list of books I read in 2011. The ones in bold are the ones I really liked. As in, I almost kept reading after I put David back down because it was so good. Almost.

January

• East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
• Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand
• Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout

February

• Eclipse (Twilight #3), by Stephenie Meyer
• Sarah’s Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay
• Runner’s World Guide to Running and Pregnancy, by Chris Lundgren
• Breaking Dawn (Twilight #4), by Stephenie Meyer
• One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

March

• Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen
• Beneath a Marble Sky, by John Shors
• Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die, by John Piper
• The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath

April

• Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
• Mommy Wars, by Leslie Morgan Steiner

May

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
• Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, by Piper Kerman
• Esther: It’s Tough Being a Woman, by Beth Moore
• The Best Birth: Your Guide to the Safest, Healthiest, Most Satisfying Labor and Delivery, by Sarah McMoyler our Guide to the Safest, Healthiest, Most Satisfying Labor and Delivery
• The Church of Irresistible Influence: Bridge-Building Stories to Help Reach Your Community, by Robert Lewis
• Just Do Something: A Liberating Approach to Finding God’s Will, by Kevin DeYoung

June

• Restorers of Hope: Reaching the Poor in your Community with Church-Based Ministries that Work, by Amy L. Sherman
• The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd
• Big Stone Gap, Adriana Trigiani

July

• The Winter of Our Discontent, by John Steinbeck
• The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
• The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy

August

• The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss
• Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor
• The Pearl, by John Steinbeck
  [and then David arrived]
• Heat, by Bill Buford
• A Tree Grows in Brookly, by Betty Smith

September

• Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
• Mile Markers: The 26.2 Most Important Reasons why Women Run, by Kristin Armstrong

October

• Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
• Room, by Emma Donoghue
• The 19th Wife, by Dave Ebershoff
• The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
• Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
• Once A Runner, by John L. Parker, Jr.

November

• Again to Carthage, John L. Parker, Jr.
• Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, by Marc Weissbluth
• Shepherding a Child’s Heart, by Tedd Tripp
• Isaac’s Storm: A Man, A Time and the Deadliest Hurricane in History, by Eric Larson

December

• A Reporter’s Life, Walter Cronkite
• The Problem of Pain, by C.S. Lewis
• Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery
• Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell
• Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
• Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

(I use GoodReads.com to keep track of my books. It lets you make lists of books you want to read and see what your friends are reading. Add me as a friend if you’re on GoodReads.)