Today marks the two year anniversary of our book club.

For the past two years, I have had the pleasure of meeting up every month with a group of seven of my favorite women to discuss a wide variety of books that we select as a group. To give you an idea of the eclectic tastes of our members, here’s the list of the books we have read together:

The Night Circus

Tale of Two Cities

Visit from the Good Squad

Let the Great World Turn

The Husband’s Secret

State of Wonder

Wind up Bird Chronicles

The Book Thief

100 Years of Solitude

Reconstructing Amelia

Me Before You

Rebecca

Story of O

Never Let me Go

Defending Jacob

Where’d You Go Bernadette

And the Mountains Echoed

Forgotten Garden

The Good Dream



We pride ourselves on being a book club that actually talks about the books. On a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being spending most the time discussing things like which checkers we prefer at the local grocery store and 10 being a non-stop discussion of the themes and character development of each book), I would say that most the time we stay at about a 7.

But then there are nights like February 17, 2014.

Nights when instead of just discussing the book, we decide to try to line up the next six books we’re going to read.

Nights when the number of bottles of wine consumed is greater than the number of people in attendance.

Nights that involve a chalkboard, whiteboard, flipchart and facilitator.

Nights when I have to post notes like this to our book club Facebook group to help translate my drunken notes from the evening.

In my defense, this is what I had to work with:

At last, we did it. We had our 6 books in an almost-readable list.

We said our farewells, stumbled home (we all live walking distance from each other) and I filled (and I mean filled) up my recycling bin with wine bottles and went to bed………

Fast forward 7 months.

My daughter was cooperating with a forced cleaning of her room and brought me a bunch of folders and papers to recycle. Since she’s a talented artist and often trashes pictures of hers that I consider treasure I decided to sort through the piles.

As I was flipping through, this caught my eye, and I didn’t have to even think twice about what night this was from.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one taking notes that night (and hers are actually easier to read than mine).

She also did a sketch to document to two primary offenders who appear to me and my friend, Jen. (I’ve deduced this based on where we were sitting that night, not based on actual physical characteristics.)

But she didn’t stop there. She went on to keep track of just how noisy 7 drunk book-lovers can be.

And to be clear, that heart was not intended for us. It simply bled through from something on the other side that didn’t completely drive her crazy to the point of tracking tic marks of noises. (However, in our defense, some of those tic marks appear to be attributed to ‘bird sounds’ she heard as well.)

I’m not sure if she just gave up because she ran out of room or passed out from sheer exhaustion.

I showed it to her the other day to get her permission to post it and she said she doesn’t even remember doing it.

Which is a good thing, because guess whose turn it is to host book club again this week?

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For more stories about my daughter, you can read about how she challenged the LEGO Corporation to start making LEGO Friends girls with short, sassy hair. You can also read about how her long track history of random injuries are the primary reason that I’m afraid to work outside the home.

Once upon a time, Susanne Kerns was a Senior Account Director at an advertising agency working for two of the top brands in the world. Nine years ago she traded in her corporate life for a life as a stay at home mom, raising two of the best kids in the world. She started her blog, The Dusty Parachute as a way to dust off her online advertising skills and begin her job search. Instead, she now uses it as a way to spend lots of time on the computer so her kids think that mommy has a job.

Susanne’s essays have been featured in Scary Mommy, BonBon Break and Redbook and she is also a contributor in the upcoming books Martinis & Motherhood – Tales of Wonder, Woe & WTF?! and It’s Really 10 Months, Special Delivery. You can follow her on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.