Sometimes in my life as a mother and nerd, I have an ah ha moment. Last night, after a long day of feeling rotten, the kids not napping, hitting my head on various things for no obvious reason other than ouch, being confined in an examination room (which they should really just call The Waiting Room Part Deux) with two very rowdy kids under 46 inches tall waiting to find out if the taller child (or myself) might have Strep Throat (nope) …

…and then rushing home crawling home slowly through rush hour traffic and road work to make dinner and then refigure out dinner upon realizing that every box of pasta we own contains about 1.5 servings and nope none of the boxes are duplicates (mac and cheese for dinner!! yay!!) and convincing MM to go brush his teeth and put on pajamas and brush his teeth again (better this time! brush every tooth!!!) and seriously why aren’t your pajamas on yet???

Finally.

It was time for bed. Dan is reading the first Harry Potter book aloud to The Eldest Child Who Does Not Have Strep Throat and I knew that because I wasn’t feeling well, if I could stall her long enough, he’d put BB to bed, too. But meanwhile she was impatient. She brought me a book (Olivia the Princess) to read to her. Did I mention I have a sore throat?

I’d been trying to talk as little as possible all day and the Olivia book was more than I could handle. Particularly because it’s one of the non-board book quasi-Easy Reader editions with LOTS of words. Lots of words that I’ve been forced to read so many times that I sometimes just pick and choose my favorite sentences and skip the rest and because she’s two she hasn’t noticed yet, but even with that cheat it was still too much. I was tired. And my throat hurt. And I didn’t want to read her wrinkled, battered, mangled edition of Olivia the Princess again.

So I had this dorky ah ha moment that probably somebody had had this problem before and then later recorded themselves reading said favorite bedtime stories on video. Or maybe they work out of town or are in the military or just taking pity on tired mommies tired of feeling like a repeat button. Either way, I did a google search for “Olivia read aloud” on my Tablet and found this:

I found several similar types of videos actually because, I was right, this is a THING that people do. But I was partial to the readaloudbooks4kids videos because of the good selection of books for BB’s age range, the quality of the video and the reader’s voice. She was born to read stories out loud to children, it’s a fact. We listened to three or four videos while Dan read a chapter of Harry Potter in the next room, BB absolutely mesmerized and delighted (me wondering if I’d started a habit that would be annoying to me later but not caring) with the whole thing. And then as predicted, Dan finished reading and took both kids upstairs and put them to bed and I had a cup of tea.

Bliss.