january

I only took around 50 pictures this whole month. Life just kept moving on in its steady, routine, nothing-too-exciting to remember way. There was Scouts, violin lessons, choir practice, reading lessons, the start of play rehearsals, book clubs, Young Women's, and ballet. Just life.

This picture of Anne is something of a dream come true. We built shelves in the front room. They still aren't finished but it is so nice to have a room full of books.

 Ben has become obsessed with the iPad.

Emma had an unusual desire to read this month. She read Beauty by Robin McKinley and Edenbrooke by Julianne Donaldson. It was wonderful to see her curled up on the couch with a good book!

My mom gave us this chess table for Christmas. The boys have been playing many games with the chess set we bought in Poland.

I've finally perfected my whole wheat bread. The whole family loves this bread. We go through 5 loaves in about 5 days. My kids seem to live on cheese sandwiches. Speaking of food, I did a two-week stint eating as a vegan. I wanted to see if it made a huge difference in how I felt. It didn't. I decided I like cheese too much to keep going.

inspired

 Once a month, I meet with my homeschooling friends for Mom's Night Out. We meet to discuss a book, homeschooling, parenting, and life in general. Add in a treat and it makes for a delightful evening. This month, we were lucky enough to listen to our brilliant, book-enthused friend, Shauna, practice her presentation for an upcoming conference. She shared a lot of great insights into how to get your children reading but it was one small idea that totally changed things for me.

I've really struggled with finding a regular time to read out loud to my children. I've tried the afternoon, but once school time is over they are ready to be off doing their own thing. I've tried bedtime, but I am usually ready to be off duty by then. When Shauna shared how she reads her kids out of bed each morning, it was major light-bulb moment for me.

I immediately put the idea into use and it has been wonderful. I read to Emma first in her room. We're reading The Secret Garden. Then I get Slade out of bed and we go sit on the playroom couch. He is quite interested in Greek mythology so we first read D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths and are now reading The Golden Fleece. Then Nathan comes out to the couch. Our current read is Indian in the Cupboard. After that, I head upstairs to make breakfast while they get dressed and tidy up the rooms.

My plan is to read to Anne and Sawyer in the afternoon. I haven't been as successful in getting that implemented but I am still hopeful it will happen.


I'm thrilled with how a small change in our schedule can make such a difference. Thanks, Shauna!

good reads

I saw this book list on a few blogs and the book lover in me just had to join in the fun. I love book lists!

The Big Read is a National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.

The books I have read are in bold.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (okay, well maybe not ALL, but I've read most)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I consider myself an avid reader, so I was shocked to that I had only read 30 of these books! Why haven't I read more of these? I have been in a bit of a reading slump lately. This gives me a good list to get started on my reading obsession again.

How about you?