"Name a book you love and why"

I have been a slacker this week, the carpet will be here Tuesday and we are doing the last minute stuff.... But, excuses is not the name of this post, so on to book talk!

I will agree with Julie that naming just one book is almost impossible. I too will also skip the assumed primary answer of the Book of Mormon and the rest of the scriptures. If you don't know that about me then I'm doing something wrong.

I will give just about any book that you put in front of my face a chance. Most I will even read through before I decide if it was worth my time. There are, however, a few books that I come back to often. The ones that have a permanent place on my bookshelves and life. A few of them are...

For me

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I don't think that I need to say anything about this one. It has survived the years and even though I can practically recite parts of it I still get hung up in the suspense of Lizzy and Darcy's lives. Anything by Jane Austen will do. She is a wonderful writer. Though I will admit that the first time I read Pride and Prejudice it took about five times longer than my usual time for a book of equal length. It's hard to get in to the way her books are written and the period expressions and descriptions.

The Harry Potter series is one that really I can read over and over. They are like old friends or your favorite pair of jeans.

I love the Twilight series...

The Chronicles of Narnia is one of those that is great, stays interesting, starts to waver at the end and then BLOWS YOU AWAY with the ending. I read them just like that. I kept thinking that I was hating the last book. I almost hated it till the very end and then, well, I loved it. After reading all of them (more than a few times) I decided that C.S. Lewis is missing book 8. I really do believe there needed to be a book 8 but I won't tell you why unless you've read all of them and know what I am talking about. I think that just about the meanest thing you can do to a person is spoil the end of a book. I will say of this series that as I read it I thought to myself, "I can't wait to read this to Cedar when he is old enough."

I love Madeline L'Engle. All of her books are great, but my favorite is A Wrinkle in Time.

I love the stories that Shannon Hale writes. Princess Academy, Goose Girl, Enna Burning, River Secrets.

For the kids

Alpha Phonics is my favorite "learn to read" book.

Izza Trapani is one of my favorite illistrators and creators of wonderful plays on nursery rhymes.

There are so many more, but my time is up because Olive's video is over. Mommy is needed. I'm back on duty!

More updates and pictures to come. Maybe before the carpet, but that's a big maybe....

p.s.
We just bought tickets to come out there (Utah) for Christmas. We get in Wed Dec 17th around 7:00pm and leave Wed. Dec 31 at 5:00pm. Yea!

Traditions

I don't think anyone could call me the slacker blogger (lately anyway) but to show support and to keep everyone else blogging I will participate.

Emily already went through many of them so I'll post some different ones, though I'll second all the ones that she posted, as well as Girls weekend from Julie's post.

When we went to Grandma and Grandpa Johnson's we would stop at the "Big Rock Candy Mountain." I just tried to post a picture, but I don't know how to take an image off of another web site and post it on mine. You can check it out here though. http://geology.utah.gov/surveynotes/geosights/candymtn.htm

Another one that I remember is the day after Thanksgiving sock sales. My mom, Grandma Loveridge and sometimes my sisters and I would get up really early and wait for the stores to open (Open, open, open) and we would grab our carts, rush over to the socks and madly start throwing socks into our basket. We would go through what we got later, for now, it was more important to get our hands on them before they were gone. They don't do sock sales like that anymore, but I still get up early and go shopping. It's not the same with out the rest of the crew, but most of the time, the tradition still lives on. Maybe this year...

With my family we have several. One that the kids really love is that Jonathon makes crepes with strawberries on Saturdays. Some days he has meetings or is just too tired, but we have them a lot and the kids love it!

Another one that we love is Halloween. We invite all of our Japanese friends over and have pizza and carve pumpkins. They don't have Halloween in Japan so it's fun to see the first time someone carves a pumpkin.



One that just got started that I hope to carry on I got from Allison's blog. Aspen turns eight in a few weeks and will get baptized. My mom got her a beautiful new dress and I wanted to take some pictures of her in it. It needed to be special, just her and I so I took her out of school while Olive and Cedar were still in school and we went up to the butterfly garden and took pictures. I am no Allison photographer, and I will probably take her to Sears or something for some back up images, but hopefully this tradition will help my children feel how important they are to me and what a milestone in their life that they are reaching. Here are a few peeks at the pictures we took. I will post more in the next few days.

Olive and the basement

One last coat of paint was all that was needed in the basement and the painting that needs to be done before the carpet goes in. I asked Olive if she wanted to help me paint or watch TV and incrediably she chose to help. She was very cute. Her area was under the stairs and she kept up with me for an hour! So that's it with the painting. (For now any way...) Thanks for the help Olive!

Ahh! Spider!

So today I was innocently picking tomatoes. (I can't believe how many we've had this year!) When I almost put my hand through this big girl's web.

It's so hard to tell in a picture, but she is HUGE! I got the marker because she is just a little bigger around than a marker and her body is about an inch long. Add in those legs and OHH BOY!
So, after I stopped freaking out I was able to find out that this is a golden orb spider and though she will bite if provoked, she's not poisonous. (But, let's not test her out, shall we?)
We named her Goldie (Olive wants to call her Yellowie.)

This must be the same kind of spider that Charlotte (as in Charlotte's Web) because sometimes they are called "web writers."

Button pancakes and football practice

It was time to shake up breakfast! Jonathon usually makes crepes on Saturday mornings, but since he had a 7:30 meeting (don't feel too bad for him, he was well fed with "the works" breakfast during the meeting.) I don't know about any one else, but breakfast around here is getting pretty boring. So, since we've already had cereal, eggs, waffles and toast this week, it was pancakes again. We all like pancakes, but they are so, well, normal, old, boring, you know what I mean. So, to get the kids to eat their breakfast we tried "button pancakes." They are just like regular pancakes only the size of a silver dollar. Then, instead of eating them with a fork, the fun part is to pick them up and dip them in your own little container of syrup. It actually worked. Olive, who NEVER eats breakfast fell for the novelty and ate 5. I'll mark that one off as a success.





Cedar is finally 5 and we are so excited for his new opportunities in athletics. We chose football for this season, mainly because it's close and a great program. This one is through the local Baptist church (who says Mormon's and Baptist's can't get along?) I love that the focus is on learning, having fun and good sportsmanship. He was so excited today that he wore his Jersey and mouthpiece most of the day.



One more plus for football practice is the little friends that the girls can play with! Yea! Everyone wins!

The Blue Room

I finished painting the girls room yesterday. I decided to stick with the blue that looked a little less bright in a 1x3 rectangle sample in Lowes. Once everything was put back together I liked it a lot more than the original super bright blue! The kids all helped put on the wall stickers, so of course there was no holding back! Cedar was even jealous and asked why I didn't put fairies up in his room. I really hope they weren't mistaking on the package that said that they come off walls. I hope that they meant that they easily peel off, not that you have to get the sander out to remove them... There are a lot of stickers!

Yep, that's still the bucket bed!

Aspen was the sole decorator of her side of the room.
Aspen loved putting fairies all over the place.
Hey, those are fabulous curtains! I bet whoever made those is really cool!
The cloud suggestion was great!

Do you remember the famous Pink dresser story?
Up next...Painting the basement!

Cedar's Room Before and After

The last week and a half have been dedicated to Cedar's room. I was going to paint his room over a year ago. I even painted the ceiling. But before I actually bought the paint, more beautiful art work showed up on the wall. I didn't want to cover up the pictures while there was still a huge chance that more would show up in the coming weeks and months. As a tribute to the artwork that I scrubbed and finally gave up and primed with the worlds stinkiest super heavy duty primer (That really works, but you can't breathe in the room for 2 days, by the way..) Here is some of the art work along side the new "I promise I won't hurt these walls, mommy." looks.

Next to the closet.

In the dormer.

Along the far wall.

I love these squares that I got at Lowes. They are wall stickers that (reportedly) come off and leave no sticky residue. So far I think they are great. They remind me a lot of contact paper. What is super about them is Cedar can still hang his pictures up on the wall as long as he tapes them onto the squares

Next up...The Girl's room