Silly Purchase

The girls love when school has a book fair!

They drag Nana in there everyday to pick out books.

Last week was no different...Mariah even gave Nana a break and spent her own hard-earned money.

Except they kind of missed the point of a BOOK fair, and came home instead with these:

"Pointers", as they call them.

??

I don't know what they're supposed to be used for.

Pointing at stuff, I guess.

But the girls like to use them for this mostly and think it's hilarious:

They did drag Nana in another day and got actual books, so all's well that end's well I guess. :o)

Love of Reading.....and crafting

I made the girls some bookmarks!

Embroidered them, sewed them, voila.

I asked each girl what exactly they wanted on theirs.

Mariah's answer:

"have a nice book"

Mallory's:

"Mama loves Mallory"

Arissa's:

are still under construction. I finished it, even added a rainbow which took me forever, but the color combo I picked looked really really awful so I tossed it and am starting over.

But it's not like she went away empty-handed...

While I was working on hers, she made this:

And then I also have been working on these every night:

Some little "thank you"s for people who donated to the recent Car-wash-a-thon that her drill team hosted.

I was going to make one for everyone, but eventually I had to decide to only do it for $10+ donations because these things are killing my hands!

:o)

what I'm loving right now:

I'm trying to give up soda. I might as well be trying to give up speaking, or laughing. That's how hard it is for me. I haven't officially said "as of NOW, no more at all", cause I've tried that before and by noon the headache comes on, I get irritable, and I buy a big gulp. But I realize that if I quit drinking it, and it alone, I would probably lose 15-20 pounds. I know this cause I did it before. And also because I don't usually enjoy soda by itself, I like to be eating at the same time. So no soda, less (and different) eating. So I'm trying to ease into it.

And this Arrowhead sparkling water is fabulous. When I bought it, all they had was Raspberry-Lime, which kind of made me gag. But it tastes really delicious. And of course it's got the fizzies, just like my beloved soda. It's not at all the same, but it's something.

And then this: I read this book when Oprah originally announced it as part of her book club....must have been in 1998 or 1999. After the Oscar's on Sunday, I picked it up again and finished it in 2 days. It's SUCH a good book! Although, after reading it this time, I feel like maybe I shouldn't have been reading it when I was only 18/19 years old....it's pretty explicit. But it's such a good story, and such GREAT writing. I just love it. It's translated from German, and when I read stuff that's been translated I always wonder about the translator...how to me they deserve as much acclaim as the author. I know from just trying to translate things I read in french.....it's really really difficult to a) determine what the writer MEANT when they were writing, and b) to make it sound nice in English.

I don't know if I'm up for seeing the movie The Reader though....although I'm tempted after watching the Oscar's, and because I love love LOVE Kate Winslet. But I don't think I'm up for all that nudity. Plus, as was evident with Confessions of a Shopaholic, the book IS always better than the movie so maybe I should just leave it at that! :O)

the best book....

...EVER:








Seriously, this is the very best book I've ever read. It's about a brain scientist who had a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain, and lost all use of that side for awhile. So she had no language skills, linear thinking, reasoning, etc. But her right side was fully functioning, and she eventaully recovered completely. Since I picked it up, I've not been able to stop thinking about it...even though I've been done for several days now. Jesse can attest to my obsession with it....because I keep coming to him with random facts about the human brain that I either learned in the book or discovered through research online. It is just a really really great book, and it's impossible to read it and not think differently afterward about SO many things.