TweetI was drawn first to this book by its beautiful cover illustration.   It’s in the style of  a classical oil painting, and shows a woman in a Biblical landscape who is obviously suffering from a great tragedy.  I looked at the description, and found that it was about Dinah, a woman who is barely mentioned [...]

TweetI found this book incredibly interesting and I read it constantly until the end. What was so interesting? The author is from Canada, the characters were well developed, and it is a story about conjoined twins (yes, siamese twins, but the proper term is conjoined twins). Of course, since Lori is not a twin, much [...]

It all makes me realize that my baby’s getting older (and therefore, so am I).

Food is, of course, the most basic of our needs beyond water and air (and toilet paper!). Isn’t it funny how we take these simple things for granted? You breathe in and out, you pull on the roll, you turn on the tap, you pop a Lean Cuisine into the microwave, or answer, “Yes”, to “Fries with that?” Easy, automatic, instant. But of course, it’s not. All of these things, with the exception of air, require a complicated combination of infrastructure and workforce to get to us. We only think about it when the system breaks down (imagine a toilet paper factory worker’s strike!), or when we pay our bills.

TweetDue to constant traveling, I have been homeschooling my son for the last few months. We have gone through different stages where he enjoyed it or didn’t, and I’ve had a few struggles getting him to listen and to actually like doing work, especially math. My son is seven years old and officially in first [...]

TweetI found this book at the free store and almost didn’t take it. It looked kind of cool, a hand with candy sprinkles all over it. But the description, about a man with an addiction who goes through rehab didn’t sound that exciting. I’ve read a few of those, and they’re mostly over-Christiany, “feel sorry [...]

Tweet Unless you work from home, transportation is a necessity. But it need not be expensive. You don’t need three cars. You probably don’t even need two cars. And you could likely get by with no car at all, especially in the city. If you live in a larger city, you probably have a bus [...]

TweetThis is one of those rare perfect books that I will want to keep forever to loan out to friends in need of enlightenment or encouragement. It has everything: a good storyline; characters that are real, complex and that you would want to meet in real life; it’s funny; it talks about the Northwest US [...]

TweetWhale Rider is a lovely little movie about a rural Maori town in New Zealand and their search for a leader. It’s about the struggle for a little girl to be accepted, about the struggle between tradition and modern ideas, fulfilling your dreams, and about love within a family and within a community. It introduces [...]

TweetThis is a neat little book that I read almost in one day. I found a lot of myself in it. Some of you may think that this statement is odd. After all, it’s about a British girl growing up in a small town under a severely religious, perhaps deranged family, to find out that [...]