Butterfly in the Sky

Take a look! It's in a book!

I read books to Olivia every day. Olivia reads books to Olivia every day. Olivia quite often tries to read a book to Lucy or one of her stuffed animals every day. Or at least to show them the pictures.


And while I am getting extremely sick of "One Fish, Two Fish," and a few others, I do my best to read them in an enchanting fashion. I usually ask myself, "How would LeVar read it?" He definitely would not use a monotone style. (I was very surprised a few months ago when I overheard JB reading this way to Olivia. JB, king of sound effects and silly faces and voices! Perhaps he was just tired. Or perhaps he wanted to make One Fish, Two Fish so dreadfully boring to Olivia that she would never request it again--which unfortunately didn't work.)

Today was my turn to read scripture at church. The text was Daniel 6: Daniel in the Lion's Den!!! One of my favorite stories. Apparently I got a little caught up in the tale, because when I sat down after I read, JB leaned over to me and whispered,

"I can tell you've been reading a lot of stories to Olivia. You used a lot of inflection in your reading."

It takes a lot to embarrass me. I have had several snafus while doing the Scripture reading. Like discovering afterward that my fly was open the whole time. Or walking up and trying to read at the wrong pulpit while the worship leader is whispering loudly at me to move, which everyone else hears and understands, but me. Or walking up and almost starting to read (because the order of service said that I was next) only to be told to sit down again because there was some added thing that I didn't know about that had to happen first.

These things did not embarrass me.

But "children's story hour" left me feeling a little mortified. I never wanted to be one of those Moms who got stuck in kid mode when trying to interact with adults. Yet here I am.

Oh well.

Too bad LeVar wasn't there. He would have understood.

All the cool kids are buying it

I am going to shamelessly promote Grandma and Grandpa Hunt's latest book, "I Do."

BUY IT BUY IT BUY IT

Those of you who know me know that I am very skeptical of devotionals and books on "Christian Living."

It is very hard to find ones that have solid information that seems relevant to me. Too often I have picked up a book that I quickly closed because it was obvious that the author was trying to stretch 50 pages to 150 pages and threw in a lot of senseless repetition and extra words. Maybe it's the journalist in me, but I like when authors make their point once. Not make their point. Then to explain the point with another sentence. Then repeat that point, perhaps with italics. Then repeat it again, this time with a sentence starting with, "It's like," in an effort to further explain the point that we got 4 sentences ago!!

There are only a handful of Christian novels that I can tolerate (thanks Mrs. E!) and about zero devotionals.

Okay, so C.S. Lewis' stuff kicks ass, but I've never finished anything beyond the Narnia series. (I just now decided to try ScrewTape Letters again.) And I've tried Mr. Stott's stuff several times. But he would never use a word like "stuff" so I have to work really hard to understand what his great mind is saying. It's like reading the KJV (actually I find the KJV easier than John Stott--haha!). It's really good, and totally worth it, but it takes a lot of brainpower and will to get through it. And by the end I am so pleased with myself for finally getting it, only to realize that I've just deciphered the first sentence. Maybe one day when I'm smarter I'll try again.

All this to say,

"I Do," is a cool book, and I don't put the cool stamp on many Christian publications.

And it's not just cool because my Grandparent-in-laws penned it. Or because JB and I have the very first, best ever edition (sorry, Austin and Lauren--I am naming yours 2nd edition, so mine is better!), made especially for us before any publisher decided to take it on. Or because it's less than $10, so totally affordable to give as wedding gifts (hint, hint!).

It is cool because it is a great, non-fluff, devotional for any married person, whether a newlywed, or hitched for over 60 years, like the book's authors.

(It JUST came out, but you can get it on Amazon or from the publisher, Discovery House. Or if you're cool like Harry Potter, you can wave your wand and have your owl deliver it to you.)

Read with Me!

Back in 2003 the BBC conducted a poll on reader's favourite books. This list, the BBC Big Read Top 100, has been circulating the internets since it's inception in 2003. As the poll was conducted in Britain, it's no surprise that about 60 of the books are Brittish.

There are scads of "best book" lists out there, but this one had the most titles that I am honestly interested in. Maybe it's because I like British tales.

Apparently the BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of these 100 books. When I first received the list, I had read only 14 or 15. I shared the list with JB, who ticked off 35 titles himself. Goody two-shoes!

I am an avid reader but when I tried to read classics in high school, I was BORED. I preferred my detective novels, thank you. So I never gave them another try. I didn't really believe that many people actually liked these stories and that they just raved about them so that they'd look smart and trendy. You know, like people who rave about "classic" black and white movies that in reality have light plotlines and so-so acting (Gone With the Wind excluded!!).

In 7th grade I did read all 1036 pages of Gone With the Wind of my own choosing. I loved it. My English teacher, Mr. Coopes, then assigned me to read To Kill a Mockingbird, believing I'd enjoy another Southern tale. After page 3 I was dreadfully bored and refused to read it. I took an E on the assignment. Nobody tells ME what to read! After that I left everyone else to their classics while I read REAL books, like Nancy Drew.

Then when JB and I were living with Grandma and Grandpa Hunt (during the Calvin restoration) I saw To Kill a Mockingbird on one of their bookshelves. It had a cool cover and I was itching to read, so I cracked it open.

And couldn't put it down.

How had I ever thought that this book was BORING??? Probably because I was a child. I don't think that teenagers can really get most classics.

Ever since then I've been interested in classic books but as there are so many, I never knew where to start.

JB and I are working our way through this BBC list together. Only I'm the only one that has started. Then again, maybe he's just waiting for me to catch up to him.

My sister Annie has graciously lent me several of her classics from this list, dubbing it my "winter reading." Annie, I won't let you down!

Here's the full list, for any of you fellow readers who care to see where you stack up and perhaps even read along with me! (I've bolded the ones I've read. I've started several others, but they don't count until I read the last page!)

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
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’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 (JB has read this, but I shall not)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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 Zifon
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 Inferno - Dante
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 (Mitch is too self-important, so I'm not reading this one, either.)
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 Factoy - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I don't think you should eat that

Each week April and I attempt to follow our pregnancy progress in the book Your Pregnancy: Week by Week. The book is full of descriptions of how the baby is growing and the changes to expect as well as tips for healthy living with a baby inside you. There is quite a bit of good and interesting information and quite a bit of information for those who need to know EVERYTHING that could possibly go wrong. Needless to say we only read the applicable entries.

Last night as I was getting ready for bed I heard April read, "Are you concerned about Anthrax?" WTH? Anthrax? This should have been an indication of this week's reading which went something this like...

[I'm reading from an article titled Some Alternative Food Choices]
J:To help control a sweet tooth, limit yourself to a 100 calories of candy a day - a handful of jelly beans---
A:A handful of chili beans?!?
J:No, a handful of jelly beans.
A:That's a handful of bullshit.

Ladies and gentlemen this is my wife...

and i love her just the way she is.

The Quickening

Last night I was laying in bed and reading about gardening in this cool book:

JB had already thumbed through it and shared his excitement with me about this latest project of ours. I am so thankful to have such a compatible husband! For the most part, he and I like the same things, though one of us may be a bigger fan of something than the other. It’s really nice to share things that you love with someone else.

As I was daydreaming about giant tomato bushes and homegrown onions, I felt it.

The Quickening.

A friend of mine laughed that “the quickening” sounds like something from the Highlander movies. It does. It also makes me think of some dark Stephen King novel. Or some horror movie (I have a theory that every movie that that has a two-word title that starts with “the” is a horror/thriller movie).

But "the quickening" is just a term for feeling your baby moving for the first time.

How cool is that?

(I don’t know if this is technically the quickening for me, because I felt the same thing last week, but only once or twice while I was reading my baby book, so I wasn’t sure if I was making it up or not.)

So now I feel mini-Hunt swimming around in there all the time. I’m not really a “baby person,” so I am taking time to enjoy one of the few things I find interesting about babies—watching/feeling them grow!

Hopefully I'll be as successful with my tomatoes!