Book Reviews: Junior Style

It's no secret I love YA fiction. Brandon Mull and Shannon Hale are some of my favorite authors. I've recently gotten my mom and sister hooked on The Books of Bayern. I have wanted to read this series for a while now though.

Uglies is about a futuristic society where the playing field is leveled at sixteen and everyone receives plastic surgery to become "pretty". Everyone has basically the same features, skin color, size, etc. No more judging people on appearances. And until your a "pretty", you're an "ugly". It was interesting and kept me sane during the stomach virus of last weekend. It wasn't as captivating as I'd imagined though. However, I've already reserved the next book, Pretties, because he leaves you with a big cliffhanger!

However, we're not just YA fiction fans here! I've been getting more books for miss M to expand her horizons beyond Disney Princesses while still playing to her heart's desires. We have enjoyed Fancy Nancy and Olivia, but this is an adorable book! Read it, and you won't eat all the pink cupcakes next time! :)
My coworker at the school has this book and I recently read it with one of my kids. The next time were at the library, I checked it out to share with miss M and W. They loved it too. And I was thrilled to see it's a series. I hope the rest are as fun! Don't forget your Antonio Banderas accent when you read it though! (and remind me to tell you about the French kid after you read it!)
But in an effort to continue to be the book club member who reads the books but never makes it to the meetings, I also checked Pope Joan out. I have started it before but didn't get past the prologue and birthing. This time, I've conquered that and the gouging out of the eyes. So, I'm doing pretty good! :) Wish me luck!

I need a Tiffani!

I miss Tiffani!

Everyone needs a Tiffani!

Tiffani watched my miss M for a year and a half starting when she was 6 months.

She loved my girl.

She nurtured my girl.

She sang songs to her and drew pictures with her.

I loved knowing she was in a secure, safe and loving home where the same things I believe were being taught.

She watched her every Tuesday and Thursday and didn't get bugged that I was dropping her off at 6:30 am or if I picked her up a tad late.

She was the kind of nanny who, if my girl didn't like what I packed for lunch, would just go ahead and make her what she wanted from her own food.

She did my daughter's hair if I didn't have time and got her dressed.

but most of all, she LOVEd my girl.

Don't get me wrong, my girls now love being with Grandma and ask to go to the green house ALL the time! But I think Grandma wishes her time were her own. And I wish I weren't part of that burden.

So today, I'm missing Tiffani and the wonderful mom she was to my girl.

And thinking how much she would have love love LOVEd little miss LG!

Heard from the backseat

(belted out at the top of her lungs to a tune from Barbie: The Island Princess, just picture an island girl with perfect hair and makeup running around dancing while her prince dances aboard a ship and you've got the song!)

Daddy is Jesus's friend

Mommy is Jesus's friend

I love Jesus. He doesn't love castles.

Jesus walked on the water.

He doesn't want to save me.

Mommy saves me in the water.

But he is my friend.

Jesus loves to be with me.

birthday cake and vomit

LG had one half of her birthday bash last weekend. I was at home with a stomach virus that has been marching through all the Toblers. We thought we were over it a while ago and then W and I got sick just in time for his parents to come all the way from Minnesota to visit. Lovely. So, if you have been around any of us in the last three weeks, beware. And if you get it, I'm truly sorry from all of us Toblers.

Anyway, the lucky girl gets another family birthday next week and forgive me if I'm more excited because I get to be there this time! She can wear her special birthday shirt (thanks so much Em! It's so cute!) that we forgot because I was sick! I can make her a special cake! So stay tuned for MORE pictures! And enjoy these in the meantime!

giggles

I told you she was ticklish!!

Beautiful Baby Lucy Grace

Happy Birthday my sweet girl!

You light up my life every day! You and I became closely bonded from early on as we watched my blood levels to make sure you were safe in my womb all those months. And I loved you instantly! I knew you were chosen to be my second born from early on. Your sweet disposition and easy smile, especially when you crinkle your nose and show off your jack-o-lantern teeth, melt my heart. I love your excitement for life, kicking and dancing when you see a new toy, your beloved milk, really any food, me, or your big sister. I am thankful to have you in my life, miss Lucy goose!

and if you want to know more about miss LG:

-she wants to be like her mom and doesn't crawl. She gimps her way to wherever she needs to go and gets really mad if you put her on her tummy to crawl!

-she looooooves wind-up toys like the little bugs that crawl around on the floor or jump

-she looooooooooves food! she'll eat anything and has the round cheeks and tubby tummy to prove it! W says she never gets full, she just slows down a bit!

-she signs more, simultaneously repeating "mah" whenever she wants anything!

-she goes by Lucy goose, Lulu, Ludy, chunky monkey, and many other names

-she loves to be held but rarely snuggles

-she rubs her ears when she's sleepy, when it's time for bed/nap, we lay her down, plunk in her firepass and she grabs onto her ears for dear life

-her eyes show her emotions, you can totally tell if she's happy or tired or mad even without seeing the rest of her face

-her blonde hair curls in the humidity, love it!

-she loves kisses and is totally ticklish and loves being tickled and played with!

-she doesn't really like swimming and is much more content to sit on the patio and smile and laugh at us in the pool, I usually just sit her in the shade on a bunch of towels and until she just recently became mobile, we didn't have to worry a bit!

-she waves and points at the same time

-you can tell how much she loves her family and her love is infectious, we love her right back!

My ode to book group

It is not meant to be.

I want to join the area book group. I've intended to go for months now. I've checked out the monthly read twice. I even made it half way through the second book.

Alas, W's first MBA class is tonight. And every Thursday night for a while. Therefore, every Thursday night until December 17th is now booked. I have plans with the DVD player, microwave popcorn, and my sewing machine. Or maybe scrapbook. I must ashamedly confess that LG has no scrapbook as of yet.

Book club is of course on Thursday night. So, while I made a valiant effort to get through Enemy Women this month, I will not be attending and will continue to be envious of book group.

But M and LG's grandparents are coming in from Minnesota tonight so we are going to have lots of fun anyway!

Now I can get back to reading Uglies and Inkdeath. :)

Preview

Teriney and I have started working on flower girl dresses. She will have a thick bright pink ribbon for a sash. And it will be a bit more fitted and of course hemmed. But oh, so cute!

the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

I thoroughly enjoyed this book!

As much as I profess to hate cliche endings where everything ends up just as it should, I really did hope for the ending that ultimately came. I love historical fiction and am fascinated with the UK, WWII, and the Holocaust. But, while I believe that Night was something that I needed to read and I learned from it, this was much more enjoyable. It was quaint and sweet and charming and I love falling in love with characters like they wrote!

Read it!

Shouting from my rooftop!

wahoo!

hooray!

phew!

exhausted sigh...

Will is going to business school!

He studied long and hard in May and June and took the GMAT this summer and is starting at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, well, next week!

I'm so stinkin' proud of this boy. He's worked so hard and been so diligent.

Here's to that continuing over the next two years! :)

The Actor and the Housewife

**may contain spoilers**

About 100 pages in, I groaned. I wondered if we would get past the cliche green jello and sherbet punch. And I just didn't see how a top Hollywood heartthrob actor would ever in a million years just call up a housewife to talk about nothing. It just doesn't happen. But I don't like to not finish books. Someday I will return to Gone With the Wind just to say I finally finished it. So I pushed through hoping it would get better, and then suddenly I was sucked in. I finished the last third just last night. Let's just say that the end was much better than the beginning. There were funny parts. There were cute parts. And there were a few parts that were somewhat believable. I admit that I cried a lot during the third quarter and I liked that the last quarter didn't dissolve into a sappy romance but that reality checked back in. Except for the helicopter in suburban Salt Lake.

I totally agree with my friend that, while I love Shannon Hale's young adult fiction dearly, she must be trying to live out her fantasies with Austenland and The Actor and the Housewife.

So I finished it. But I didn't love it.

A Rare Privilege

LG missed her "before church nap" today. Usually she's up so early that she can eat, bathe and go back down for a quick nap to be a happy girl at church! But lately she's been sleeping in more. I'm not complaining but halfway through sacrament meeting, I was ready to complain! She was sooooooo tired! She squirmed and fussed and was only happy sitting in the hall watching other kids play. But I didn't want to sit in the hall for three hours!

During the second hour, I took her in the mother's nursing room and wrestled her for ten minutes until she grabbed onto her ear, started humming to herself, and FINALLY closed her eyes and stopped kicking! She slept for a blissful 45 minutes. I sat back and rocked and enjoyed my solitude.

She's in that busy, I-want-to-see-everything phase where she doesn't want to snuggle, so I loved holding her and watching her rest. Holding onto her security blanket, her ear, her face was all squished up against my arm and oh-so-cute! Her hair curls in the humidity and I just enjoyed looking at the sweet miracle that I created. I'm still just tickled that she has blue eyes and light hair! I love when my babies are babies and I'm wishing she could stay that way for a bit longer!!

Someday...

I think she wishes it were her

sigh....

Living Vicariously

I was planning my wedding six years ago.

My color was periwinkle. I still adore that color. We threw in navy to give it a more wintery feel. It is funny some of the other details that I just don't remember anymore.

My grandmother made my veil. I loved that. I will always love being able to tell people that.

My dress, the bouquets, and the cake were perfect.

When I got married, I lived in Minnesota and my Mom lived here in Arkansas.

I had many wedding coordinators in place of my Mom.

My first dress shopping experience was with Holly and Julie.

Julie was really my wedding planner. She hooked me up with a caterer, a seamstress for altering my dress, and went shopping with me for everything. She made my table centerpieces. Holly and Julie were my unofficial bridesmaids, taking me to get a mani/pedi the week of my wedding and providing me with lingerie.

Then there were the ladies at Talbots. I worked there during grad school. I finally had to order dresses from beautifullymodest.com to get dresses with sleeves and that would be temple appropriate. The ladies at beautifully modest were so kind when I was ordering and told me which dresses would fit my body type and told me I could cheat and order three dresses and as long as I shipped them back within 48 hours, I wouldn't be charged.

I got them on a Friday morning from the UPS shipping center and took them to work with me. I couldn't very well leave them in the car to bake in the heat and possibly get stolen! When my manager realized what I was bringing in, we had a fashion show instead of cleaning up the store! It was perfect! great lighting and mirrors everywhere! And what everyone said was true! I knew the second I put on the second dress that it was the one I would keep! I still love that dress!

Watching Grace plan her wedding with my Mom makes me sigh. I wish she had been more than a voice on the other end of the phone approving decisions and giving advice. (insert sigh again) Luckily, my sweet sister is letting me tag along on a lot of adventures like fabric shopping for the bridesmaid/flower girl dresses and she even let us "help" her register the other night. I missed the dress excursion (yes, she found a BEAUTIFUL dress already!) but she promised I could come taste cakes! :)

It's pitiful of me, I know, but I am enjoying it. It's so sweet to see Grace so happy and in love. There is nothing like being in love when you're engaged!

I actually voted!

I take silly, but great, pride in watching a few reality TV shows but never having voted on or for them.

no longer.

I have been a SYTYCD addict this season!!! I always watched it before but this year, with the assistance of my parents' DVR and the rallying of my sister and Mom (newfound fans) I have watched every second!

I have loved it! And while my favorite was Janette, who is now gone, I have always loved Jeanine and I broke down and voted for her tonight!

five times :)

I hope she wins. She is an amazing dancer! Who am I kidding? They're all amazing and I love this show!!!!! But, please don't hate me for this but I will be disappointed if Evan wins. He's great but he's not as well rounded or up to par with the others. So I'm pretty sure I'll be happy however it ends up!

funniest thing though? my Dad has also been watching with us! And as much fun as he makes of the show, he stayed awake and watched the whole thing tonight! :)

thank you, sweet Relief Society teacher

When I am feeling low, I ignore my blog.

I read lots of blogs and probably comment more. I write lots of posts and then promptly delete them when I realize how pitiful they sound. And then I get back to normal. Normal-ish....

And it's been one long roller coaster of a pity party over here. From poor motherhood skills, to eating habits, to loneliness, to lack of romance. You name it, and I was down on it.

And then I sat down in Relief Society on Sunday alone and listened to wonderful Ceanne ask if any of us were going through a personal trial, maybe big or maybe small but overwhelmed nonetheless. Of course the answer was yes for all of us across the room. And then she reminded me of something that I'd forgotten and pridefully ignored through my personal crisis. She shared a story about her husband and I remembered that I had not prayed about it. I'd felt sorry about it. I'd felt hopeless about it. I'd whined and complained endlessly to my sweet hubby about it, but I hadn't poured my heart out to my Heavenly Father about it and humbled myself and asked for help. Tears poured down my cheeks as I realized I knew exactly what I needed to do, and I looked around a little embarrassed that no one else was reacting that way. But that part of the lesson was for me so it was okay that I cried like a baby.

I think the lesson was on prayer. I will never truly know because my squirmy worm got noisy after that and we ended up out in the hall for the rest of the time. But I'm thankful for the snippet I got. I don't exactly know how to solve my worries and fix my problems yet. But I'm thankful for the reminder that I'm not alone in them. And the reminder that it's my own fault and I need to depend more wholly on my Heavenly Father for the strength and power to overcome them. And to get back to being me.