New Habits

This week I started a new book by Kristin Hannah. It is call Distant Shores! I am very excited to be reading another novel by her because I have really enjoyed all the ones I have read so far. This one is quite a bit shorter than the last two I read so I will probably have it done within the next week. On that note, I have developed some new reading habits. I give full credit to this PRABE assignment because, honestly, I would not have read near as often had it not been for a grade. On the flip side of that, I did find that once I was reading material that I found to be very interesting I wanted to read all the time!! I enjoyed reading like I had never enjoyed it before which has opened my eyes to how important it is to take the time to read for fun. This is a habit I hope to pass on to my students when I am a teacher because I do want them to have a love for reading so that they can grow intellectually. I want my students to make connections with text not just for an assignment but as I read and found the genre that I connected with the most, the reading started to mean so much more to me than I ever imagined. It gave me a chance to reflect upon things in my life. Reading is a world bigger than what it seems and I cannot wait to share my new found enjoyment of it with my students one day!

Office Visits

It is amazing how one week can change dramatically from the next. This week I have spent quite a bit of time in doctor or dentist offices. I used my time there to read the magazines they had. I quickly found out that not all of them are up to date! I guess I wasn't completely surprised but considering that it is a place of business I just assumed that they get the most recent copy of any magazine they choose. My readings this week were not very exciting at all. I had two appointments on Wednesday and then my daughter got sick Friday and still was not better today so I had to take her back in. So needless to say I have had my fair share of office visits this last week!! 

Unfortunately, I did not read anything that really stuck with me. I found a couple of interesting tips in a parenting magazine on how to get your toddler to sleep  in their OWN bed. It just reassured me that this "phase" she is experiencing is not just happening to me! I was relieved to read that it is normal and can be overcome. She has recently started to be "scared" of everything at night. At first, I thought maybe she was pulling my leg because she was fighting her sleep but now I know that it happens to toddlers sometimes. 


Other magazines I read were not very interesting. There were, of course, a ton of magazines about celebrities and the latest in their lives. However, some of the magazines were from months even a year ago so it was "old" news. Others I wasn't too sure if what I was reading was even really true. They make the headline so catchy that you want to read it but then by the time your done reading it did not even seem like news. I did get to read about details of events in their lives that I had not heard about but that was about it. 

I tried really hard to find SOMETHING of interest in a Business Week magazine but I had no luck. It just was not my kind of  read I suppose. I did enjoy flipping through the magazines and stopping to read anything that seemed intriguing. It was not what I had in mind for reading this week but with having my own appointments and a sick child there wasn't much of anything I could get done anyway!

New Read

This past week has been such a great week! Not only was it a time of togetherness but also a time for me to enjoy A LOT of reading! I had the pleasure of borrowing another book by Kristin Hannah. My friend from work finished reading Winter Garden, that I let her borrow, and she decided to go buy a few more books by Kristin Hannah. We both have found that her books are extraordinary!! They make us laugh, cry, and open our minds to life. The new book I started this week and finished today is called Night Road. It was absolutely terrific! I could not stop reading it and I was actually able to have time to sit and enjoy reading like never before. The book was a great story about a mother, her twins, and a best friend of theirs that became the ultimate enemy. It was about love and loss and the all too familiar reminders of high school and choices we all face. Sometimes the decisions we make ruin lives and sometimes they bring everyone back together. The best part of this book was the twists it had and yet they were very realistic. I love realistic fiction. It truly makes me feel every emotion possible to man! Of course, I did cry when I read this novel but what's wrong with that?! Nothing. I know that when we read we are taken to a whole new world in our mind and sometimes when we stop reading we are so moved by what we read that it makes us appreciate life that much more. I thoroughly have enjoyed the two books I have read by Kristin Hannah. I know now that I will keep up the reading with one of her other novels. I just don't know which one yet!! 

Lingo! Lingo! Lingo!

Wow, I never thought I would use a dictionary or Google as much as I have this past week. Confessions of a Shopaholic is set in London and it has been very hard to get used to the lingo used in the book. I am constantly looking up what words mean if I cannot decipher them from the context. It is becoming quite annoying for lack of a better word. I loved the movie but I am finding it harder to stay focused on what I am reading because I am always stopping. On a more positive note, it is a humorous story and I do get a laugh at some of the words the main character, Rebecca Bloomwood, uses. Her struggles that she has within herself considering her shopping addiction is very hilarious. She is always battling with herself on items she should or should not buy. She also has a bank sending her letters constantly to try to get the debt she owes them. She gives them many different excuses for why she cannot pay them. She does have a job as a financial journalist which seems to make her a hypocrite. 

I have been trying very hard to read at least four days out of the week. So far I have managed to squeeze in the time to enjoy reading! However, I am going to be looking for another book to read because I am just not as interested, as I hoped, in Confessions of a Shopaholic. My plan is to find another book by Kristin Hannah because I really enjoyed Winter Garden. I was also able to make some really good connections with the story and it really touched my heart. I felt very good after I read that book and highly recommend it!! 

Hopefully, my "lingo" experience is over for a while. I did not mind so much having to look up the words I was unfamiliar with but it has just become too much and I have lost interest. 

On to the Next

I have officially finished Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. It was a rather silly/funny. I would recommend it to my students because it is a good book. It would probably be more funny to a child that has a younger sibling at home that they are annoyed by! The main character, Peter, was hilarious in the story especially about his family and his younger brother Fudge. It was a great book to get lost in because it would make you laugh at the silliest things! 

So, on to the next! I am now reading Confessions of a Shopaholic. I am very interested to see if it is anything like the movie. I have never read a book that also had a movie out so I am excited to see the difference! I am not the type to normally spend a lot of money but lately it has been hard not to. I am not over spending but I just keep finding things I think we "need" for our house or for our daughter. It can be a very bad habit. I found this book when I was looking for a new one and decided I should read it and see if it brings me back to reality about my spending lately. The only down side to reading this book right now is that it is almost Christmas and we always spend too much money!! I hope the book is just as funny as the movie! I will keep you posted :) 

New Read

Since I had finished a novel that was pretty sad and made me cry, I have decided to take on a novel that hopefully is more funny! I love reading books that are for children because I can get a good knowledge about what books are good. As an educator, I want to be able to make recommendations to my students when they are in need of a book. I am currently borrowing a book by Judy Blume. It is called Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. I asked my younger brother if he had any books that were funny and he told me about this novel. So far, it is pretty funny. I am enjoying that the story is coming from a fourth grader and it is his point of view. It makes me think a lot about my younger siblings because they are growing right before my eyes and sometimes I cannot believe the things they say. They are becoming more and more mature and with that comes a new vocabulary, a new social life, and a whole new person it seems. My brother is in fifth grade and my sister is in sixth. 

Anyway, I am really enjoying reading something that will help me provide my students with some insight on whether or not the book would be of recommendation quality. I want my students to love to read and make connections with the texts they read. The only way to give them a proper opinion is to read them myself! I do have several that I liked as a kid but I only liked realistic fiction. So, I am going to broaden my reading genres and read some that I have not read before.

Finished

I have successfully finished Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah! It was a great, easy read. I found it to be a very much needed, but dreaded, reality check. Sometimes when you get caught up in life you start to forget about important moments that will mean the world to you later. This novel had death, divorce, love, lust, sisterhood, tragedy, secrets, and new beginnings. Every emotion that is possible seemed to be brought about in this story. I know I have mentioned some about the novel, especially that which I connected with but there was so much more than I could even put into words! A mothers haunting secret and the story she tried to tell for decades was finally revealed to her daughters that so desperately needed to hear it. It was the moment in the story where everything in their lives start to make complete sense. We call these "aha" moments! I enjoyed every bit of this story even though I was crying each time I read it. There was just so much pain, hurt, truth, and heart in this story it was hard not to get emotional!!! 

I recommend this novel to anyone interested. I will give one warning: A mothers fight and love for her children can create the most unthinkable damage among a family. 

The Suspense Is Killling Me!

This week I have not read as frequently as I would have liked. However, I was reading for a longer period of time each time I read. I am at the climax point in my story and it is really hard to put the book down!! I love that feeling! There are some really sad parts in the story that make it hard to read but I keep on reading because I know that in the end it will be worth it. A lot is happening right now and some of it is very relative to my life. My mother and father are both experiencing health problems. They each have had a few tests done to try and figure out what is going on but so far there are no answers. My mother actually goes this week to get another, more invasive, test that hopefully will give us some answers. In the story, Meredith's mother is very sick and the doctor just seems to think that it is her grief but they believe it is something else. As it turns out, there might be another explanation to all the confusion and their mother hurting herself. She was living in Russia during the Soviet war and terrible things happened to her. So, now they are on a journey to dig deep into what happened to their mother. There are two sisters in the story: Meredith and Nina. They are very different. I am noticing that I can relate more to Meredith than to Nina. I mostly relate to her feelings, actions, and beliefs. They are women on a mission to find out the true life of their mother. The story just keeps getting better and better. The suspense is maddening! I have to say that, even though this is a different kind of situation that they are going through, reading this story has actually made me think more about my parents and their problems. I have really started to evaluate some of the things I would need to take care of or what I would want to do to help them out. I just did not ever think that I would have to worry about it so soon. I know that whatever happens we all will be very supportive and there for each other just as Meredith and Nina are in the story. It is amazing how a story can relate so much to past experiences, present situations, and future endeavors. 

The Truth Hurts

This week was a little harder for me to actually sit down, relax and read. I was so busy with trying to get all my homework completed before the weekend because we are celebrating my daughter's second birthday!! We have family coming into town and that makes it a little harder to do homework on the two days of the weekend that I do not work! Anyway, I completed most of it and still managed to make time to read for this week, although I had to stay up later than normal to complete that task. 

I was able to make a couple connections with the novel I am reading this week. Some were very frightening because you never want to think about detrimental events in life that you are unprepared for. I found myself taking special interest to the character Meredith. She has a family and runs her deceased fathers apple orchard. She has many struggles in this story because she has never gotten along with her mother. Her mother was not the caring type that hugged, kissed, or praised her children. She was always very distant and never understanding. I love my mother to death but she was similar. She seemed very distant sometimes and unable to understand what I was going through as a teenager and young adult. Her mother, my grandmother, got very sick with ovarian cancer when my mother was a teenager. She never really had a mother figure around when she was going through high school and shortly after she graduated my grandmother passed away. So, my mother never learned how to be a mother because her mother was sick all the time and was in and out of the hospital while my mother was in school. The story has really made me think about what kind of  mother I want to be to my daughter. In the story Meredith does the same kind of thing. She has two daughters and she calls them everyday and makes sure that she is always there for them. But her marriage is starting to fail because she is so wrapped up in how to take care of her mean mother that has been very confused lately, taking proper care of the apple orchard, and keeping her own motherly duties. She is facing so much that it has really made me think about how prepared I am in dealing with the death of a parent. I know that I will be taking care of the finances and anything in their Will but I have never discussed with them any specifics. I do not even know whether or not my older brother knows that I am the one they have chosen to take care of that stuff. There are just A LOT of questions I have in my mind about being prepared for their deaths even though I DO NOT want to think about it at all. But sometimes it is hard to face the truth of the matter because it hurts SO BAD.

What a Tearjerker!

I have recently started a new novel by Kristin Hannah called Winter Garden. A few ladies that I work with have read her book called Fireflies and recommended her books for me to read. I have not read for pleasure in a long time so I wanted to make sure to get a good novel to start and since Fireflies is currently being read by another lady we work with, I bought Winter Garden. Little did I know that I would be crying after the first chapter!! Every time I read it is hard not to cry. Every part of the story really touches your heart and brings you memories you may have wanted to forget or hold on to forever. By that I mean,  we all have had experiences with the death of a family member. Each one of us can relate to all the emotions we feel, the distinct things we said or didn't say, and the struggle we face for months to come. This book brings about all those thoughts, feelings, and memories of their death. The words are so moving it is hard not to cry. It also makes me think about my living family members and how much I love and care about them. In a sense, it makes me dread the day when they are taken from me and will only be a memory. It is hard for me to handle death so, of course, this book is a real tearjerker for me! Even though it makes me cry I will fight through every page even if they are soaking wet by the end.

It's the simple things in life...

If you have read the "About Me" section in my blog you would know that I have a daughter that is almost 2. Everyday she does something to amaze me. Since this blog is all about reading I wanted to talk about how much she loves it when we read to her. 

She has several books. For a while, she was really into Duck and Goose by Tad Hills but now she has branched out and likes most of her books. However, she does have one favorite that I have read an enormous amount of times this last week. It is called Happy Easter Mouse by Lauren Numeroff. She has had this book since her very first Easter so it is very funny to see how she picks her books out and suddenly she has a new favorite that has been on her shelf forever! Anyway, one of the first times we read this book last week was shockingly funny to her. She would belly laugh after the first page! If you have not read this book it is about Mouse who decorates his Easter eggs. When he wakes up on Easter morning the eggs are hidden all around the house. After the first page he finds two eggs on the counter by the milk carton. My daughter found it to be hilarious! So, naturally we would start to read the book with disbelief that the eggs were hidden all around!! Just by simply putting our own silliness and surprise voice into the reading she would crack up laughing harder. 

It is the simple things in life that make me so happy and grateful to be a mommy!! I love that she is interested in having books read to her and that she has her own personality and opinion about them. Who knew a book could be so funny to a 2 year old??!!

Welcome to my blog!

I must say this assignment could not have come at a better time! I had never created a blog before until my technology teacher gave me a blog assignment just last week. So, now that I am a little familiar with blogging I am looking forward to sharing my weekly thoughts with you about what I am reading! I must also confess that I have not read for pleasure in a long time so it will be an exciting journey! I hope you enjoy my blog and please feel free to leave questions, comments, or concerns!!