Favorite Picture Books

One of my obsessions is books. There aren’t many I don’t like, and I find myself recommending my favorites to friends. So I thought I’d make a few lists of my favorites. I’ll start with children’s picture books and work my way up over time.

The Monster at the End of this Book – Furry lovable old Grover just doesn’t get much better than this.

Moose Tracks by Karma Wilson – A hilarious and surprising rhyming book

Little Critter books by Mercer Mayer – a sweet and funny series, especially if you have a little boy.

Bear Snores On by Karma Wilson – A fun read a-loud with pattern and rhyme and great sounds to explore. One to do over and over. There's more Bear books, but this is the best in my opinion.

My First Little House Books – The pictures are gorgeous and the excerpts from the Little House Series are timeless. A beautiful combination that’s great for younger ones not ready for the chapter books. Any and all of them are good.

Froggy Gets Dressed by Jonathan London – Too funny! My kids loved to read this one with me – before they could read. Great patterns and sounds they can remember.

Hug by Jez Alborough – An almost wordless picture book that tiny tots love to read along with you. Sweet pictures.

You Are My I Love You by Maryann K. Cusimano – Precious poetry, touching illustrations.

The Napping House by Audrey Wood – A delightful book with great pictures – and short enough for wigglers.

The Pumpkin Patch Parable by Liz Curtis Higgs – A parable with scripture included that’s perfect reading in the fall. I like the other three in the series too.

A Frog in the Bog by Karma Wilson – A funny, rousing read-aloud with some creative counting included. And a little gross too, which makes it perfect for boys.

Curious George Goes to a Chocolate Factory by Margaret and H.A. Rey – Perhaps my favorite in the series simply because it includes chocolate, but the books are classic for good reason. My second favorite is probably Curious George Goes Camping.

I Love You the Purplest by Barbara M. Joosse – If your child has ever asked who you love best or competes with his sibling for your attention, read this book. Touching.

How I Became a Pirate by Melinda Long – A young landlubber goes on an adventure with pirates. Best read good and loud in your finest pirate speak, matey!

Moo, Baa, La La La! by Sandra Boynton -- Hilarious rhyming book of animal sounds. My all-time favorite board book of hers.

(A few others pictured that I really like are Dinosailors, What Are You So Grumpy About? and The Day the Babies Crawled Away. All the books are linked to Amazon for your convenience.)

Feel free to share your favorites.
Happy Reading!

Favorite Picture Books

Sock it To Me

R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Find out what it means to me . . .

I'm one of those people who grew up surrounded by music. My mom plays the piano, my dad sings and played the trumpet, my grandma played the organ, my sister sings, my brother sings, my cousin, my aunt . . . you get the idea. Everybody was (and still is) singing or playing something. To quote Larry the Cucumber in Lyle the Kindly Viking, "It's a muuusicaaal." This is a good thing, but it comes with a price: I can now think of a song for just about anything. So when I start thinking about a word like "respect," it automatically starts up that player in my head and remains there until another song takes it's place. And when I start thinking about RESPECT, I start channelling Aretha. Lately, that's been often. It's like I'm stuck in repeat mode.

I love my kids. They are a blessing to me, but there are days when they drive me crazy. I find myself impatient with their interruptions and endless stories or noises. I begin to crave quiet and my own space, and sometimes . . . I snap. I bark, I whine, I beg . . . and then I demand RESPECT. Respect for my time, my quiet, my desires as a person. And that's when it hits me: I'm not respecting them as people. They have stories to tell, dreams to share and feats to show. And they want to share with me. Right now, I'm one of their biggest fans. And I'm realistic enough to realize that someday someone else will become their audience.

So lately I've been praying that God would remind me to show my family some R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and this is what came to mind:

Regard
Everyone as a
Special
Person
Entitled to
Consideration and
Thoughtfulness

Sock it to me.

Sock it To Me

Mushy Brain, Big Book

My brain was feeling a bit mushy, so I decided it was time for a challenge. After reading loads of children's books to my kids, I needed something more substantial for my personal time. You know that saying, "Go big or go home"? I decided to go big and picked up a book by C.S. Lewis. Not the Chronicles of Narnia either. Now, I know Lewis isn't the most difficult reading in the world, but after reading Fudge books and repeats of Sandra Boynton board books, it seemed a hard tackle.

I've read a few books by C.S. Lewis, so I know that he's brilliant. He has an amazing knack for apologetics, so when I picked up Till We Have Faces, that's what I was expecting. That's not quite what I got. Till We Have Faces is a rework of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. It takes place in a land called Glome, in a pre-Christian world. It also contains one of the best lines in any book I've read, "I could never be at peace again till I had written . . . I was with book, as a woman is with child."

Faces explores the relationships in family -- the jealousy, the love, the complexities. It explores the soul and probes into motives and truth. And even though it's not as apologetic in nature as Lewis' other books, it still bears truth to a God-centered world -- mainly that it is not until we see God face-to-face that we will truly understand. As Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13:12, "Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known."

Here's the kicker. I think my brain is even mushier than before . . . but it's more educated mush.

Mushy Brain, Big Book

Middles

Wednesdays are under appreciated. The poor day gets the title "Over-the-Hump" day. It's the halfway mark of the week. . . ho, hum. But I kind of like Wednesdays. After all, if you've reached Wednesday, that means Monday is over, and most of us can really appreciate that. And Saturday, that beloved of all days, is just around the bend. I like Wednesdays, too, because generally it's a quieter day for my family, and after the hustle and bustle of Monday and Tuesday, I'm ready for the quiet. Plus, it was the day I was born on which naturally makes it a good day. But most of all, it's a middle.

I'm partial to middles, being one myself: the middle of the candy bar, the middle of vacation, the middle of a good book, the middle of a cup of coffee. If you're in the middle of a good thing, it means you still have some good left. The middle of the Bible is the Psalms, and that's one of my favorite books. And then there's my middle child, also born in the middle of the week.

He's in that same category of good things that I enjoy. He's usually in the middle of a project, which means he's in the middle of a big mess. But he's also in the middle of being helpful and in the middle of being funny. He keeps us in stitches with his silly jokes and goofy antics. He's the child who told me one of the branches of government was the License Plate Branch and told someone else that they were up until "forty-nine hundred hours." So on this middle day of the week, I'm just pausing in the middle of this blog to be thankful for, well . . . middles.

Middles

First Love

This might just be a love affair. I've had many others, you know. They start off as innocent interests and quickly become obsessive. Some people call them hobbies or activities, and if kept in their proper place, that's what they remain. But I think it was in John and Stasi Eldredge's book Captivating that they were coined "little affairs of the heart." That phrase has stuck with me because it rings true.

I enjoy creating things. My hobby used to be ceramics. There is something satisfying about taking gray clay, glazing and firing it, and having something beautiful to use or show for your time and effort. I moved on to making cards. Then came jewelry-making -- sparkly beads and pretty stones. I've also done a short stint with floral arranging and had a little fling with cooking. Some "affairs" lasted longer than others and not all had the same intensity, but they had something in common at times: a tendency to replace my time with God.

Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with a hobby. There's nothing wrong with shopping, surfing the Net, eating, gabbing with friends, sewing, running . . . whatever the interest is. I'm thankful for a way to let the creative juices flow, or for times to just enjoy the life God has given me. But for me when the interest trumps the relationship, I have a problem. When my hobby becomes to me the most important thing, it's no longer a hobby. As a mom, I find it easy to turn to the things that show results, because so much of my work either never stays finished (The Laundry) or is intangible . . . tying heartstrings with my children. But it's these words from Revelation 2:4-5 that cause me to stop, drop and reconsider, "You have forsaken your first love. . . Repent and do the things you did at first."

The lyrics of an Amy Grant song say it this way:
Do you remember the time your heart was moved to tears?
Can you look back on the moment after all these years?
On the moment Love broke through, and Heaven seemed so near . . .

I remember, and when I stop remembering is when the innocence stops and the "little affairs of the heart" begin. How about you?

First Love

Realistic Recipes

This blog isn't meant to be all about cooking, but as a mom, it's a big part of my life. I feel like I'm constantly planning for, shopping for, cleaning up after, or fixing meals. My children are hungry pretty much all of the time, and yes, I do feed them. But they're like little Cookie Monsters, and they're getting bigger all of the time.

And as a mom, homeschooling or not, I bet some of you are like me. Time restricted. So I'm starting a blog with Realistic Recipes at Sugar Tails Recipe Box. Most of the recipes will be super-easy ones that I like to use fairly often. Occasionally, there might be something special that takes a little more time, but for the most part, I'm only including my go-to meals. The ones I "go-to" when I need an easy stand-by that doesn't leave me searching for exotic ingredients that I don't have on hand. I've also included a couple of my favorite food links, and hopefully, as I go along, I'll be able to add some pictures of some of the super-easy, yummy dishes. So here's the link. Enjoy!




www.sugartailsrecipebox.blogspot.com/

Realistic Recipes

Overcoming: My Battle with Bread

It all started with a bread machine. I had been thinking about wanting one for quite a few years, and my husband decided that it was time to stop being wishy-washy. Or maybe he just wanted homemade bread. But under the Christmas tree this past year was a box full of possibilities.

I'm not a gourmet by any means, but I need to explain that I love to cook and bake. Apple crumb pie and dumplings, cookies of all sorts and dark chocolate cake are just some desserts I bake regularly. I have tried all sorts of recipes for supper: butter chicken, chicken fettuccine Alfredo, roasted turkey and Salisbury steak are just the tip of the iceberg. I've canned my own home-grown green beans and made (and canned) my own salsa using tomatoes from my (ridiculously large) garden. Yet, in the twelve years that I have been married, I have never once attempted to make anything with yeast. Yeast scares me. There's something mysterious about it. This idea of kneading, punching, resting, turning, letting it rise until doubled (how long will that take and how do you know?) and then doing it all over again was intimidating. I had this picture of a Lucille Ball moment with yeast becoming so unmanageable that I would be shoved out of my kitchen by some dough ball gone amok. My hubby would come home at that moment, and with a Cuban accent would say, "You got some 'splainin to do." So a bread machine seemed the perfect solution. Throw some ingredients in a machine, let it decide for you and *Poof*--bread!

With five loaves of bread under my belt since December 25, I stumbled across a recipe for cinnamon rolls using dough . . . made with the bread machine! I had no idea! So last night was The Grand Experiment. I read and reread the recipe until I could just about do it by heart. It seemed easy enough. I checked again just to make sure there weren't any tricks that were lying in wait to make it a train wreck. I gathered the ingredients, carefully measured them into my bread machine, turned the thing on . . . and walked away.

A little while later the beeping let me know it was my turn. I turned the dough over onto a lightly floured surface and covered it to let it (you guessed it) rest. Side note -- if only I could come with some directions like that: *Warning -- you need to rest because soon life is growing to stretch, pull, shove and roll you over.* Ah well, come to find out that while I was mixing the cinnamon and sugar, the lump of dough wasn't really resting at all. It was conspiring. I began to roll the dough out into an oblong shape. It sprang back. I tried again. It refused to budge. A feeling of desperation overcame me, and I realized I had to make this stubborn lump of yeasty dough obey. I WOULD NOT FAIL. (Anyone ever felt that way with their kids?) My 10 year-old son was watching the process, so I kept a calm exterior and a smile plastered on my face. Finally, after much quiet struggling, the thing was in sort of a rectangle. I figured it was good enough for a first try. And the last part -- the sweet part-- was surprisingly easy: buttering and sugaring and rolling and cutting. I placed the rolls in the pan to the tune of, "Mom, you're amazing! You're such an awesome cook! Those look great!" Ah, the innocence of children. But I did feel just a teensy bit amazing.

I wish I could tell you the rolls are good, but I don't know yet. They've been sitting covered in my fridge for the night. I can hardly wait to try them out in an hour or so . . .




If you want to try them out check out this site http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Clone-of-a-Cinnabon/Detail.aspx

Overcoming: My Battle with Bread