What's In My Teapot?

Welcome to the very first Book of the Month review!  I should say here that this is set up more as a discussion than a review and that my questions and answers are not going to make a lot of sense to you unless you have read the book! However, you may get a sense as to whether or not you would be interested in the book by reading over the discussion! Better yet, maybe your interest will even be piqued enough to read the book and enter into the discussion yourself, which would suit my purposes pretty well, come to think of it!!! For anyone who wishes to join the discussion, just leave your remarks/answers to the questions found in this post in the comment section below. I have been looking forward to talking about January's book,  The Light Between Oceans ,  and hearing what others who have joined me in reading this book have to say about it! Before we begin, however, we must set the perfect ambience for a book discussion... Picture coming in out of the cold to a

I have decided that in order to facilitate discussion, and perhaps help myself and others better analyze our book of the month, I will post a list of questions each month prior to the book review. In the future, I would like to post the discussion questions several days before my actual review (which will be the fourth Tuesday of every month), but as you can see, that didn't happen this time around! Part of the reason for this is that I am still trying to figure everything out. The other part may have something to do with the fact that I am confirmed procrastinator, but we'll leave more on that for another time!!!  Now, on with the questions for The Light Between Oceans: 1. Which of the two main characters do you identify most with throughout the story: Tom or Isabel?  2. Isabel justified keeping Lucy because of her own losses. Can you sympathize with that logic? 3. Who do you think had the "right" to Lucy: her birth mother or Isabel?  4. Do yo

Today was an exceptionally ordinary day, and the fact that I can make that statement causes me to be extremely grateful, for it means that we are all well and that there is no major holiday on the horizon (two things to be thankful for in January!) The only problem is that ordinary does not always beget creative writing, which could explain why things have been pretty quiet around here! I was excited when I announced in this post  that the third Tuesday of each month would be a random review, but today I felt a bit at loose ends with it all. I taught school, folded laundry, got the ironing done, pulled frozen spaghetti sauce out of the freezer and popped it into my slow-cooker for supper, washed a high chair tray three times, read stories to the children (repeating the same book several times), and worked at expanding Elasa's wardrobe by cutting out two dresses. Where, in all of that, lay inspiration for a fascinating review? After supper, knowing that the time had com

Got boys? Then this is the book review for you, especially if the boys in your life happen to be in the same age range as mine, which would be ages 2 and 4, and especially if they like trucks!!! I think I know more about trucks than I ever did before in my life. Not that I could fix them or tell you anything about what's under the hood, oh, no, but identify them by sight while passing  a construction site or barreling down the interstate? Yes, that's what I am talking about! If you would like to explore some of the differences between boys and girls, just take a peek into our library bag! Elasa and Gavin both enjoy many of the same books, like  Arthur , Poppleton , and Henry and Mudge , but for personal favorites Elasa will have The American Girls , Pinkalicious (The Princess of Pink, if you please!), Angelina , and other non-motor-vehicle-related selections, and Gavin will have a pile of truck books...every. single. time!!! Out of self-defense, perhaps, against getting

It's a brand new year and somehow that never fails to inspire me to brand new ambitions! And mind you, ambitions are quite a different thing than resolutions!!! In the blogging and book review department, my ambitions have taken on the form of a formal (albeit unfinished) book list and some new ideas for how my book reviews are going to work out in 2015. Here's the plan: I am compiling a list of books- twelve to be exact- and I am hoping to introduce the title of a new one on the first Tuesday of the month. Then, on the fourth Tuesday I will review the Book of the Month. What about the weeks in between? Well, on the second Tuesday I will plan to review a children's book and on the third Tuesday I will do a random review on something that interests me, be that a recipe, a book of poetry, a game, something relevant to homeschooling or homemaking, or a place we have visited. And the fifth Tuesdays, you ask? Well...there is the possibility of something special for my