Book Review: A little bit of faith

I recently registered with MomSelect, thanks to an excellent post I saw by Stephanie, which I can no longer locate. (oops! me? librarian? cite source?) I think I may have gotten to said post from 5 Minutes for Parenting, a new read which I am really enjoying. *hanging head in shame*

Anyhoo, I can point you to MomSelect, a company that connects moms and marketers. You don’t even have to be a blogger to register. Since I have begun exploring couponing, I realize how many opportunities there are out there for moms to try new products and offer feedback. MomSelect is one excellent way to explore even more of these opportunities.

After I registered, I was able to get some “virtual” SWAG from BlogHer to share with my friends and readers. I’ll be highlighting a few other things in future posts, but today’s post is a book review and giveaway of A Little Bit of Faith by Cindy Kenney, the first title of a new series called the “Precious Girls Club.”

Let me just begin by saying I am not a collector of Precious Moments. There was probably a tiny window when I was about 11 when I thought they were cute, but it passed. That being said, I really do like the illustrations in this book. They were done by the Precious Moments Creative Studio. To me, they look a lot more up to date than what I typically think of when I see Precious Moments figurines. They have the bigger eyes typical of Japanese anime illustrations and the look has been updated to something more along the lines of Polly Pocket or the “new” (2006) Holly Hobby.

Cindy Kenney has previously written for Veggie Tales. Her website describes A Little Bit of Faith like this:

The first book in a new series for girls 6 to 11 that celebrates the special gifts that make each girl precious in God’s sight. Girls will have an opportunity to learn ways that God made them special and how they can use their special abilities to make a positive difference in the world!

Girls can interact with the series and develop their own real “Precious Girl’s Club” by going to the website: www.PreciousGirlsClub.com where they can play games and discover how God made them precious.

The main character, Katie Bennett, moves to a new school and faces the daunting task of making new friends. One of my favorite things about the book is that Katie half-heartedly takes her mom’s suggestion for how to make friends and fails the first time out. (Hmm. Now wondering if I just like it b/c the mom was right! Mwahaha. Subtle marketing ploy?!) No one comes to Katie’s club, and she has to try again. I liked that things didn’t come easily for Katie, but she stuck it out. I’m sure many moms have coached a daughter through some difficult situation where they had to try more than once.

I will say that I willingly suspended disbelief on the whole “Katie-talks-to-a-guardian-angel-only-she-can-see” thing. I wasn’t sure if that part of the premise might be troubling to some. To me…meh…not a problem. I appreciated the opportunity to dialog with my daughter about such things instead of say, hmmm, why we do not dress like streetwalkers. I really found this to be a nice antidote to some of the unhealthy girl culture I was ruminating about over here.

And my daughter gave it a 5 stars, better than Junie B. better than Meghan Rose rating. I think I agree with her. BUT we’ll have to see how the series develops on that whole “better than Junie B.” thing, because Junie B. is a classic. We are not anti-Junie B. here. We do talk about how she makes some pretty silly choices and we enjoy laughing AT the Junie B.

I can’t say yet whether the Precious Girls Club will rise to Junie B.’s literary standards. But I think it might be trying to be something a little different. There is the online component mentioned above. We haven’t tried that yet because I think it’ll be another couple of weeks before you can log on, but we will definitely be checking it out.

Maybe I’ll have my daughter give you another review of Precious Girls Club online later. The book I’ll be giving away comes with a secret code to use at PreciousGirlsClub.com. If you’d like a chance to win a copy, just let me know in a comment below. I’ll draw a winner next Tuesday

Shhhhh…this is actually last Tuesday kicking my butt

Carrie at The Gremlin Wrangler asked for pictures of Monday madness. WHY do the dishes never end?

Dontcha hate it when the dishwasher’s already full but so is your sink?

Fair photos

I’ve loved peaking at everyone’s fair photos, so I thought I’d go ahead and share mine.

I’ve always been nostalgic about the fair. Since I have a summer birthday, the excitement of going to the local carnival with grandma and letting her buy me a heroic goldfish, who usually lived a short but well-loved life, seeing grandma’s excitement about “slippery pot pie,” and drinking in the thrills, the lights, the colors, the smells of the fair…It all speaks summer and love to me.

sad pony

I’ve seen lots of these tiny little tractor-cycles in your photos!

fresh calf

almost fearless

Not a fair photo, but I felt the need to document…the forty-ness. Happy Birthday to me.

Go bless a mama with some casserole-love

You can catch me blog-sitting at Fried Okra’s today. She’s snugglin’ up to these two delicious dishes.

haiku

It’s Haiku Buckaroo time again at My Mommy’s Place. Why don’t you submit your haiku? Deadline is this Friday. Here are mine:

Yellow bird sees me
singing at the end of day
perched on a high wire.

Head unpacks the day
four feet shuffle slowly
fingers intertwine.

Feet hit warm water
bright colored day dreams begin
fish nibble dead skin.

Sun shines on water
kids skip rocks across the lake
minnows swarm slowly.

Shaded woodland path
air grows cooler instantly
the day melts away.

Garlic basil cheese
linguine with olive oil
Last, toasted pine nuts.

Mid-life poetry crisis

After my heady dip into Mary Oliver’s Red Bird, I decided to go back through my own poetry collection. Now that I’m *cough*40*cough,* I thought it’d be a good time to reevaluate whether or not I really need to continue carting these books through life with me — and whether they really are worth the shelf space, which becomes more and more of a premium in this growing family.

Some things have not stood the test of time, and I will soon be carting them to my Half Price Bookstore. But SOME things are even more delicious at mid-life. Badmom, I don’t have enough Keats in this house to indulge fully; but I found a few things in anthologies, one of which describes his writing as “sensuous” and “intellectual.” (Well, THAT’s got Badmom written all over it!)

MY new best friend is Carl Sandburg. I’m not even sure where I picked up this 1960 copy of Harvest Poems. But how FUN to read all the Chicago poems now that we live in, um, CHICAGO! When we were in SC, we lived about an hour from Connemara, his goat farm in NC where he spent the last 20 years of his life. I’m not sure where I’m going with this except to say, I’ve always enjoyed learning about him and digging into his work. There are some treasures in “Harvest Poems.” Here’s one that hit me where I live in the dog days of summer. From p. 25, “Red and White”:

Nobody picks a red rose when the winter wind howls and the
white snow blows among the fences and storm doors.
Nobody watches the dreamy sculptures of snow when the sum-
mer roses blow red and soft in the garden yards and corners
O I have loved red roses and O I have loved white snow–
dreamy drifts winter and summer–roses and snow.

And from p. 74, “Primer Lesson,”:

Look out how you use proud words.
when you let proud words go, it is
not easy to call them back
They wear long boots, hard boots; they
walk off proud; they can’t hear you
calling–
Look out how you use proud words.

Think differently : introspection

I saw this meme over at Monica’s, and it seemed to fit perfectly with this post about introspection I’ve had brewing for awhile.

I think I was probably born introspective. I was due on July 4, but I wasn’t born until over 3 weeks later (that was back in the day when they let the little babies percolate in there for awhile). My decision-making style is, shall we say, deliberative. As the youngest of 4 girls, I continued to develop my introspective nature. There was always something going on in the house to watch, analyze, or ruminate upon.

As I grew older and these innate patterns of thinking burned deeper and deeper into my brain, they sometimes occasionally frequently became a problem. Especially after I had my first child, fear often consumed me. (What if she dies?) This post describes where I was and where I ended up at that stage of my life, albeit briefly.

I slowly began to unpack years of unconscious behavior. I began to recognize and confess worry and fear. I began to cede control of my daughter’s life to her maker. She was His child and He would never leave her or forsake her. I clung tenaciously to Roman’s 12:2 and 2 Cor. 10:5. I think I thought that if I just introspected properly, all would be well.

Ironically, after a couple of years of blog reading and a year of blog keeping, I’ve come to see that some things are not worth the time we devote to introspecting upon them. Some thoughts, I just need to lay at the foot of the cross and forget. Some thoughts are not the treasures I once thought they were as I turned them over and over and over and over again and again in my mind smoothing and polishing, smoothing and polishing them.

This summer, my small group Bible study is reading and discussing Joanna Weaver’s Having a Mary Spirit. Weaver articulates this realization perfectly on p. 119:

“…it isn’t enough to take thoughts captive. According to 2 Corinthians 10:5, I must also bring them into obedience to Christ. Which means that, after exposing the lies with truth, I need to promptly hand them over to Jesus.

This is especially important for me, because I tend to place my thoughts under the microscope of self-introspection and study them so intently that I become captivated by the very thoughts I’ve captured. I overanalyze and over-scrutinize to the point that the thoughts I once imprisoned imprison me.

Back away from the microscope, people. I still believe in an examined life. And I still love to think and analyze things. But I continually rely on God to show me the balance between healthy introspection and unhealthy thinking that is simply a waste of my time.

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer. ~Ps. 19:14

Sluuuuuuurp

Go see more pics from a family fun day at the Milwaukee Art Museum at my man’s blog. If you like art and live anywhere close to Milwaukee, you must visit this museum. It is fabulous.

Salad days

Hey everybody! Look how our garden grows.

This corn’s a redhead!

Those *&%^ Japanese beetles keep eating my basil, but I WILL have pesto.

Lettuce! I’ve already harvested about half of what was there. We could never grow lettuce in South Carolina, so this is a special treat for us. I confess I always feel a little naughty pulling greens out of the yard and then bringing them inside to eat. I half-expect to hear my mom’s voice saying, “You can’t eat that! You just pulled it out of the dirt!”

But isn’t it pretty? And delicious.

Frugal Friday Recipe: Tuna casserole aka “Ring of Plenty” aka “Mermaid Casserole”

Gayle of Grace4Gayle and Grocery Cart Challenge is hosting a recipe swap. This week’s edition is all about cheap dinner recipes.

If you haven’t been over, you should go check out her blog. She is a real frugal self-starter. I love all her creative “recipes” for things we don’t necessarily need to buy. She really challenges me to think outside my frugal box.

This is one of my mom’s very few “signature” recipes. We had it all the time when I was a child, and I HATED it — mostly because I was convinced I hated tuna fish. And my mom insisted on putting raw onions in this recipe, which crunched when I bit into them and squirted tangy onion juice into the nether regions of my mouth. (But I’m not high maintenance or a whiner…I know I’m really sellin’ it.)

The good news is, now I love this recipe. It makes me so nostalgic for my childhood. This has always been “the one” recipe I turn to when we have nothing else. I keep a can of tuna on hand just for such an occasion. And I have made a very few minor OCD modifications to the recipe, which of course make ALL the difference. I will admit, my children are not particularly fond of this casserole, which is why I dubbed it “Mermaid Casserole” in an effort to make it more appealing. Because clearly, this is what mermaids eat. I’m sure my kids will look back with fondness on this recipe, when they are old like me and force feeding it to their kids.

1 c. hot milk
2 T butter, melted
1 c. shredded cheese
1 c. bread crumbs
1 egg
1 T onion, finely chopped
1 tsp salt
dash pepper
1 can tuna
4 oz cooked noodles

This is a mix and bake kind of casserole. It bakes at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. I usually either saute the onion or throw it in a pan with the milk and butter to soften and soak up their flavor. I also add the salt and pepper to the milk and melted butter so things are distributed more evenly throughout the casserole. My mom used to leave big hunks of tuna here and there, so I am also pretty anal about mixing everything evenly throughout. At our house, this was always served with tiny peas, so I just go ahead and mix them into the casserole now. And my husband has added his signature touch of baby biscuits baked on top. This dish is excellent served with potato chips, which also increases the kid friendly factor exponentially. I like to load each bite on top of a chip…salty heaven.

Enjoy, thrifty friends.