High Five for Friday!

Hooray for Friday!  This week has been a crazy one, so I am super happy that it's just about the weekend, especially since we have an exciting week ahead.  But, before we get there, here are five ways I feel blessed this week:

1.  The reason I have been MIA in the blogosphere this week:  we moved.  Moving is never fun.  Throw in a toddler, and you get extra-crazy.

2.  Anyone remember this show?  Well, they have the whole series on DVD.  Turns out our little one loves it...which gives us an excuse to relive our childhood Saturday mornings.

3.  Major high five for my brother who was promoted to Sargeant yesterday!  I'm a super proud big sis!

4.  This was at the bottom of the page in my "Parents" magazine (Judy on Duty section).  It made me really happy to see someone in a non-allergy related publication to say this.  As an allergy mom, I can understand that food-related regulations can be annoying to non-allergic families.  But...I cannot understand why so many people have to communicate their annoyance with eye-rolling, nastiness, and without compassion.  We just want to keep our kids alive.  Thanks to "Parents" for pointing this out!

5.  You never know what you'll come across while moving and re-organizing.  Here, we have a poem from my obviously melodramatic 9 year old self that my mom must have held onto as a laugh.  I don't remember why on earth I was so upset about our baseball stadium closing (in favor of a brand new one).  I do find two things about this extra-funny.  One: I wasn't really an exceptionally big baseball fan and rarely went to baseball games.  We watched them on tv...not in the stadium.  Two:  My teacher's comment, "The closing of this stadium will cause you much pain, won't it?"

Linking up with Lauren at From My Grey Desk!

What were the highlights of your week?

High Five for Friday!

After an extremely busy week, I am extra glad that it's finally Friday!

Linking up with Lauren at From My Grey Desk to share my highlights of the week:

There's a little fish pond outside of a restaurant right by our church.  My little one gets super excited to see the fish as soon as church is over.  It also gets him to sit quietly for the service...no small feat for a 2 year old!

Family trip to the zoo!

Last Saturday my hubby and I celebrated our fifth anniversary.  

Badger lip balm...It has taken me months and months to find a lip balm or chapstick that doesn't have something that my son is allergic to in it.  Finally one that is safe for me to wear!

Our DIY light box.  This is an awesome idea I saw on a blog that I read religiously.  It is amazing how much more fun our light box makes our daily activities.  (Also amazing is how much longer it holds a toddler's attention!)  I'll be doing a post on this next week.

"The Weird Sisters"

Review-- “The Weird Sisters” by Eleanor Brown

 

I love books.  I love books about books and I love books with characters that love books.  And the family at the center of “The Weird Sisters,” well, they love books, too.  While the Dad is a Shakespearean professor (hence his daughters all being named after characters in the Bard’s plays) and quotes Shakespeare for his part in just about any conversation, no one in the family is a book snob.  They read just about any book, without discrimination, mainly because it happens to be closest to them.  With the exception of the works of Shakespeare, we aren’t informed of a single title that any of the characters reads throughout the novel, and it seems to be because it doesn’t matter to them what they are reading, so long as they are reading something.

The original “weird sisters” hail from Macbeth, and here, at the center of the novel, we have our own “weird sisters,” who will explain to you, early on in the book, that “weird” to Shakespeare doesn’t mean anything close to what “weird” means to us.  For the first time since reaching independence and taking their own paths, the three sisters are all home together.  They’d tell anyone who asked that it was because their Mom has breast cancer, but the truth is that they each have their own reason for returning and staying.  We have Rose, locked into her sense of responsibility as the eldest daughter, refusing to leave out of the certainty that the family would fall apart without her.  But the truth is, something else is keeping here there.  And then there is Cordy, who clearly wants to be by her mother’s side although there is no denying that something else really forced her into giving up her nomadic lifestyle.  And finally, Bean, who for the first time not only can but must leave her carefully created life in New York.  Caring and dealing with their mother’s illness serves as a backdrop as the women each struggle to overcome the Shakespearean idea of what makes them “wyrd,” and instead realize that people can, in fact, change, and make a life for themselves rather than letting it happen to them.   

An interesting aspect to the novel is that it has a first person plural point of view, meaning it is actually narrated by all three sisters as one voice.  And while we learn, over the course of the novel, each individual character’s personal truth, we get the impression of all three sisters as one.  Interesting, because isn’t it true that sometimes our family see things in us; our true motivations, fears, and feelings, that we try to keep neatly wrapped and hidden away?  Your siblings will tell you the bottom line, point blank, which is that the collective voice of the sisters does for the readers in each circumstance.

Overall, the story is an interesting exploration of the complicated relationships of sisters and the family as a whole.  Truthfully, it didn’t suck me in and while I didn’t mind the characters, at times I had a hard time finding a reason to really be rooting for them.  I wanted it to work out; I just didn’t care all that much, or maybe I knew that, predictably, it would.  

30 with 30

It's Tuesday again, and I just barely managed to get my 3 new outfits in before getting the little guy down for his nap!

Here we go...

Dress:  Mossimo/Target

Sandals:  Target

Cardigan:  Forever 21

Belt:  H&M

Shoes:  Nine West

Top:  The Loft

Skirt:  H&M

Shoes:  Nine West

It's not to late to join in on the challenge!

30 with 30: Week 4

The 30 with 30 challenge is in it's fourth week, although it's only Week 2 for me since I got a late start!

I love that this challenge is already pushing me to think of new ways to wear things I already have.  What it is NOT doing for me is making me think "I have so many clothes, I don't need to shop ever again."  However...it is at least making my desire to shop much more focused.  Instead of just shopping for a cute top and then figuring out something to wear it with, I'm more likely to look for something like a great belt that would give me several more outfit combinations.  Anyway, here are this weeks 3 looks...

Necklace:  Ebay

Cardigan/Skirt:  American Eagle
Sandals:  Steve Madden

Necklace:  Anthropologie

Top/Skirt:  American Eagle

Sandals:  Steve Madden

Necklace:  Ebay

Cardigan:  American Eagle

Jeans:  RueLaLa.com

Want to give the 30 with 30 challenge a try?  Check it out here!  

Review: "The Language of Flowers" by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Crossing the first title off of my "Summer Reading" list!  Definitely a good one.  Up next:  The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown.

The Language of Flowers centers around Victoria, a just emancipated eighteen year old that has been hardened by a lifetime of being passed around through the foster care system.  From the time of her abandonment, Victoria has had little experience with security, familial love and positive relationships.  In a sense, Victoria has almost always been “on her own” and this is just the first time she has no one directing her next movement.  She doesn’t have a family, a plan, hopes or dreams, but she does have her connection to flowers.  Homeless, she spends her days creating a garden in an untended section of a park until, driven by hunger and necessity, she uses her talent to secure a job with a local florist.  Here, Victoria’s boundaries are tested.  She is uncomfortable with opening up, gets ill at the slightest touch, and has no desire to be attached to anyone or anything permanent.  Anything that is, aside from her flowers.  And suddenly, in the form of a young man at a flower market, it all begins to change.  She is forced to consider a future, but also to face the secrets of her past.

The story opens on the day of Victoria’s emancipation, and alternates between momentous moments of her childhood and her current struggles to overcome her past, forgive herself, and learn to love.  Diffenbaugh’s history as a foster parent lends great authenticity to the characters and their complicated relationships.  I found her writing to be very real, and at times raw.  She doesn’t hold back on showing the good and the bad of her characters in order to win the reader’s approval of them.  This is especially true of Victoria.  You won’t always like her…in fact there were a few times when I was reading that I wanted to look away.  But, if you’re like me, you will always root for her.  I think it’s because underneath it all, we can sense that she’s doing her best with what she has…it’s just that what she has isn’t much. 

And then there are the flowers.  Flowers are to this book what New York is to Sex and the City.  The story would be impossible to tell without them.  Diffenbaugh is well versed in the use of flowers to communicate in Victorian times, which I found fascination.  From the beginning the flowers are critical in understanding who Victoria is.  Where Victoria doesn’t “get” people…or herself for that matter, she “gets” flowers.  They become her key to learning to communicate honestly, to understanding others, and to making new beginnings.

One additional note:  Vanessa Diffenbaugh co-founded the Camellia Network to support children “aging out” of the foster care system.  Check out her website…the statistics are staggering.  www.camellianetwork.org 

Have you read The Language of Flowers?  What did you think? 

High Five for Friday

Happy Friday!

5 Highlights from my week:

1.  My silly toddler:  "Mommy!  Look at me!"  I can dump my food on the floor and balance the bowls on my feet!  

2.  An early high five for lunch with my bestie today!

3.  I woke up on Thursday and my extremely 1980's alarm clock told me it was 8:30.  Which meant for the first time in a week we got more than 4-5 hrs of sleep!

4.  My J.Crew-ish necklace came from ebay, rounding out my 30 items for the 30 with 30 challenge!

5.  Annie's Artisan Treats Kettle Corn.  I found this at Target.  So.  Delicious.