Lord, That I May See

We are leaving tomorrow morning for a two week vacation at the beach! My entire family, on my mother's side, goes every year at this same time. My grandparents "give" us all the vacation as a Christmas present. Its always like a mini-family reunion and lots of fun. They even try to rope a couple of priests into coming down for a bit to hang out and say daily mass for us. :) The priest who prepared my husband and I for our marriage is coming, as is my family's parish priest. Daddy will be driving me and the girls down and then coming back home to work another week. Then, the 2nd week he will join us again. We are, needless to say, very excited! Turtle has been asking every hour for the past 10 days when we are leaving and who's going to be there and how long the drive is and what we are bringing, etc., etc. So, I'll be back in 2 weeks! These pictures are from our camping trip a month ago. P.S. There's a little bit of news on my sidebar! :)

Rosebud has started going to Turtle to ask for a story. I love to see them cuddled together, Turtle "reading" and Rosebud listening intently. Here they are reading Kitten's First Full Moon, by Kevin Henkes

My successes are so small this week that it seems silly to even write them up, but I guess that is the point of this -- to recognize successes no matter how small! 1. I've gone outside with the girls for long stretches of time almost every day this week. I haven't walked with them or taken them to the park (like Turtle's been asking) or anything, but we have spent time outside. And that's good. ****************************** 2. I've remembered to water our potted flowers on the porch. I always, always end up with any potted plants in my care dying of thirst and neglect. So far, so good. Oh, and Rosebud and Turtle have been mauling the poor things and I haven't gotten too annoyed with the maulers . . . yet. :) **************************** 3. I think this is my biggest success: I've taken a 30 min walk two mornings this week. I've been working on getting up at 6:30 and going out every other morning before the girls and my husband wake up. It's so good ...

A friend of mine was asking me recently about what books I chose for my girls when at the library. The truth is, I am growing to hate going to library with the girls. I spend the whole time sifting fruitlessly through shelves and shelves of absolute drivel and idiocy while all my girls want to do is whine to play computer games on the rows of low computers in the children's section. Then I go home annoyed at my inability to get decent literature for my children and the library's inability to get the whole "Library = BOOKS" thing and thus finds the need to draw children AWAY from the books to play Elmo games on a computer. No wonder we have a education crisis in this country. Sorry. Rant over. :) Anyway, I thought I would post a list of good --and reality-based of course, since I'm "Montessori" and we don't read fantasy yet ( see this post for details ) -- children's books that I have found over the last two or so years. This first post has books ...