Books I read in 2012

cov	title	author	avg rating	rating	shelves	date read	date added
	Walk Two Moons	Creech, Sharon	3.91		read [edit]	Dec 20, 2012 [edit]	Dec 21, 2012
	Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship	Caldwell, Gail	3.84		read [edit]	Dec 16, 2012 [edit]	Dec 21, 2012
	Digging to America	Tyler, Anne	3.46		read [edit]	Dec 12, 2012 [edit]	Dec 21, 2012
	My Life Next Door	Fitzpatrick, Huntley *	4.12		read [edit]	Sep 2012 [edit]	Sep 25, 2012
	The Scorpio Races	Stiefvater, Maggie *	4.08		read [edit]	Sep 2012 [edit]	Sep 25, 2012
	Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness	Jurek, Scott	3.91		read [edit]	Aug 2012 [edit]	Jul 14, 2012
	The Fault in Our Stars	Green, John	4.55		read [edit]	Jul 16, 2012 [edit]	Mar 29, 2012
	Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen	McDougall, Christopher	4.31		read [edit]	Jul 12, 2012 [edit]	Jul 14, 2012
	The Night Circus	Morgenstern, Erin	3.99		read [edit]	Jul 08, 2012 [edit]	Jul 07, 2012
	An Abundance of Katherines	Green, John	3.90		read [edit]	Jun 17, 2012 [edit]	Jun 18, 2012
	Heaven Is Here: An Incredible Story of Hope, Triumph, and Everyday Joy	Nielson, Stephanie	4.23		read [edit]	Jun 2012 [edit]	Jul 23, 2012
	Pathfinder (Pathfinder, #1)	Card, Orson Scott	3.98		read [edit]	May 16, 2012 [edit]	May 16, 2012
	When You Reach Me	Stead, Rebecca	4.07		read [edit]	Apr 28, 2012 [edit]	Apr 28, 2012
	Belong to Me	Santos, Marisa de los *	3.82		read [edit]	Apr 22, 2012 [edit]	Apr 22, 2012
	Unforgettable	Ellsworth, Loretta *	3.68		read [edit]	Apr 15, 2012 [edit]	Apr 19, 2012
	Peeled	Bauer, Joan	3.57		read [edit]	Apr 02, 2012 [edit]	Apr 03, 2012
	Sundays at Tiffany's	Patterson, James *	3.62		read [edit]	Apr 2012 [edit]	Apr 03, 2012
	Crossed (Matched, #2)	Condie, Ally	3.56		read [edit]	Mar 24, 2012 [edit]	Feb 18, 2012
	Rachel & Leah	Card, Orson Scott	3.83		read [edit]	Mar 07, 2012 [edit]	Mar 14, 2012
	Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry	Skenazy, Lenore	3.93		read [edit]	Feb 25, 2012 [edit]	Jan 03, 2012
	Peace Like a River	Enger, Leif	3.93		read [edit]	Feb 22, 2012 [edit]	Feb 27, 2012
	Ender's Shadow (Shadow, #1)	Card, Orson Scott	4.23		read [edit]	Feb 10, 2012 [edit]	Feb 27, 2012
	The King of Attolia (The Queen's Thief, #3)	Turner, Megan Whalen	4.40		read [edit]	Feb 07, 2012 [edit]	Jan 13, 2012
	To Kill a Mockingbird	Lee, Harper	4.21		read [edit]	Feb 04, 2012 [edit]	Jan 03, 2012
	Out of My Mind	Draper, Sharon M.	4.34		read [edit]	Jan 31, 2012 [edit]	Jan 03, 2012
	Major Pettigrew's Last Stand	Simonson, Helen *	3.83		read [edit]	Jan 28, 2012 [edit]	Feb 01, 2012
	Red Glove (Curse Workers, #2)	Black, Holly *	4.08		read [edit]	Jan 28, 2012 [edit]	Jan 30, 2012
	Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide	Kristof, Nicholas D.	4.35		read [edit]	Jan 24, 2012 [edit]	Feb 01, 2012
	Stuart Little	White, E.B.	3.80		read [edit]	Jan 15, 2012 [edit]	Jan 16, 2012
	Room	Donoghue, Emma *	3.94		read [edit]	Jan 13, 2012 [edit]	Jan 03, 2012
	The Queen of Attolia (The Queen's Thief, #2)	Turner, Megan Whalen	4.25		read [edit]	Jan 08, 2012 [edit]	Jan 13, 2012
	Little Blog on the Prairie	Bell, Cathleen Davitt	3.63		read [edit]	Jan 07, 2012 [edit]	Jan 07, 012

 

Looking back at this list, I know there were probably a few I missed (in fact, I see that I forgot “Xenocide by Orson Scott Card, which was a five star book), but things definitely slowed down in October and November, when I was always editing photos.  I am happy with my five star ratings – I still look back those books as the ones that impressed me the most and stuck with me most.  My most surprising five star book of the year was “The Scorpio Races.”  I don’t know if I could even explain why I hold it in such high regard, but the author, Maggie Stiefvater created such a strong mood and setting with her writing.

For more in depth reviews of some of these books, here is a blog post I wrote last summer for my cousin Olivia’s blog, Gnome Sweet Gnome.

So did you read any of these books?  What are some “five star” books that I HAVE to read in 2013? Please share!

It’s a new year

We had a New Year’s Eve party at my house last night.  My sister was here with her family from Missouri (staying with my parents), and my brother Levi came down from the mountains with six of his kids on Sunday and stayed with us.  Yesterday my nieces Lettie and Ruby helped me get ready for the party.  We filled up seven balloons with slips of paper stuffed inside, and wrote “6:00,” “7:00,”  “8:00”…all the way til “12:00” on each balloon. Each slip of paper had an activity written on it for that hour, and each balloon was popped at the appointed time.

6:00 – Glow-in-the-dark hide-and-seek (played upstairs with glow necklaces for everyone).  This was a huge hit and they played for almost the whole hour.

7:00 – puzzles from Dollar Tree – again, the kids did this for almost an hour

8:00 – a fire outside.  Once it was lit, most of the men were out there for the rest of the night

9:00 – Just Dance

10:00 – Board games .  I got to play a rousing game of Apples to Apples Junior with a very emotional/sleepy Gabe.

11:00 a slideshow I had quickly prepared that day with a picture from the last year of everyone present (I think I missed Roy though, and myself)

12:00 We watched the ball drop and then all of the kids fell apart at the seams by 12:30

It was such a fun night, with pizza provided by my Nana, and sooo much other junk food that we were still munching away all day today.  I think only three out of the 17 kids fell asleep early and for the most part they were so busy having fun all night long with their cousins.

I have some firm resolutions this year – very specific goals about very basic gospel principles I need to just buckle down and DO.  After a month of no blogging and feeling a nudge to return to blogging with more earnestness for a long while, I am ready to get serious about that as well.  My goal is to blog at least four times a week.  I find it hard to blog when I am need to be editing photos, but I don’t think I will have many  photos to edit in the month of January, so maybe I can get into a better habit while things are dead.

So friends and family, a totally unoriginal question for you – Have you made New Year’s resolutions?  Do you like the New Year or is it depressing for you?

Christmas Day 2012

  Around 5:45 am, I heard the boys laughing and talking in their bedroom.  Our Christmas morning rule is that you can’t come into our room until 6 am, but of course that doesn’t keep them from waking up at 4:45 or so and anxiously watching the clock and listening for their brothers to wake up too.  At about 5:58 they ventured into our room.  Carina had been nursing back to sleep, but as soon as they came in, she was ready to party.  Chad checked to “make sure Santa came” and then the kids lined up, youngest to oldest and then galloped downstairs. 

After presents from Santa, we opened the rest of the gifts and it was a good, happy morning.  All the kids were pleased with their gifts for the time being – the jealousy and Christmas let-down came later.  We were all beat by lunchtime, and everyone took a nap. 

That evening we went to my parents house for dinner with all the Charlotte Jeppsons.  We had the cousin nativity with a little program organized by Bobby and Sabina, and a piñata.  As always, it was a delicious and fun evening, and as always, I felt very blessed to be able to spend Christmas with so much of my family.

                                          

Christmas Eve 2012

We changed our Christmas Eve traditions this year.  In the past, we have always gotten pizza.  Since we have started eating vegan most of the time at home, we have noticed that every time we eat pizza (which is still at least once a month), we just don’t feel too great afterward.  We always wanted to do something as a family to focus more on Christ.  So we decided to have a bread feast and talk about how the bread represents Christ and his atonement for us.  Chad picked up three loaves of yummy bread at Panera Bread yesterday morning right around the corner from his office.  We had a couple of soups (from a mix, for maximum Mom-ease), and Chad talked about Christ in the garden of Gethsemane.  Then I talked about Christ’s love for us, we sang Our Savior’s Love, and had a nice candlelit dinner. 

After dinner we moved onto another new tradition. We have always opened up one present on Christmas Eve, but this year we made them “Secret Santa” presents.  We all drew a name of someone in our immediate family at the beginning of the month, and we became that person’s Secret Santa.  It was so much fun for Chad and me to see the kids thinking up the perfect gifts for their person.  Yesterday I had everyone fill out a survey about their person and we took turns reading the answers and tried to guess who the person was before they got to open their gift.  The survey had a lot of questions aimed at saying nice things about each other (I am a sneaky mommy), and there were smiles all around as each one was read.  Here is Colin reading his about Chad – he said so many nice things about what a fun dad and good provider Chad is.  His gift to Chad was a key chain he made with the names of everyone in the family, and some truffles.  I am SO happy with this new tradition – it was the best part of Christmas for me.  Seeing Gabe and Ollie hug sweetly after Gabe’s kind words and thoughtful presents to Ollie, and seeing Ollie think about his little sister when he chose her name…..I get a little teary when I think of it. 

After the presents we drove around to look at lights and to deliver my parents’ presents.  When we got home we opened up new pajamas and took the requisite pictures.  Notice the pink necklace Carina has on?  Oliver made that for her and she loves it.

Then it was the nativity story and bedtime!! All the kids were asleep by 8:30.