It's Monday. Happy 4th of July!

Good morning and Happy 4th to all of my fellow Americans! I hope there is delicious food on the grill, a cold drink, and a lazy day in your plans.

We are taking it pretty easy today. Although with two kids, that is no promise that the day will be quiet or uneventful. After the big moments of last week, this one was focused on starting to find a sort of summer rhythm. We are spending a ton of time outside, which is made more wonderful by our new hammock acquisition. The kids and I also went to the library this week to sign up for the summer reading program. I love that our library allows each kid to pick a book to take home with them each week.

         
      

Now to the books! I read More Than This and The Silkworm this past week. More Than This went somewhere truly unexpected, which I love in a story. As I was reading The Silkworm (which is the second in a series), I decided to go online and see if Galbraith had plans to write a fourth book. Turns out, she has nine books total in the works!

Now I am about halfway through June, which I am enjoying but not as much as her earlier book Bittersweet. Next up for me is Traveling Mercies by the amazing Anne Lamott.

What are you reading this week?

What I Learned From Dinner: A Love Story

Recently, I read Dinner: A Love Story by Jenny Rosenstarch.  It had been lauded by some fellow bloggers and I snatched it up when I saw it at our local library. The book itself is a really lovely combination of memoir, cookbook, and meditation on what it means to be a family with a hectic life. Rosenstarch is judgment free and she chronicles her journey from a single woman with a busy career who ate a lot of takeout to a wife and mom of two who cooks dinner for her family every evening. I loved reading along as she tried out beloved family recipes, figured out how to cook on nights when she and her husband both got home late, and dealt with having picky toddler eaters.

While I loved reading the story, the recipes didn't do too much for me. At first this made me frustrated, but then I realized what it meant. Many of the recipes in the book are on the simpler side, like egg dishes or four ways to customize a homemade pizza dough recipe. I finally figured out that the recipes didn't grab me because I had grown as a cook.

I honestly had to push myself to write those words. I'm a cook. I'm someone who cooks (and bakes) for our family most nights. I bring homemade food to parties and events. I make cookies and breads that I made from scratch to people who are sick or going through tough times. But somehow I still have trouble with the concept. I never grew up as one of those kids who helps out in the kitchen. Husband and I got married when I was 20 and D was born not long after that. I cooked because someone had to and my schedule was more forgiving than my husband's.

That's not to say that there haven't been bumps along the way. I will forever laugh at the time when I didn't understand what a clove of garlic was and added an entire bulb to our salad. My lovely husband was doing his best to eat through the pain when I took my first bite, spat it out, and yelled "Why are you eating that?!?"

Now I am comfortable making (or at least trying) almost anything. I tend to shy away from recipes that call for obscure ingredients that I will never use again, but anything else is fair game. I bake homemade bread every week or two and I've made seafood a few times. I've made gnocchi from scratch.

                     

I've made pies with a homemade crust. I have a go-to macaroni and cheese recipe and sometimes I put that delicious cheesy pasta inside of portabella mushroom caps, because I can. 

So I want to thank Jenny Rosenstarch and Dinner: A Love Story for making me realize that I can cook. I might even be a good cook. Just don't look at my disaster of a kitchen after dinner, ok?

Review: Raising Grateful Kids in an Entitled World

We've all been there, fellow parents. We have experienced that moment when we bent over backwards, trying to do the things our kids wanted to do on that particular day. We have let our own to-do lists and priorities fall by the wayside to go to the pool or the movies or cook macaroni and cheese yet again. And then? They complain. Then they ask for even more. And the parental blood starts to boil just a bit (or a lot). How do we teach our kids to be thankful in a world that teaches them to constantly be seeking bigger, better, and more?

Meet Kristen Welch. She is a mother of three children. She and her husband also founded Mercy House, a nonprofit that helps impoverished pregnant women living in Kenya. The disparity between the desperate needs of women she worked with and the unending wants of her own children led her to write this book. She opens the book by recounting the time when she and her husband took back a pair of very expensive boots they had purchased for their ungrateful child (they live in Texas, by the way). They gave that child a choice to either work a difficult and time-consuming task to earn them back or they would be returned. American culture seems to suggest that our children deserve everything that they desire with no need to earn it. We as their parents should be buying them the latest everything and dedicating every moment of our time to drive them to all of their activities. But in Raising Grateful Kids in an Entitled World, Welch suggests a different path.

This is the moment where I should mention that Kristen and her family are Christians and a good amount of what she writes is through the lens of her faith. However, I think that the suggestions that she makes are applicable to families of any religious background. She writes about our impulse to give into our children's desires because it makes our life easier, or we want our children to be successful or included. She challenges readers (and herself) to worry less about making our children happy and more about preparing them for life and its inevitable disappointments. When we center our home lives around our children all the time, we do a disservice to our marriages, our families, and our children's perceptions of themselves and the world around them.

This book is easy to read and there are steps that you can take yourself and with your children at the end of each chapter. In the introduction, Kristen writes that she is not a professional. She still has days herself where she is ungrateful and she is still working with her children each day. But she is on the road to cultivating a family that recognizes the gifts that they have instead of focusing on the desires that are still unfulfilled.


Raising Grateful Kids in an Entitled World:
How One Family Learned That Saying No Can Lead to Life's Biggest Yes
By Kristen Welch
Tynedale Momentum January 2016
272 pages
Read via Netgalley

It's Monday and school's out for the summer!

Hey there, friends! Happy last week of June!

It's been a whirlwind of a week here in the literary house. D has his last day of school on Tuesday. We celebrated appropriately by going to IHOP for breakfast on Wednesday and setting up our little pool in the backyard. Then on Thursday night, we had an end of the school year movie night with How to Train Your Dragon 2. 

This weekend, we celebrated my grandmother's 90th birthday with a big open house at our church. I think we had about a hundred people stop by during the afternoon and there was cake, cookies, and ice cream for everyone! My sister flew in from California for the weekend and my cousin and her husband stayed with us, so we tried to spend lots of good family time together too.

Reading-wise, I finished The Fifth Avenue Artists Society. Then I picked up (and sadly put aside) City of Secrets by Stewart O'Nan. But I got back into reading with the short story collection Summer Days and Summer Nights, which is perfect when reading time is limited!

              

Next up is More Than This, which has been living on my bookshelves for longer than I care to admit and The Silkworm, book #2 in the Cormoran Strike mystery series.

                 

What are you reading this week?

Literary Life: Sequels and Series

Two weeks ago, I read The Rose and the Dagger which is the sequel to The Wrath and the Dawn. I enjoyed the sequel as much as the first book. The characters were compelling, the writing moved at a wonderfully breakneck speed, and I was captivated by the story. But it was a rough re-entry. The six months between reading the first book and the second one made lots of details blurry and it took me a few chapters to remember what had happened before and get back in the rhythm of Renee Ahdieh's writing.

So maybe I've learned my lesson. I read The Cuckoo's Calling earlier this month. Then I went to the library and picked up the next one. This way, I will remember everything from the first book that impacts the second. One of my favorite reading memories is when I sped through several Flavia de Luce books all in a row. Some of my most frustrating moments have been while reading books in series when the previous book was published (and read) many years before.

So tell me, bookish friends. How do you deal with sequels and series? Do you read them all in one glorious spree? Do you re-read earlier books before a new release? Or do you just jump in and hope that you remember enough of the previous stories?

Mini-Reviews: Sunday's on the Phone to Monday and Country of Red Azaleas

When Mathilde and Claudio meet at a party, they discover that even two fiercely independent people can be strengthened by family. They marry and Mathilde continues to pursue her dreams of acting, while Claudio runs a record store. They soon have three children: brilliant Natasha, Lucy, whose heart condition could turn into tragedy at any moment, and Carly, who is adopted from China. In addition to the usual joys and trials of raising children, the couple is also responsible for Claudio's sister Jane who is unknown to her nieces because of her violent struggles with mental illness. In short vignettes from differing points of view, we are invited into the inner depths of the Simone family to see just what makes their hearts beat.

It would be simplistic to say that Sunday's on the Phone to Monday is a book about sisters. It is that, but it is also a book about husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, parents and children. Reilly does a masterful job of capturing what it is like to be a young parent as well as the ways that siblings fight with and protect each other. This book is both quirky and heartfelt; sometimes those two things work wonderfully and sometimes it becomes just a bit too much. It would be a great pick for the reader who loves to read about the tragedies and triumphs of family.

Sunday's on the Phone to Monday
By Christine Reilly
Touchstone April 2016
323 pages
Read via Netgalley

Lara and Marija are the best of friends, no matter what. But when their countries of Serbia and Bosnia begin a bitter war, the two women are torn apart. Lara goes to America with a new husband and Marija is determined to report on the atrocities of war from Sarajevo. The friends are able to keep in touch for a while but when Lara loses contact with Marija, she is determined to go back home and find her.

Country of Red Azaleas has been compared to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan books and I can understand the comparison. Lara and Marija are the kind of friends who will fight bitterly but fight for each other even harder. Lara is a tough character to follow, though. She is mostly able to escape the war that rages in her homeland. She marries, works as a professor, has a child, and has the luxury of having an affair while her friends and family are in a war zone. Even when Lara finds out what has happened to Marija, the terrors she experienced seem removed from Lara's life (and by extension, ours). But I'm glad that this novel gives voice to two nations and a war that I think are often ignored by history.

Country of Red Azaleas
By Domnica Radulescu
Twelve April 2016
320 pages
Read via Netgalley

It's Monday and I'm a little behind today!

Hey everyone! It's Monday afternoon and I'm finally here!

We had one of those good and hectic weekends. I worked late on Friday and picked up the boy from a sleepover on Saturday morning, Then we all went to the birthday party of our nephew Saturday afternoon and spent Sunday at church and the afternoon/evening celebrating Father's Day with my husband and dad.

I have still been reading, of course. It is good for this lady's mental health to find some quiet time every day to read a few chapters. I finished Raising Grateful Kids in an Entitled World and then read What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi. Currently, I'm reading The Fifth Avenue Artists Society and am looking forward to tackling Stewart O'Nan's City of Secrets next.

What are you reading this week?