Happy Happy Birthday Katie Dear!

Well, I hope that you don't mind, Kate...but Mom has hijacked your blog to wish you a Happy Birthday! I cannot believe that 11 years has flown by so quickly... but here you are...on your way to becoming a "tiny" teenager.

This February 24th started out, like every birthday morning, with the traditional Grasteit song "Today is Katie's birthday, wake her up, wake her up!" Repeated over and over again. I know we should come up with some better lyrics, but I think the kids might be disappointed if we did. They so look forward to it. Then, Taylor made banana pancakes for breakfast and we were off to school, with cupcakes in hand. Tonight Kate has ordered pasta with shrimp, asparagus and mushrooms, for dinner, and crepes with strawberries and cream for dessert. (Not a traditional birthday cake...but better, maybe.) The rest of us will have chocolate drizzled over them as well, but Kate doesn't like chocolate. (She doesn't know what she is missing.) And we will have presents, too, of course. I will be off to finish shopping, as soon as this is done.

Although I am not a blogger, I have seen enough cute blogs to make an attempt at a little birthday tribute. So here we go...

K is for Kind. I don't think I have ever seen her be unkind to anyone...except maybe her siblings, occasionally, but that doesn't count!
A is for Avid Reader. Kate is always reading....early in the morning...late at night...in the car. We cannot get her to stop!
T is for Talk, Talk, Talk...another thing we can't get her to stop doing!
E is for Example, which she is to everyone around her, especially her family.

Kate, I think I got the best present of all, on your birthday...YOU! I am so lucky to get to be your mother. I love you and hope you have a wonderful day!

Books to take your breath away

I have to tell you about a new favorite series of mine. It's called The Dreamhouse Kings Series by Robert Liparulo. They are young adult books but I bet even grown ups will love them.

The King family has just moved from Pasadena to Pinedale, California, and they've found a great house. It is a big old Victorian style house secluded in the woods. Even better it's got secret rooms - a whole hallway full of them. And even better, these rooms are portals to take you to all kinds of places. Want to see France during WW II? Or how about the Roman Coliseum during the days of the Gladiators? Maybe the great Civil War battlefields? But exploring these places is no fun for brothers Alexander (Xander) and David. Because each of the worlds is a very dangerous place, and they wouldn't even bother except for a family member that was kidnapped and taken into one of them.

I don't want to give too much away but these books are really good. I read the first four in about a weeks time - and each was about 300 pages long, so that was no small feat. Book 1 is House of Dark Shadows, book 2 is Watcher in the Woods, book 3 is Gatekeepers, and book 4 is Timescape. I can't wait to get Book 5 ,Whirlwind, and book 6, Frenzy, that comes out in a couple of months. This series is very exciting, I just couldn't put it down. It is a good thing I had all four of them together so I could read them without stopping in between. So if you get book 1 I recommend you have book 2 on hand before you finish because you are going to want to start it right away.

What a name for a book!

Since I am "the girl with her nose in a book" I decided to write about some of my favorite books. Except this time, it wasn't my nose in the book, it was my ears. We listened to it on CDs in the car, and it's not even really a kid's book, but we all liked it a lot.
The book was The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Marry Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. This book is a collection of letters from Juliet Ashton, an author in 1946 who after the war is looking for a subject for a book. She gets a letter from a man on an island called Guernsey and finds out about their lives during the war and also about their literary society with a very strange name.
I liked this book because it was interesting how it was all told through letters back and forth between the different people. I couldn't listen to all of it because my mom loved it so much that she couldn't stop listening to it even after she dropped us off at school. She always told us about what we missed but I am going to go back and listen to it again.