Reading Round-Up: The "Turning Eleven" Edition

With the sweet girl on the eve of her 11^th birthday, I thought it might be fun to share a little of what she’s reading these days.

Most recently, she’s enjoyed The Magic Half by Annie Barrows. (This is not to be confused with Edgar Eager’s Half-Magic, another book she’s enjoyed in the past year.) The Magic Half is about two girls who share a room, decades apart. The girl in the present time travels back to help the girl in the past.

In the evenings, we’re enjoying Shannon Hale’s sequel to Princess Academy, Palace of Stone. We’re also wending our way slowly through Anne of Avonlea, the second Anne of Green Gables book. We’re not getting much daytime reading because of camp, but it’s still nice to have a fall-back read-aloud book that’s this good.

I’ve also seen her reading Jean Craighead George’s All Upon A Sidewalk; Sharon Creech’s Hate That Cat (novel-in-poetry sequel to Love That Dog) and Annie Barrow’s Ivy and Bean.

She bogged down part-way through her reading of The Hobbit (which she heard read aloud last year) but (shh!) she’s getting her own rather nifty copy for her birthday. And yes, she’s getting her own copy of A Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban (because she loves that book so much). I am also secretly tap-dancing for joy (did you know you could do that?) because we’re giving her Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I’ve been planning to introduce the series to her on her eleventh birthday (since the stories start on Harry’s eleventh) since she was about five years old and mispronounced Jo Rowling’s name to rhyme with Growling. She’s been to Narnia and Prydain and been introduced to Middle-earth, so I really think she’s ready for Harry. And I’m always ready to re-read Harry!

In the evenings, we’ve been enjoying the third volume of the Family Read-Aloud series by Augsburg Fortress Press. This one is called Explorers for God and follows up on Early Saints of God (a book we’ve loved for years) and Kings and Queens for God. This is a delightful church history series that is, unfortunately, out of print, but I was blessed to find used copies of the second and third volumes recently.

The Seventh Birthday

The sweet girl's birthday is becoming my "new way" to realize we're half-way through another year -- it used to be the approach of July 4th!

We had a lovely celebration on Saturday. After seven years, I am at last getting the hang of what makes a birthday celebration "just right" for my daughter. It has to do with simplicity and tradition: friends, ice cream, balloons, and of course muffins (no cake!) She loves the tradition I started last year, where we bring out her "birthday book," a scrapbook of pictures from previous birthdays. I didn't finish putting in all the 6 year old pictures until the morning of her 7th, but no matter. It was there to flip through and look at and marvel over, and that's what mattered.

Although we were missing some folks very dear to us this year, we still had a lovely day. And our precious little one really is seven...truly growing up, in all sorts of wonderful ways, right before our eyes. Thank you, Lord, for all your blessings on this family.

Butterfly Cookie Cutters, Anyone?

Well, I give up. Almost anyway.

I've been attempting to find butterfly cookie cutters...or to be exact, ONE butterfly cookie cutter...for the sweet girl's birthday celebration. Who knew this would be such a challenge?

I've tried several stores but thus far haven't turned up one. I decided to see if I could find one on Amazon, since I was placing an order for some books and another couple of small gifts for her birthday. Found one that looked just about perfect, and it only cost $1.17. But then they tried to throw something like $7 dollars shipping onto the amount, since it doesn't ship directly from them.

Sorry, but I'm not spending an extra $7 for someone to mail me a light-weight thin piece of metal shaped like a butterfly. I am guessing actual shipping costs on something like that would be a dollar or less.

S. has been adamant that she wants no cake this year, only ice cream and my special banana chocolate chip muffins (with candles in them). Which is grand. But her love of butterflies led me to think what a neat idea it would be if I made butterfly shaped cookies that we could then use to make ice cream sandwiches.

I'm sure someone crafty is probably thinking I could just shape/cut the cookie dough into butterfly shapes by hand, but unfortunately I am just not that artistic. And I'd like them to actually look like butterflies instead of amorphous shapes that might look like butterflies if you squinted really hard and used your imagination.

Oh butterfly, butterfly, wherefore art thou butterfly!?

The Birthday Scrapbook Project

I have been busier than a hive full of bees for the past couple of weeks. It's hard to explain why. Nothing too earthshaking has been happening, just a lot of "stuff" to do at work and home (projects, paperwork, cleaning, syllabus writing, etc.) and all of it seeming to come in a flurry of have-to-get-done-immediately-if-not-sooner. Hence my lack of much time to blog.

June promises to be yet another busy month, though I hope to have at least a little time for some creativity (among other things, my poem a day idea for May fell by the wayside relatively early on into the month...urgh). One project I've barely begun, but have a definite deadline for, is the sweet girl's birthday scrapbook.

I am not a huge scrapbooking gal. But I love making cards and paper collages, so the notion of making an attractive scrapbook has some real appeal. I got the idea to create a birthday scrapbook for S. sometime last year when it dawned on me how woefully inadequate I have been as a chronicler of her babyhood, toddlerhood and early childhood. Yes, I've written a lot about her, that's true, but none of it is in one easily accessible place (it's mostly in e-mails to family, some of which are on a computer that's not been used/accessed for a few years). I started two separate baby books when I was pregnant with her, workbook type keepsakes given to me as gifts, neither of which I ever finished filling in or actually glued pictures in. I have a scrapbook I put together with a lot of the cards people gave us when she was born, and I have two boxes full of photographs in roughly chronological order from her birth onwards.

Several months ago I got the idea to put together a scrapbook where I would create a couple of pages of pictures, along with some notes, from each birthday. I bought a lovely pale pink album at a craft store, stuck it on the shelf, and promised myself I'd get to it this year -- meaning I would go ahead and create the pages for all of her birthdays so far and then show it to her right around her 5th birthday, the one coming up, and then continue to create new pages each year as the birthday comes round again.

Well, her 5th birthday is now coming up in three and a half weeks, and I've still not put the scrapbook together! I have made some headway though: I managed to gather the pictures for it. This was trickier than I expected because not all of our photo sources are in the same place either. I didn't want to use my one and only copies, so I thought I'd order extras -- which was fine for the photos taken up through her 3rd birthday, which we'd taken with a film camera and stored in an online film developing website. But then I had to go hunting for photos from the last two years which we've taken on our digital camera. I thought we had them all on our computer, but turns out that some of the earlier ones were only on CD. I had to find them all, sort them all, choose, upload the digital ones to the online ordering site that had our film photos (sometimes resizing them for best quality). It all took much longer than I planned on.

But it was worth it. The pictures came in the mail Friday, and it was such a fun experience to look through the whole set and see how much she has changed and grown from the day she was born. We have some wonderful pictures and it will be fun to arrange them attractively in the book, along with a few well-chosen (I hope) words here and there. I've begun going through all my beautiful crafting papers and even bought a few fancy birthday scrapbooking stickers. I'm not sure how much time I will have to pull this together, but I would really love to get it done before that birthday rolls around at the end of the month. We shall see!