January

I don't want to forget to write down any book I am reading. Some books just get a slight look see by me. Not my full attention. I started off the New Year with a resolution to eat better, grabbed some diet books and decided to do a "Cleanse" as propsed by Mark Hyman in The UltaSimple Diet. Ha! Simple indeed. Stocking up on all he suggests just for the first week kept me busy for awhile. The most helpful suggestion was the UltraBath. "Add 2 cups of Epsom salt, 1 cup baking soda and 10 drops of lavender oil to bathwater as hot as you can stand it. Soak 20 minutes before bed." p. 107 Its great, I sleep much better. Can't seem to eliminate the coffee completely, must be a winter thing. oh, I am going to read The Coffee Trader by David Liss to prepare me for my trip to the Netherlands. That's coming up the end of February and I want to acquaint myself with some history of Amsterdam. I am also reading bits and pieces of travel books, Let's Go Europe by Rick Stevens and Safety and Security For Women Who Travel by Shelia Swan and Peter Laufer. I need to start working on my lists of things not to forget. The wedding announcement came, the town is Hoogwoud. My sister and I are traveling to her son's wedding. How cool is that!!

What I have been up to

Betty Bunny Love is my lastest creation. Not only did I knit this cute little bunny, but I wrote a story for my granddaughter about time with Nana.

Reading about Afghanistan

Finished A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. A great read, and a great audio book. The Reader, Atossa Leoni, who is German-born of Afghan ancestry, was chosen because she could pronounce the Afghan words. I appreciate a book more when it is read to me. It was perhaps slow, but by the middle of the audio book, I transfered to the written word. Sitting down one evening to finish the book. I loved it more than The Kite Runner probably because it was a story of two women, bound together by a infant. It touched my female soul, knowing how much bonding to a baby can be like. Sharing my grandson with my daughter, or rather she shared him with me, only made that time more precious. I especially liked the ending.

January reading

Still reading Isabel's Bed, but I finished another novel in the meantime. Decided to take a paperback book I owned with me on my trip to Washington D.C. So I went to the bookshelf at home and decided to take along Saying Grace by Beth Gutcheon. An interesting book about private schools and people who are in charge of them. Funny, I just read My Latest Grievance by Elinor Lipman and that too was about private schools. Back to the novel by Beth Gutcheon. She writes about a disagreement that a wife has with her husband over her daughter's life choices. Why is it so hard to disagree with the one person you are in love with, especially about the person that you both love? It seems there ought to be a better way of handling disagreements. It divides families. Sometimes I just think it is because women cannot think like men and men cannot think like women. Laura Schlessinger said something really great, at least I think she said it, "Don't let a man define what motherhood means to you." In that sense don't let your husband tell you how you should feel as a mother, how you should behave as a mother, and how you should think as a mother. Mothering is very emotional. Men just don't get it. It's a good book about family problems, which we all have at one time or another.