Our House in the Middle of Our Street

* The Hormone Cure  by Sara Gottfried, MD - Listen, peeps, I don't know what to tell you other than I feel like my hormones have been out of whack for a solid few years now. I'm putting in the effort to figure out WHAT all of them are for, HOW they do what they do (in their prime) and WHY I have certain symptoms that won't go away. This is book one by Gottfried, and I'll follow it by her #2,  The Hormone Reset Diet .  If you're a woman aged 30-55, this might be a worthwhile side-table read. I know I'm learning a lot. * 50 People Every Christian Should Know by Warren Wiersbe - This book is one I found (amazingly!) at a big thrift store for about $3. I'd wanted to read it since I read it's sister book last year (different author) about 50 Women. I didn't like this one as much because it included too much of each bio to what the person had written in their lifetime, and the author's opinion of those books. I'd much rather have read more

One of my kid-oriented goals this year was to take my kids to a movie. We never go to the actual theater because it's so expensive (this afternoon matinee was $30!), but it's something fun to do over the summer, and when it's very rare, it's a big treat. I had seen the trailer for The Secret Life of Pets last year and thought it looked really cute. The kids loved this movie and laughed quite a bit, though to be honest, I was a little disappointed in this movie. It wasn't nearly as funny as the trailer made it look, and the plot was only so-so. I wished I had watched this at home after it came out on DVD from the library, but the kids enjoyed the movie treat, and that's what I cared about. We enjoyed our time together. I'm here to tell you, however, to skip this one in the theaters and wait for a better Pixar or Disney movie, and watch this one at home on the couch with a bucket full of popcorn made in the microwave.  It tastes just as good. 

family shot in Salmon Arm, BC Our family lives in Ft. Langley, British Columbia. This small village is part of the lowermainland of BC, which encompasses many large cities, farmland, mountain towns, and Vancouver metro that total about 3 million people! We love living right on the Fraser river where The Fort started the province of British Columbia as a famous trading post.  My husband is from this area, and I'm from Nebraska, where our two children were born. We've lived in the Pacific Northwest for almost 4 years (we lived in Blaine, WA, while I finished my immigration work while my husband commuted across the border every day to work in Canada), and in BC for two.  Here in Langley, we have a fantastic homeschooling community, and my children Lukka, 9, and Ani, 7, spend many of their days riding bikes through town, going to the library, playing with Copper, our dog, or listening to loads of audiobooks. We hike on the weekends all over 'Beautiful BC', hit t

At the end of June we finished a monumental task- we finished the entire Laura Ingalls Wilder series; nine books where the shortest one was 150 pages, and most were well over 300. It took us a solid 7 months of reading aloud, during school time, bedtimes, bored times, etc. and I am so glad I made this a year-long goal, because quite frankly, it was a doozy. I had never read the entire series myself, I remember reading at least two of them, but I knew my kids were at the right age to enjoy these books. There are a number of series I have 'planned' to read to them through the next 3 years or so, and these were the books that I thought best to start with, because the kids would enjoy the simple stories of pioneer life, and were considered the 'youngest' of the series. The last two large books, Little Town on the Prairie, and These Happy Golden Years, were listened aloud on audio with Cherry Jones (thanks for the tip, Jamie Martin! ) because I needed a break, and my