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A New Way to Keep Track of the Books I’m Reading
Earlier this year, I realized I was reading six books at once: one for Sunday School at church, one for a church ladies’ book club, one for review through Crossway, an audiobook with Samuel, a fiction book on my own, and a non-fiction book on my own. This is almost unheard-of for me. As a younger reader, I took my books one at a time and read them slow enough that I thoroughly appreciated them. I paused to imagine what the characters looked like and built entire worlds in my imagination along with the author. Now that I’m teaching, attending a church that likes to read books together, and have…
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Planting Seeds with “The Sower,” a New Book by Scott James
We have a small collection of books on our kitchen table, held up with an old bookend from my sister and a pot overflowing with African Violets. Some of the books in our kitchen table collection include Everything a Child Should Know about God by Kenneth N. Taylor, My ABC Bible Verses by Susan Hunt, The Biggest Story ABC by Kevin DeYoung, a few of R.C. Sproul’s children’s books, and a children’s Bible. The kids and I use these books to do devotions together in the evening and we also used them as part of our bygone homeschool days. All of these books do an excellent job of taking biblical…
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My 2022 Book List & My Top Ten Songs
Happy New Year, friends and family! As I did in 2021, this past year I kept track of all the books I read, either as family read-alouds or on my own. (This list doesn’t include the books the kids asked me to read out loud to them–that would be a very long list!) As a family, we especially enjoyed Brave Ollie Possum by Ethan Nicolle, the Green Ember and Archer series by S.D. Smith, and the Nnewts series by Doug TenNapel. My favortie books on the list this year are The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald. The book that held my attention for…
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A Lullaby & The Introduction to My Book, The Light Gatherers {New Music Monday}
This is a very special New Music Monday, and I appreciate that you’re here, visiting my website. I’ve been working on a book for a little over a year, called The Light Gatherers. (You can read the Prologue to the book here, which I wrote as a writing exercise as part of The Habit.) I don’t feel like any book is complete without a poem or a song; most of my favorite books include at least one or the other. The Hobbit includes the songs in which the dwarves sing about helping Bilbo with the dishes and the Lonely Mountain. The Princess and the Goblin includes Curdie’s rhymes, which scare…
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Garbage Cans and Apple Blossoms: A Poem for Young Readers
We are under a wind advisory here in the Midwest. The gusts of wind have been so strong these last couple hours that I can feel the house shaking. I went out a little while ago to rescue the garbage cans. One of them was blowing across the frozen snow, and the other had gotten stuck in a ditch at the end of our driveway. The wind was grabbing pieces of recycling out of it and hurling them into the air. I hid the garbage cans along the east side of our house, out of the wind and safe for the time being. Praise God for sturdy houses and functioning…