July & August Movies and Money for Charity

August 31, 2021September 17, 20214 Comments

I forgot to do this last month so this is two months of movie watching. I feel like I need to do a monthly post on what we’re binge watching too since we do as much of that as anything. What’s the last show you binged?

You know the drill, add your 5 words (or less!) to mine in a comment and earn $1 for charity. Once we get to $100 the person with the most reviews will choose the charity. Click here to see the past winners, the charities they chose and the other reviews you can add to. Anyone is welcome to join in at any time. Click here to see past movie posts.

What do I need to see in September?

We’re at $81 right now. Your charity could be next

Bounty hunter evades mafia and police

Bizarre boy escapes cult, government

Game Night, 2018 (Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, Kyle Chandler, Lamorne Morris, Billy Magnussen, Sharon Horgan, Jesse Plemons, Kylie Bunbury, Michael C. Hall) **Grade B**

Game night turns violent.

Game night has a dark side (Heather)

French imprison Jews during WWII

Time traveling to fight a future war.

So very many plot holes. (Heather)

Hugo, 2011 (Asa Butterfield, Chloe Grace Moretz, Ben Kingsley, Christopher Lee, Sasha Baron Cohen, Emily Mortimer, Helen McCrory) Grade B

Hugo finds picture perfect ending

Playboy and young courtesan find love

Perfume, 2006 (Ben Whishaw, Alan Rickman, Dustin Hoffman, Rachel Hurd-Wood) **Grade C**

Serial killer with a picky nose

Ice Road, 2021 (Liam Neelson, Laurence Fishburne, Amber Midthunder, Marcus Thomas, Benjamin Walker, Holt McCallany, Matt McCoy) **Grade D**

How did this get made?

This Week – Finishing up school prep

August 28, 20218 Comments

So, we start full days of school this week and I’m still trying to make decisions about curriculum! The rest of my day will be spent doing the research I should have done already. The only decision left to be made is on the language arts curriculum so that I can call our new tutor and get her up to speed. Ohio raised the scholarship amount this year so, he’ll get 6 hours a week with a tutor for language arts, in addition to a weekly piano lesson and speech session. It’s all coming together, but still work to be done.

Here’s what I’ve read this week…

Gage and I started half day school this month, although we missed the week he had two ER trips and last Friday when we had two follow up appointments. I read The Tale of Despereaux aloud over the last few weeks, knowing this my reluctant reader would never read anything this long himself. Thankfully, it was a hit! It was a fun one to read aloud with plenty of opportunity to ham up the characters.

A mouse, a rat, and a princess all end up in the castle dungeon, but the how and the why are the driving force of the story. Full of humor (not always nice, but we call those teachable moments), animals that had their own stories, and silliness earned two thumbs up here in Ohio.

I listed to Paula McLain’s latest, When the Star Goes Dark, while we puzzled. The stars are the only thing connecting the two 🌟

Anna has just experienced something traumatic, we get only snippets until the very end, and retreats to the town where she grew up. She’s a missing persons detective and an old friend needs her help. This takes place in the 1900s and contains real cases, like Polly Klaas, with the fictional.

This is a dark book, just like the title says. As a mother my heart still hurts a little. If you are triggered by child abduction or abuse then read at your own risk.

We have some great friends! Both @rhapsodybooks and @wheelmaker2 sent Gage books recently and we always love new books! Thank you 🥰. These are all for older elementary kids.

Let’s start with Whale Fall Cafe because it was our favorite. From the outside it looks like a silly story, but on the inside it gives you all of the details about a whales death and what happens once the carcass hits the ocean floor. It was fascinating, and perfect for kids who like their stories with a little bit of gross factor. Gage read this to me and got a kick out of my inability to look at the illustrations for more than a few seconds. Highly recommend!!

Little Leonardo’s Fascinating World of Paleontology was the opposite of Whale Fall. It had cutesy illustrations with just too much information to make it fun. But, the 6 experiments at the end make it worth a look. We’ve already done two and hope to do at least one more. We both thought the story was okay, 3 stars, and the experiments fun, 5 stars.

We read Desert Baths because we’re studying Nevada this week. It is fantastic.!! The story about the creatures who live in the desert was good and over half the book. It’s the 6 pages of facts and fun quizzes at the end that made this a big win for both of us. This is a perfect book for homeschoolers and school libraries or classrooms. Highly recommend.

Do you love the bees? Do you think they are aggressive pests out to cause you misery? Do you want to know and do more? Even if you answered no to all of these questions you should still pick up this book.

50 Easy Ways To Help Save the Bees 🐝 is a great read. We love the bees because we understand what they do for us. but even I learned new things. The first 23 pages are about the plight of the different kinds of bees which I thought was excellent. The 50 ideas were well though out.

I read this last night and shared things with Gage this morning. Our afternoon project is to go through the book together and choose 5 things to do this year. We received a pack of seeds last year from a save the bee campaign and threw them into out old bee container this past spring. They may not look like much now but we still get bees daily.

At 127 pages this is a must read. 🖤💛🖤💛🖤

Susan Elizabeth Phillips is an automatic buy for me (as are Harlan Coben and Sarah Addison Allen). She is a master of romance. While not a series, this is the 9th book she’s written about a member of the Chicago Stars football organization.

In When the Stars Collide Olivia, world renowned opera singer, and Thad, backup Stars quarterback must spend weeks together traveling the country promoting a brand. It’s not exactly love at first sight, but heartbreak and danger are close at hand.

Loved it ❤️❤️❤️❤️

Sauna time! I’ve been in here less than 10 minutes and I’m already sweating. I’m not a fan, but we’ve had the infrared sauna for years and the doctor we saw with Gage a few weeks ago told us we really needed to be using it twice a week. So, I sit here and sweat for my health 😅

Are you a sauna fan?

Okay, the book…The Last Thing He Told Me lived up to ALL of the hype! It’s so different from her other two books. It’s a thriller. One day a child knocks on Hannah’s door with a note, it’s from her husband and all it says is PROTECT HER. Bailey, the daughter. Comes home from school with a duffel bag full of cash that her dad had stuffed in her locker. Owen himself was missing.

That’s all you get. If you like thrillers this is a must read! ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

This Week – Dog Days of Reading

August 22, 2021September 12, 202113 Comments

Sorry this is so long. It’s been a long, trying week and getting anything done, especially reading, has been a struggle.

Do you ever feel seen? I received a 2022 calendar from the Ocean Conservancy, an organization I wasn’t familiar with but is definitely within our donation wheelhouse. Can you guess what else they offered if we gave a donation? Did I make it too
easy for you? Gage and I finished this in less than hour, which seems like it took way longer than it needed to!

Gage is feeling much better today. Mornings have been rough this week, but for the first time this he woke up feeling good. Now we just need to get him eating more.

I have News of the World by Paulette Jiles in one of my TBR stacks and thought that Jason and I could watch the movie before I read it. The movie was…underwhelming? Tom Hanks and Helena Zengel were terrific and I loved the last 10 minutes of the movie. Hanks plays a Civil War soldier who travels town to town reading the news to people who have a dime to hear it (he was a newscaster before tv). When he takes on the responsibility of getting a girl who had been kidnapped by Native Americans home to her aunt and uncle every kind of possible trouble shows it’s face.

It was okay, but not necessarily what I needed to see at the end of this particular week. Not sure if I’ll be reading the book anytime soon now.

When I ‘discovered’ Virginia Hamilton earlier this year I fell in love with folklore and legends and mythical storytelling. This book has all of that. It’s shorter at just over 200 pages and is perfect for a young adult introduction into the genre and the time period in America, mid 1800s. I really liked the book and learning more about the Yemaya and Obatala legend and love how Kopacz imagined a new story for them.

Yemaya is a deity of the sea in the African Yoruba people religion. When she decides to follow her heart and love across the ocean as his slave ship heads to America, she makes the decision to transform from mermaid to woman so she can find him on land. She is welcomed into a Native American tribe, taken as a slave, and saved by a Quaker before finding her special powers and her way north.

I love the beautiful cover and want to thank @atriabooks for sending me a copy. I’m excited to have this one my bookshelf!

I loved this fast paced thriller with its slow reveal and twists and turns! Just what I needed to end this crazy week. Delilah has been missing for 11 years when she is suddenly reunited with her brother and father. What happened all those years ago? Told from more than one point of view and time period this one is a winner for thriller/mystery lovers.

Gage made pumpkin bread with chocolate chips yesterday. Don’t mind if I do 😁. His appetite still isn’t great, but he feels a lot better.

So, I listened to the audio production of this one and loved the performances of the seven so much! I could have picked up the book and finished it quicker, but preferred to listen for 14 hours 😀

I’m mixed on how I feel about this one. It started strong. A small African village was suffering from health problems because an American oil company was depleting their resources and leaving environmental damage in their wake. I loved hearing in first person from different villagers. Their stories drew me in. The plight of those villagers was compelling.

I don’t want to give anything away, but I will say that multi!generational story seems like it could have really happened. If you are in the mood for a story about how the powerful overpower the powerless then this may be for you. The richness of the storytelling made me glad I read this one, but it left me in a melancholy place.

Yesterday’s book left me a little depressed so this whimsical book called to me. This was just what I needed to lift the spirits.

Jess is still physically and mentally recovering from a near death experience when her ailing grandmother asks her to find an old family heirloom, a necklace that find’s true love. What she finds is a journey to knowing her roots and the stories of the women before her. There’s also a choice to be made between the safe and the risky.

This quote made me stop and reflect a bit, “There is is a philosophy that the way of soul mates is to come into our lives to challenge us, move us forward. It’s not the job of a soul mate to accompany us through our entire life or share every detail of our being. Once it’s purpose has been fulfilled, the soul mate is free to disappear.”

This was fun, especially for those who love old things, jewelry, genealogy, or want a story that will transport them to a more magical place for a moment. Loved it.

First, let’s talk about Milo. Milo is taking the subway with his sister and he likes to imagine the lives of the people he sees and draw a picture. He takes the train every Sunday and you find out at the end that it’s to visit his mom in prison. So many things to love ❤️ here and I loved them all, the story, the illustrations, the creativity. Gage and I will be trying something like this tomorrow at the park 😁

We’re learning about a different musician every week and it was Elvis week! Both of these were good, but we did prefer the claymation-like illustrations of the one on the left. Both had additional information and a real photo or two at the end. We’ve had a fun time listening to and watching clips of his performances this week. I wonder if we can still see those old movies he was in? I haven’t seen any of the 30 some odd movies he was in since I was a kid.

This was a fun summer read, that dealt with serous issues in an optimistic way. Letty arrived at her sister’s place in NYC to find her dead with her daughter standing there witness. She grabs her niece and high tails it south away from the bead news ex she suspects of the murder. They arrive at a small beach hotel and find acceptance there, but she’s still a fugitive.

I mostly listened, but did read the last 75 pages. I loved seeing Letty find a home, even if it took awhile with everyone, especially the ex, trying to track her down. Some twists and turns keep the action moving and make this a satisfying story.

This week has been the first real week of struggle in my 2021 book a day challenge. I sat down to start my book yesterday and just couldn’t do it. So, I picked up these two instead and my day was saved. So far this year I’ve read 275 books and watched 10 bookish movies.

Fatima’s Great Outdoors was released earlier this year and I loved it. Fatima is excited when her Indian family plans to do something as All-American as camping. She leaves her struggles at school behind and gets to have new experiences and learn things like how to put up a tent and start a fire. I love the memories that she cherished of that time with her family. Traditional Indian words and food are included into the story, which I love, but I might have loved it even more if a short page with definitions were included at the end. Big thumbs up from this non camping enthusiast.

The Great Bridge-Building Contest is a books for the older elementary child who is interested in American history, engineering, or West Virginia (our state this week). It’s taken from stories passed down in Lemberg Chenoweth’s family about how he, a furniture maker with a third grade education, beat out countless others to build what would become the bridge that would become the site of the first land battle of the Civil War. This full of interesting information.

Last month I read the novel Perfume and really didn’t like it. But when I was looking for a movie of a book I’d read this year this tempted me, so I suffered through the story once again. BUT, it turned out to be a better movie than book. Having Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman in the two big secondary roles helped. And not being inside the murderer’s head as much made it better too. I wasn’t sure if they’d go for the town square orgy at the end, BUT THEY DID. All I kept thinking about was how many hours and days those hundreds of naked people hade to lay on the ground and each other.

I’ll do a comparison of the movie and book soon.

This Week – ERs and sickness

August 14, 202121 Comments

This has been a week. I’m posting my reading week from my daily IG, but this morning’s Gage update is that he is feeling quite a bit better. Mornings have been rough and this has been the best one so far this week, so here’s hoping the rest of the day continues the healing trend!