I love Christmas cards and appreciate every one that friends and family take the time to send.  Every year I choose a favorite and this year my favorite arrived today all the way from Moscow, Russia.  I hope you all have quality time with family or friends.

I don’t typically review anything that’s not book or movie related but I have something special for you.  A friend of mine recently launched her own educational business (her story here) and she let me try it out and give some feedback.  I admit that at first I was skeptical about it because I think of myself as a creative person and I do have a degree in education so I know how to make a lesson plan, but now that I’ve started using the kit Gage and I are both sold!

This is  why I think it’s a great gift idea!  Sometimes moms and dads just don’t know what they should be doing to prepare kids for school.  This makes it so easy!  It’s a subscription service so you could just gift the kit and one month of activities and see how much the person likes it.  Check out their different plans here.  This is a perfect gift for grandparents to give because both grandkids and parents will benefit.

Here’s the deal-You buy a kit for your Pre-K to 2nd grader (there are 2 choices) and it comes with everything you need for daily 5-10 minute learning activities for you and your child.  Here’s what the kit looks like.

It comes with everything you need for a month of activities and it is all planned for you and easy to use.

Here are a few of the activites

Gage liked the spinning but it was also teaching him sight words and graphing.  We did this activity quite a few times.

Working on fine motor skills is big around here so this was perfect.

Some of the activities I’ve made harder for Gage, like this one.  He cut the strips for the puzzle himself and then used the numbers to put it back together.

Telling time, learning about the small and big hands on the clock.  I was amazed that once I explained the concept of the ‘game’ he got them all right.

He loves all of these activities and there have only been 2 that he had trouble completely with the concept and I’m glad.  I think it’s great to encourage learning new things and to know where the problem areas are (for Gage that has been rhyming and estimating).  We’re still on the first month, but I do plan on signing up for the service. It’s learning made fun and easy and it comes delivered to my door.  What’s not to like?

If you have any questions just ask or you can go directly to the website for more info. K-3 Climbers

The strict diet portion of this book aimed at weight loss is meant for 28 days.  After that it moves into maintenance and I haven’t looked that far, although I do know it’s Mediterranean based. I took off three days this past week for Thanksgiving festivities, so I’m only on day 18.  I’m trying to get back on track (except last night when I was organizing my Christmas gift giving I might have, maybe, eaten 4 Godiva salted toffee caramels).  On Thanksgiving Day I ate everything I hadn’t had in a few weeks, noodles, mashed potatoes and gravy, rolls and butter and I even skipped that low-fat bird and went straight for the ham.  Ah, Thanksgiving.

Here I am enjoying the day with family (I think there were about 40 of us this year and somehow this is the only picture I have with me in it!)

Ok, the diet, it’s going well even with all my cheating this past week.  My goal at the start of the diet was to lose 10 in 28 and I’m almost there!

Week 1 – lost 6 pounds

Week 2 update – lost 0 😦 gained 0 🙂

Week 3 – lost 3 pounds

total loss so far – 9 pounds!

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came in their mailbox during the last week.Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists.

I received 3 books in the mail and picked up the older Kingsolver book at Half-Priced Books for $2. Score!

You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz (received from Goodreads 1st Reader)

Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself, devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son, Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice. Grace is also the author of the forthcoming You Should Have Known, a book in which she castigates women for not valuing their intuition and calls upon them to pay attention to their first impressions of men.

But weeks before the book is published, a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only a chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster, and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver (purchased)

Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.

“As the U.S. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begin the adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain.

“Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel. . . .”

Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that’s better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

“This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew . . . and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air.”

If You Were Me and Lived in Greece and If You Were Me and Lived in Peru by Carole P Roman (received from Red Feather Productions)

It’s never too early to start teaching children about the world around them. In If You Were Me and Lived in…Greece , early learners get a taste of what their life would be like if they lived in Greece while being introduced to the birthplace of democracy. This book is the latest installment of the educational series about the cultures of the world that speaks to young children about the topics that interest them, such as the foods people eat, the names of boys and girls, and the activities that children their age living in a foreign land are likely to engage in. This exciting visit to Greece also introduces the important concept of democracy to children and highlights some of the other cultural contributions that Greece has made to Western civilization. Basic information is offered in a playful way that won’t overwhelm children.

**

You’ll never guess what crazy dish the ancient Incan kings ate. But you can read all about it, and more, in If You Were Me and Lived in…Peru, the latest book in Carole P. Roman’s fun travel series for kids.

An exciting introduction to world cultures written for young readers ages three through eight, this new expedition takes kids to South America and gives them a colorful glimpse into what living in Peru is like. Highlighting a myriad of topics, including language, cuisine, climate, and history, this book teaches kids about diversity while also revealing to them the important truth that we are all connected.

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Did anything arrive in  your mailbox this week?

I decided to take up Elyse on her meme since I wanted to sit down and decompress from our whirlwind trip back home for Thanksgiving.  I hope you all had a great day with family and friends.

Use titles from the books you’ve read this year to complete the sentences.

1. Black Friday makes me The Invisible Man (HG Wells)

2. If you post racist jokes on Facebook, I (am not) Missing You (after unfriending) (Harlan Coben)

3. In my ID photo, I look like The Wife, the Maid and the Mistress (Ariel Lawhon)

4. If someone interrupts my reading, (they might find) A Discovery of Witches (Deborah Harkness)

5. When I read/watch the news, I Love Life (Rob Lowe)

6. The last time I visited the zoo, I (saw a) Gift From the Sea (Anne Morrow Lindbergh)

7. If I were a Supreme Court Justice, I (would be) American on Purpose (Craig Ferguson)

8. Absolutely nothing compares to That Night (Chevy Stevens)

9. Best advice my mom gave me (be) The Best (wo)Man (Kristan Higgins)

10. My hope for 2015 is (a) Miracle Cure (Harlan Coben)

It’s a sad day when you look at recent photos of yourself and don’t really recognize yourself.  It’s a tough day when you realize you really need to lose 50 pounds.  It’s a stressful day when you know you don’t really have the time or energy to plan a course of action.  So, this book came on my radar at just the right time.  Here was a plan that would hopefully give me some fast results and some good ideas on changing my menu and I might even learn to cook vegetables yummy enough for my two guys to eat them!

The idea is that you will lose 5 pounds for 5 days, maintain for 2 days, and lose 5 more the next 5 days, maintain for 2, and then again for a total of 28 days, and ideally you’ve lost 20 pounds.  I decided to give it a shot and started last Monday.  The diet is really just cutting calories. Here’s a pic of my daily meal plan from the book.

You can see for those first 5 days I was supposed to be around 850-900 calories a day and I was able to stick to that.  I didn’t cheat and by Saturday morning had lost 5.5 pounds.  Not bad!  Now on the weekend I was allowed more food and as a treat I let myself have wine both nights and still managed to lose another half a pound. SO, I managed to lose 6 pounds this first week.

I’ll update every week and we’ll see how it works out.

The plusses

I lost weight

The food (except for one loser) has been really good.

Meals are quick to prepare and cook.

He provides ready-made substitutions for every meal.

The minuses

It is expensive to buy food for all the recipes he provides.

It’s hard to find many of the ingredients.

The specific shopping took way too much time this week because I wasn’t familiar with many of the ingredients.

His recipes are for 4 servings!  Seriously, this makes no sense in a diet book.

At the end of the third day I went to bed with a headache and woke up with one the next morning so I skipped the protein shake and went straight for the real food and it helped.  I have followed the menu fairly faithfully but have switched the order of the foods as the mood strikes.  I was supposed to have grapefruit every morning but after the first day I just couldn’t make myself do it so I switched to half an orange.

I took a photo of my two favorite recipes this week if you want to give them a try!

 As you can see I added the shrimp and the extra calories.

I didn’t have nor could I find red curry past so I used garlic paste.   And I used real cooked turkey, not from the deli.

If you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer!

Sorry I’m late in announcing these, balloon decorating fest til 12 when I couldn’t do anything but fall into bed!  And the winners of my Beloved Cover mini-challenge are…

Debbie Chute -you have won $15 to spend at Book Depository!  Congratulations!

Jamie (Valia’s Page Turner) -you have won $10 to spend at the Book Depository! Congratulations!

Thank you all for participating. I have quizzes like this every Wednesday for fun and prizes 🙂