Nonfiction

Homeschooling, Nonfiction, Parenting

The Middle Years – My Favorite Parenting Books

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When I began this blog in 2012 or so, my parenting journey was in the new, shiny, rosy stage. I was full of optimistic ideals. Homeschooling was the plan but not the reality yet, as my two children were just 3 and 1 years old. In my memory, that time of my life was a time of very little sleep yet comparatively lighthearted days in ways I couldn’t even be grateful for at the time.

This current parenting stage is a bit more…muddled. I am still in those young children days, with a 3-year-old keeping us both laughing and on our toes, but I also have a high school student, middle school student, and two in elementary school. If you lost count along the way, that’s five. To put the icing on the cake, the fifth child of our family is a handsome, healthy, robust handful. Now that he’s three, I have fewer nightmares involving him jumping out of top story windows or swallowing button batteries, but those 2:00 a.m. night terrors still are about a once monthly occurrence for me. This kid is wild. Like, got straight up yelled at by a librarian yesterday wild. (Was I, a lifelong library addict, absolutely mortified? Yes, yes I was, and also very thankful we were not at our usual library; in this librarian’s defense, it is spring break in our school district and her last nerve had probably already been shattered). I am so very grateful for five healthy children; I don’t take that for granted for one second.

Without taking on a complaining tone, for life is indeed so beautiful and full of gifts I don’t deserve, I wanted to take a minute to be honest here that this current parenting stage I am in is a bit more muddled than shiny and idealistic. I’ve always heard that the middle years are full of mixed emotions, but it’s pretty dizzying to actually be in those years, realizing you have been working hard, but have so much work left ahead, yet somehow you have hardly accomplished anything you set out to, or so it seems many days. A lot of my current thoughts when I compare who I was as a mother twelve years ago and who I am now look something like, “How did I get here? I wasn’t always this grumpy/stressed/frazzled/unengaged.” To lessen the daily stress of being a parent, playing games like 카지노 커뮤니티 can be soothing.

So though there used to be occasional posts here along the lines of “here’s a gem of a parenting thought or tip I have this week” mixed in with book recommendations, now there’s been a years-long complete quiet on the topic, and an absence of assuredness that I can offer any wisdom at this point. For now, while I don’t have the answer for how to thrive in the middle years fully worked out or a whole lot of confidence in any part of my mothering “methods” at all, I have found great hope and direction from two books in the last few months that I would love to share with you.

Remaining You While Raising Them is the number one parenting book I’d recommend to moms today, now that I am in the middle instead of at the idealistic beginning. I have read many, many parenting books, but this one is really the most encouraging, refreshing, and practical. I highly recommend the audio, and listening to the podcast episode of Don’t Mom Alone when author Alli Worthington is the guest. For anyone worried that this book will focus too much on a mom’s me-time or encourage you towards selfishness rather selflessness, I cannot stress more how pleasantly surprised I was with the way Worthington handles the topic of a parent’s health (mental, physical, and spiritual) without becoming in any way unbiblical (in my opinion, at least) or unbalanced.

Mothering by the Book is just absolutely a kindred spirit book for me. Not only does it draw from examples in novels and nonfiction books at homeschooling mom and author Jennifer Pepito has read aloud to her kids to combat the fears that mothers face on a daily basis, but it met me exactly in that middle years parenting place I have been struggling to figure out lately. Everything Pepito has to say on parenting is deep yet thoroughly practical and easy to understand. If you’re a homeschooling mom like I am, I also can’t recommend her podcast episode on Read Aloud Revival enough. The lay out of the book is brilliant, and I truly loved the book recommendations and scripture to memorize at the end of each chapter.

I’ve read many parenting books, and will continue to do so, but I really can say that these two books have been more helpful, refreshing, and applicable to my life than any others have in years. I’d love to hear from you on what parenting books you’d put at the top of your list! Or anything you’ve enjoyed reading at all lately. Until next time, happy reading!

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Everyday Life, Nonfiction, Quick Lit, Reading, Reviews

A Longing for Faithfulness and A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

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If you read my last reading update, you know I blitzed through a bunch of new releases in the first half of the summer, some good, many not. I walked into the second half of summer with deep longing for what one might flippantly call old fashioned. I was done with the FOMO kind of reading that I get when I see exciting “Summer Reading Guides” or buzzy posts about beach reads. I was craving characters, stories, or nonfiction deeply rooted in the idea of faithfulness.

Faithfulness is the word of my heart right now. Celebrating the legacy of my husband’s grandmother this summer cemented this idea for me, giving me a word for what was a growing idea in my mind. I would love to be known as half as faithful to God, my family, and my every day work as she was. (And I should add that joyful faithfulness is really the longing here, for she was no browbeaten woman, but warm and sharp and capable and kind). There is a lot more anyone who knew her could say about her legacy, but to stay to the point of why this matters in my reading life, I realized that what I am yearning for in my thought life is a kind of mentality that doesn’t thrive in the current age. A courageous perseverance in steadily loving and caring for people, all kinds of people, without chasing after fame and followers, that commitment to something good and true over the long haul whether it’s trending or not is not popular in books, movies, or much of anything right now.

So coming into this second half of the summer, I was tempted to give myself a firm reading line, like, “No books published after 1960!” That would be ridiculous; I know by experience there are good and noble books published here and now. Even so, it’s the old books calling to me now. For fun reading, I’ve been enjoying Margery Sharpe (The Foolish Gentlewoman), Maud Hart Lovelace (my youngest girls and I read the first four Betsy-Tacy books over the school year last year, and now my oldest daughter and I have been collecting and reading all the rest of the Deep Valley books this summer), D.E. Stevenson (always), Frances Hodgson Burnett, and much more obscure titles that I have sitting on shelves all around my house, waiting for me to remember picking them up in thrift stores and book sales and come back to read them finally. There’s a measure of satisfaction I find right now even in just the act of being faithful to go back and read a book I’ve long been meaning to read.

And then I heard this title in a book group setting: A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. Oh! The very title is soul-filling. Published by Eugene Peterson in 1980, and revised in 2000, it’s a book on what it discipleship, or following the way of Jesus, over a lifetime looks like. It isn’t soul-crushing in its expectations for people or a lecture on what not to do at all, but a look at the way the Psalms of Ascent lead followers of God into understanding and dedication in the Christian life. It’s beautiful and clear, and I can’t recommend it more highly. I don’t know why I haven’t heard of it before, but I tend to think it all comes down to my ears perking up to that title because now is the time I should be reading it.

I also picked up Raising Grateful Kids in an Entitled World. It was a good wake up call for me to remember how important it is to be intentional in our decisions, not in a confrontational way, but in a guiding and focused way with our kids. Most parents want their kids to be aware of needs around them and generous and loving towards others, and also to have a resilience to face hard things as they grow up and become their own independent people in this world, but we don’t always connect how our parenting can instead make them feel a sense of entitlement that carries them right into unending self-centeredness. This book has a lot of good tips and insights for getting away from entitlement and toward generosity and thankfulness.

I’m planning to pick up a recommended mystery novel soon on audio, finish Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart (but it’s a little eerier than I expected….hoping I can stick with it), also finish Jayber Crow because I need more Wendell Berry in my life, and get back to some Gene Stratton Porter books I’ve been meaning to read for ages. As always, I would love your recommendations and hope you are finding some awesome books to carry you through the end of summer and into the back to school/back to fall season.

Faithfully,

Mia The Reader

P.S. If you’re ever curious, please see the About page for an explanation on my online nom de plume!

Children's Books, Everyday Life, Homeschooling, Nonfiction, Parenting

Favorite How-To Books for Kids

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Hi, readers! Can you believe it’s almost summer vacation time! Maybe you’re dreading all that free space in your children’s lives, or maybe you’re like us right now: every May, as our school year winds down, everything we’ve been doing all year suddenly feels unbearably stale and burdensome. Our minds have already taken in a lot, and they’re begging us, “Please, not one more date and important historical event to remember, not another science fill-in-the-blank sheet! For heavens sake, do not give us another “fun” book report assignment!” As the seasons transition to more sunshine and energy, we naturally want to run and play.

So how do we finish the academic year strong?

Or how do we keep our minds engaged all summer without killing our souls with more of the same schoolish stuff?

We pull out some how-to books and learn some skills with our hands!

Here are our current favorite how-to books. I’d love more ideas if you have them!

Sewing School 1 and Sewing School 2 – These books are so perfect for kids who want to learn to sew. They include pictures and detailed instructions, patterns…everything but the actual sewing materials. The projects are very doable in just a few hours (or less!) and will appeal to both girls and boys. My six-year-old daughter, nine-year-old son, and eleven-year-old daughter have all enjoyed these projects! If you don’t have a sewing machine for the projects in Sewing School 2, this machine has been awesome for us. I am a very out of practice and mediocre seamstress, so I am totally re-learning as I go along with the help of these books.

Cooking Class – This is the best starter cookbook for ages 5-8! The recipes in Cooking Class are easy to follow along, tasty, use mostly wholesome ingredients, and don’t require trips to the store every time your student asks to make something from her very own cookbook. I gave this to one of my six-year-old for Christmas and she has made many recipes out of it. They were all delicious and crowd pleasers.

In Bloom – As I mentioned in a recent Things that are Saving My Life post, I love this book even more than my kids do. We also have several other how-to-draw books, like this one about cartoon cars and this one about horses. I have heard amazing things about the classic Drawing with Children and have had it on my shelf from my mom’s days of homeschooling for years, but haven’t pulled it out yet. Next week I plan to open it up and try it. Maybe I’ll do the Brave Learner method and sit down with the book at the kitchen table by myself, start drawing, and see what happens….

The Redwall Cookbook– Any cookbook based on whatever literature/books your kids are into right now will be a welcome change to an otherwise ho-hum school or summer day. My two oldest have been devouring the Redwall series, and my son is always raving about how good the feasts sound. Both he and his older sister were so excited to get this from the library! Until they realized it features quite a lot of vegetables…English mice and other animals have very different tastes than American children, apparently! But they have been writing up grocery lists for me based on the dessert section, and that has been worth it.

That wraps up our favorite how-to books that are keeping us sane as we finish up the school year. May is also the time of the year I seek out a movie or two based on the literature or history or whatever connections to our studies I can draw. Last year we finished out with the film version of our literature read-aloud, Anne of Green Gables. This year I don’t see an obvious connection between what we’ve beens studying: The Gold Rush and Simon Bolivar, and also Newton’s Laws of Motion…any ideas for me??

I hope your school year ends well and your summer gets off to a great start! I’ll be back with some book reviews in just a few days, but until then, Happy Reading!

Everyday Life, Nonfiction, Quick Lit, Reading, Reviews

A Quest for Sustainability – Summer Reading 2018

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A snapshot of my current reading pile on this mid-summer day made me realize that I have a pretty clear theme going on in this season:

Apparently I’m not gravitating towards titles with words like “revolutionize” or “begin” or even “new.” No za-za-zing or va-va-vroom hear, please! No, I’m checking books out that are about “ordinary” and “everyday” and “the middle.” Somewhat unconsciously, the theme of this summer has become the pursuit of sustainability. What good things can I do and keep doing? How can I keep doing the things I must and do them well while also keeping the joy and fun in life? This quest for sustainability is really uncool, very boring-sounding, but I’m drawn to it like a tired person is drawn to a plain white duvet and a familiar pillow. I’m weary of the fads, I’m figuring out some things about what doesn’t work, and I want to be faithful in the seemingly monotonous places in life. I don’t want to struggle along anymore in the everyday, ordinary parts of life. When the summer ends, I want to be ready for doing the school year well. I’m not itching for new– not a new house or a new career or even a new baby (and I treasure my babies) – I’m longing to get the house I currently have fit for a productive and full life, I’m settling into this homeschooling/homemaking/writing/so-much-more career, and I’m trying to squeeze every last snuggle and game of Uno out these four babies that are already here. So on that note, here’s what I’ve been reading this summer:

Everyday Holy is a collection of short devotionals, good for gently waking my brain up a bit in the morning. This is the third devotional I’ve read this year, which is…surprising. I used to dislike the idea of devotionals, but there are times when self-directed study gets hard…when you’re super busy or groggy from lack of sleep or simply a bit apathetic and you need a starting point to get you thinking in the right direction. I always appreciate Melanie Shankle’s blend of humor and honesty, and her constant grappling with the mundane, circumstantial elements of life that can numb us to the life believers are called to and graced with in Christ. My current morning reading practice is half a chapter of Proverbs (I spent the first six months of this year in Psalms and now I’m moving on!), a day or two from Everyday Holy, and a chapter of The Liturgy of the Ordinary or Give Them Grace. (Yes, I read a lot of books at once. No, I do not have ADD).

The Liturgy of the Ordinary is mostly about worship during the mundane chores and tasks we do each day. We fight in this culture against constant entertainment and a fear of the ordinary. Tish Harrison Warren explains in her book how she’s reconciling the ordinary with the sacred and coming to view them as not so separate after all. I liked parts of the book, though I don’t agree with all the author’s viewpoints. On finishing it, I’d give it 2.75 stars. I think I’m going to need to dig into The Quotidian Mysteries by Kathleen Norris next, because this book quotes it often! My biggest yet most unimportant beef with  The Liturgy of the Ordinary Day is that the text is constantly interrupted with bold main points. Listen. I know this is a common practice in non-fiction publishing right now, but I hate it. I already read that sentence, and you’re interrupting my train of thought to read it again??? No. Put it off to the side in the margin if you must, but here’s a thought: maybe you should trust your readers to read the page of text and gather the main points on their own, intelligent selves? This may come as a shock, publishing world, but we are capable of drawing conclusions and recognizing the heart of the message. Thank you, rant over. (But don’t get me started on back and forth, present to future viewpoints in historical novels…gah! Hate it. (See, told you I don’t have ADD. What’s the opposite? Complete focus at the expense of all else? Tunnel vision? I have that)).

Now, onto the cookbooks! I may have mentioned three or three hundred times that meal planning and prep is the bane of my daily existence. This summer, I’m out to conquer my struggles by keeping simple meals on repeat. Usually what happens is I swing from an uber-healthy eating phase to an “I’m sick of all this food prep give me pizza” phase. I stay in the second phase for quite a while before swinging back, but I feel nagging guilt about it all the time, so I end up avoiding buying “unhealthy” foods because I know they’re poison but then I don’t have the energy or forethought to provide my family with healthy foods and my grocery shopping is all a muddle…and then the week is suddenly a disaster. No, I’m not being dramatic. That’s why I was drawn to Eating in the Middle: A Mostly Wholesome Cookbook. Sustainability? Balance? Yes, please. I have yet to cook anything from it, but the Breakfast Egg Salad and Greek Yogurt Pancakes are on this week’s menu! I haven’t made it out of the breakfast section yet…the photos are beautiful. I have tried two recipes from Smitten Kitchen Everyday: Triumphant and Unfussy New Favorites and they were winners, especially the Chicken and Rice Street Cart Style. Have I ever gotten chicken and rice from a street cart? No. But I will be making this recipe again and again.  One of the best parts of these two cookbooks is the authors are not just good cooks but excellent writers; I actually want to read all the text and introductions to each recipe. Not sure how I became a person who reads cookbooks (or a Goodreads friend whose shelves are cluttered with cookbooks…) but I’m pretty sure it has to do with the pursuit of sustainability, haha.

The Baker's SecretOn the fiction side of things, I haven’t been hitting the novels very hard. I love being outside in the summer, running around with the kids, doing house projects, swimming, so the cold winter months are really when I do the bulk of my reading. I did read The Baker’s Secret,  and really enjoyed it, though there were definitely depressing parts (war novel). If you like WWII historical fiction like The Plum Tree or The Nightingale, you’ll like this book. I also finally got Ronia, the Robber’s  Daughter off my to-read list, and mostly enjoyed it, though it was much darker than I was expecting. I won’t be reading it to my kids…it’s more of a YA book, in my opinion.

Now homeschool planning for the coming year is heavy on the brain, so my reading habits probably won’t pick up til September or October, but I’d love to hear what your summer reading is looking like! Happy summer! And head on over the Modernmrsdarcy.com to see more of what readers have been reading this summer on the QuickLit feature!

Nonfiction, Reading, Reviews

How The Small Things Become The Big Things

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Do you ever feel like you’re in the middle of living out a theme? Like all the messages you run into or the conversations you have come back to this one idea, even if you’re not trying to bring it up?

There’s an obstinate theme in my life right now, and the theme is this: the big things and the small things in life are not that different.

Or, more poetically speaking, the small and unseen minutes we live add up to the grand, sweeping, epic whole. Tiny thoughts, words, and actions are the grains of sand that make up the whole.

Image result for the painted desert

It’s a big thing to exercise. It’s a small thing to take a walk. It’s a big thing to be a friend. It’s a small thing to have a conversation. It’s a big thing to feed your kids for an entire childhood. It’s a small thing to make a comforting recipe on a weeknight. It’s a big thing to love someone with your whole heart. It’s a small thing to look straight into the eyes of your child when he’s telling you about the Transformer he’s pretending to be while you’re trying to cook dinner. The small and the big get blurry when we stare at them together.

Church of the Small Things: The Million Little Pieces That Make Up a LifeI didn’t know this big vs. small idea was the ground rock of Church of the Small Things: The Million Little Pieces That Make Up A Life, the newest release from NY Times Bestseller (and the writer of the first blog I ever followed) Melanie Shankle. I signed up to be on her book launch team almost blindly, because all her books are delightful and her blog in its early days spoke straight into my middle-of-the-night pacing with my firstborn and gave me the gift of humor with a shot of perspective. (Being on the book launch team just means I get to read the book early and review it, not that I’m paid or have any incentives for getting others to buy it or anything like that). Now, I can honestly say this is her best book yet, a perfect combination of funny and wise musings about the way a life lived in the small moments is a life worth living wholeheartedly. Better still, it fully forms the thoughts surfacing in my own life about purpose and faithfulness.

Shankle “had me at hello” when her introduction began with the Biblical account of Jesus feeding the 5,000 with a boy’s lunch because she basically asks, “what about the boy’s mother who probably packed the lunch?” I love how she muses about what the mother could’ve been thinking that morning and how the last thing she would have expected was a miracle to come from that packed lunch. You probably know that feeling of doing something so minute as packing a lunch, you’re not even really thinking about it, or if you are, you’re wishing you had something better to give your kid and what is a Bento box anyway? Shankle’s position is that all those little moments of faithfulness are shaping you and shaping the people around you. How true. More often than not, it’s the ordinary faithfulness, the staying instead of going and the hidden jobs that have no platform, that make a person’s character.

It’s easy to resent the never ending meal prep, the staff meeting you are wishing yourself out of, the paperwork you just did, or whatever seemingly unimportant and repetitive task you wake up to day after day. We all feel that way. Here’s my favorite quote about this from the book:

Nothing is wasted when we view it through the lens of what God has for us in whatever life brings our way. It’s all part of who we are and who he is making us to be. For some, that may be a public role on a big stage, but for the vast majority of us, it’s about being faithful in the small stuff: going to the grocery store, volunteering in our kids’ classroom, befriending the new girl, coaching a Little League team, showing up for work every day, being kind to our neighbors.

We need to look for God in the ordinary, everyday things, to pursue our lives and live our dreams and be faithful in the small things, because those are the moments that prepare us for the next thing.

-Melanie Shankle, Church of the Small Things

Maybe we should stop questioning whether what we’re doing at this minute or this stage of our lives is important or worthy and simply, finally believe this: it is all important. To me, that’s so encouraging.

It’s all kind of like that story about the boy with the spool of thread. You know the one? The wise old woman gives Peter a spool of thread that represents the time of his life, and when he gets uncomfortable and wants to skip some part, he does, simply by un-spooling some of the thread. When he gets to the end of his life, and he’s only lived the parts he thought were enjoyable or momentous, who is he? He’s like a shell of a person with an empty life. He didn’t stick around for the crying baby, he couldn’t handle all the school lessons, he wasn’t into working so he skipped the work…yikes. I’m actually glad we can’t do that. But sometimes, we do it as best as we can without a spool of time-thread. I know I do. Distraction, ungratefulness, wishing for other circumstances, it all keeps us from being faithful in the little things.

I’m grateful for Church of the Small Things for finally nailing down the clarity I was seeking in this theme I keep coming back to: the small things become the big things and faithfulness is in every moment.

That is the serious side of the book. What might be even better, though, is that this book will make you laugh. It’s got some deep thoughts in it and that’s what stood out to me after I finished it, but oh, how good it was to laugh out loud while reading about Shankle’s experiences throughout her life. She focuses on stories about seemingly monotonous life experiences that became important, or stories about the people around her whose everyday faithfulness to loving those around them changed the lives around them, one everyday-day at a time, with a huge dose of humor injected in everything.

Church of the Small Things has encouraged me a great deal lately, even more than I anticipated it would. I’m thinking it could encourage many of us, (note: it is mostly geared toward women, though I do force my husband to let me read him particularly funny parts). If you’re thinking about grabbing up a copy, now is the time! There are some pretty cool pre-order bonuses you can get if you order before October 3rd.

Whether you end up reading this book or not, I hope you are encouraged to look at your small moments as more valuable than you realize. As Melanie says, “Nothing is wasted.”

{Plug for future blog post – I’m working up the nerve to post some parenting related thoughts in the coming weeks. It’s been a long season of quiet on that front here at Miathereader.com. If you’re into that, could you comment here if any of these popular posts have resonated with you in the past or do now? Thank you so much, friends!

– Put Down the Scissors

–Loving the Littles Who Persecute Us

– Surface Farming}