2024 has come and gone, and we’re about to start 2025. It’s always surprising to me how quickly time seems to slide past, especially as a mom! My kids have really grown a lot in the past year: physically (my daughter grew 4+ inches), mentally (1st and 5th grade now), and spiritually (my daughter was baptized!). It’s a fun time in life, and we’ve also made a lot of progress on visiting the National Parks this year, with 16 visited so far. We have plans to see 15 more this coming year, which will be incredible. I am so thankful for this time in my life, to get to bond with my children, watch them grow, and help them along the way.
Do you have goals for the coming year? I haven’t sat down to do my planning yet, but I did make a good plan last year and the result of planning and following through was my first published book! The finished books have just been delivered to my house and I will be mailing out the pre-orders in the next couple of weeks. If you ordered a copy, you will be seeing it shortly! If you haven’t, and want to know more, visit my Storm Trucks book page.
I do have a few goals straight off though: I will be forcing my family to give up sugar for January, because boy, have we eaten too much sugar the past two months!
I will also continue with our daily family storytime. This is always a priority at our home and I can’t tell you how thankful I am for this time every day to sit with my kids, connect over stories, and have everyone calm and relaxed together before bed. I believe in family storytime so much that I was thinking, what if I could help {{ subscriber.first_name}}’s family start a family storytime? I thought an easy way to help would be to put together a 30 day email encouragement with tips, book lists, and more. You can sign up for these emails here, and I also set up a facebook group just for this challenge, where we can chat together and encourage each other in reading!
Hit reply and let me know what kind of resolutions you are making this year. I’d love to know.
Updates:
If you’re interested in How to Teach Biblical Values Through Stories, I wrote a post on that this past month.
I have also recorded several new read-aloud videos of Christmas stories:
Book Reviews:
Picture Book:
Pancakes for Breakfast by Tomie dePaola
Missing ingredients and mischievous pets create one humorous complication after another for a little old lady determined to make pancakes for breakfast in this larger-sized, color-enhanced edition of Tomie dePaola’s wordless picture book classic.
My Take: This is a funny story that teaches kids not only where ingredients for pancakes come from, the work it takes to make food, but also how to be generous when things don’t go the way we were hoping!
Adult:
What the River Knows by Isabel Ibañez
Bolivian-Argentinian Inez Olivera belongs to the glittering upper society of nineteenth century Buenos Aires, and like the rest of the world, the town is steeped in old world magic that’s been largely left behind or forgotten. Inez has everything a girl might want, except for the one thing she yearns the most: her globetrotting parents–who frequently leave her behind.
When she receives word of their tragic deaths, Inez inherits their massive fortune and a mysterious guardian, an archeologist in partnership with his Egyptian brother-in-law. Yearning for answers, Inez sails to Cairo, bringing her sketch pads and a golden ring her father sent to her for safekeeping before he died. But upon her arrival, the old world magic tethered to the ring pulls her down a path where she soon discovers there’s more to her parent’s disappearance than what her guardian led her to believe.
With her guardian’s infuriatingly handsome assistant thwarting her at every turn, Inez must rely on ancient magic to uncover the truth about her parent’s disappearance–or risk becoming a pawn in a larger game that will kill her.
My Take: This was a really fun read, with mystery, danger, and a very spunky main character. This is the first of two books, so I have to read the next one!
That’s all for today!
Happy New Year and may God bless your year ahead with family, fun, and good books!
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