Active Discussion Groups
Book Reviews
-
Most recent post :
-
stepmama
Life can be hard, but it's a lot easier when you are a good person, trying to do the right thing surrounded by people who love you! Goodness has a way of being contagious. Lucky boy. Lucky MAMA.
(from CLEAN UNDERWEAR: Book MAMA's February Review For Kid-O's)2 days, 2 hours agoShare your opinion
-
-
click to order now
My younger daughter just had her 10th birthday. We had a party here and she basically got everything her little heart wished for and then some. Her room is literally overflowing with stuff. Then, less than a week later, I hosted 20 members of the constantly expanding extended family for Thanksgiving. It all went fine—great food, good company, crazy kids. And everyone brought me hostess gifts—very nice gesture and absolutely appreciated by me but again more stuff.
This feeling of “too much stuff” is not a good feeling to have before December has even begun. Every day I go out to get the mail and there are at least 20 catalogs mixed in with the bills and now holiday cards starting to trickle in. The catalogs go directly into the recycling bin. Do people really use catalogs anymore? I mean, if you really wanted to order a gift...
- Get the whole review & share your opinion
-
click to order now
I absolutely love dyeing Easter eggs—always have. I love that vinegar smell. I love waiting and waiting for the color to get really dark and true. I love painting fancy eggs with brushes and everything. It’s honestly one of the few holiday traditions that I fully embrace. Plus I love to eat hard boiled eggs and egg salad so we generally don’t waste too many of the dozens of eggs we color. I love that even a really little kid can drop an egg into a cup of dye and wait a few seconds and then spoon it out or just reach in and grab it—dyeing their hands in the process. I’ve shown my girls all the old techniques—dyeing eggs 2 tones—both horizontally and vertically, mixing colors—both in the cups and/or on the egg, making super pale eggs and then the darkest of darks.
When I was little my sisters and I would compete. It wasn’t a...
- Get the whole review & share your opinion
-
click to order now
Why are bad things so much worse at Christmas? For some reason there is this almost innate desire in us parent types to have that traditional, Norman Rockwell-esque picture perfect holiday with the cozy fire, nuclear family, big dog on the rug, carolers at the door, steaming cider in mugs. Anything short of that is somehow utterly depressing. So even if one were perfectly content with a sort of avant garde life style or thrilled to pieces 364 days a year with his or her independent and free-wheeling nomadic existence, Christmas day might be the one day that that may suddenly not seem like enough. So that means even a good life can seem bad at Christmas. You take a crummy aspect of your life: maybe a divorce, some drunk in your extended family, an ill mannered child—and suddenly that aspect of your life becomes just glaringly...
- Get the whole review & share your opinion
-
click to order now
We were having dinner at my mother-in-laws the other night. Her ice maker has been on the fritz, and she lives alone so she had just been using her old ice trays rather than call a repairman. She was helping my daughters get some cranberry juice—on the rocks—of course, and was popping the ice casually out of the trays while she was talking over their heads to me. We both realized at the same time that both kids had gone utterly silent and were TRANSFIXED by the ice tray.
“Oh my gosh, what is that?”
“How do you do that?”
“Is that real ice?
“How did it get in there?”
“Where did you get that?”
“Mom, how come we don’t have one of those?”
Okay, these are the same kids who have i-pods, i-pads, nanos, shuffles, DS, laptops and God knows what else. All their homework and classroom information is on-line. They make movies of...
- Get the whole review & share your opinion
-
click to order now
I’ll never forget one of my first freshmen English sections in college. The teacher—probably a grad student—went around the table asking each of us which character in fiction we wanted to be and why. I was horrified and petrified and the truth was I really wanted to be one of the Sweet Valley High Twins but I knew I couldn’t say that. It had to be something literary and scholarly and so forth. I wound up saying “Jo” from Little Women which I hadn’t even read. Stupid answer. I mean, Jo’s great and all, but I was trying to fulfill too many peoples’ expectations at once. My peers—need to be cool, my professor—need to sound smart. God, there are so many better answers.
But the only answer given that day that stuck in my wee brain was this one: Wilbur from Charlotte’s web. The girl who said this was a really cute...
- Get the whole review & share your opinion
-
click to order now
I have to be honest. I am not a big fan of Halloween—the actual day with the trick or treating and all that. One of my daughters has tremendous angst over costume selection and changes her mind 5 thousand times every year. I did manage to talk her out of going as a taco this year. Not that I had any personal objections to dressing as a Mexican food staple and her father thought it was a hoot; I just knew in my heart of hearts that when it came time for the school parade, she was not going to be happy with that choice. My other daughter is a complete and total ‘fraidy cat so we are constantly on the look-out for scary masks and decorations in the weeks leading up to the big day. She forces herself to trick or treat even though her stress level as we walk around the neighborhood is sky high because she’s convinced there are...
- Get the whole review & share your opinion
-
click to order now
The holidays are here! In the spirit of massive excess that marks our American Christmas celebrations, I offer you a sort of montage of Christmas books this month.
I thought I’d try to be a little bit seasonal—thematic if you will, for this month, this oh, so joyous month of glad tidings and joy to the world and all that.
I really, really wish I felt that way. I really wish that I could just chill out and enjoy the season—but honestly, tell me one thing about it that is truly enjoyable? Stress free? No strings? No extended family? No arguments? Honest to God—I can’t think of a single thing, how about that? So I’m a Scrooge, I guess, a Grinch even! Believe me—I would love it if my heart would grow 2 sizes today or on Christmas—maybe my boobs would look bigger.
Even the damned advent calendar that cost like $1.99...
- Get the whole review & share your opinion
-
click to order now
This book is an absolute classic. It was much loved by me as a child and my own kids feel the same way. It contains stories, poems and songs and the last story is Clement C. Moore’s The Night Before Christmas which of course, we always save until Christmas Eve!
The illustrations are vintage which for me, somehow, is a more palatable way to visualize Christmas. The book has a sort of Norman Rockwell-esque depiction of the season—something we can all strive for, I guess!
Some of the stories are a couple pages and some are longer. But the good thing is that nestled among the stories are really short poems and songs that can be read on those nights when everyone is already almost asleep or about to lose their marbles because of too much fudge or just general holiday excitement!
For those of us who do at least give a nod to the...
- Get the whole review & share your opinion
