I'm READY!

Since I recently began this blog, I really haven't known what to write about. But I have been blog-hopping and checking out tons of others' blogs and now I have formed some ideas of my own. I am ready to go!

What really motivated me was winning a blog make-over. Or, more aptly, a blog "make" since I really have no idea how to go about that sort of thing. I entered to win this through Simply Stacie during the Holiday Gift Giveaway Hop the first week of December. What I won was a $100 Gift Code to use at So Stylilized Basics : Blog Design. I've just been informed that things will get rolling around here in mid-January! Since I have no experience with this sort of thing, I have no idea how long it'll take. Hopefully I'll be able to post some of the things I've been working on by the end of January... we'll see!

A GREAT BIG "THANK YOU" TO:AND:

Do you consider yourself a reader?

When I saw this posted on From Chalkboards to Strollers blog, I just had to try it out. I have always considered myself to be well-read. I even went through a phase in my 20's where I tried to read as many classics as possible. Give it a try and see how you fare:

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.
Instructions:
•Copy this list.
•Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
•Italicise the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.


Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The King James Bible
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) – George Orwell
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
Emma -Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Inferno – Dante
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Wow - I've only completed 24 of those 100 books! What really stands out to me is the number of books I've started but never finished.

How did you "stack" up? (Awful pun, huh?)

Totally Inappropriate Greeting Cards!

I recently won a package of holiday cards from a giveaway on Mommy's Free Time. This past week, I received the cards from Totally Inappropriate Greeting Cards. I must say that these are perfect for us! My husband, upon hearing that I won the cards, immediately began making a list of who we would send them to this year.

The cards are not for everyone! They do contain bad language, so you must really think about who you send them to. I think my favorite part about these cards is the, unless you read them, they look just like any old Christmas card. And, at $12.00 for 8 cards, the price is right. Where else are you going to find funny cards like this?

Here is my favorite (WARNING: here comes some of that language!)



You can find Totally Inappropriate Greeting Cards on Etsy, Twitter, and Facebook.

Halloween!

This will be the first year my toddler gets to go trick-or-treating and I'm so excited. We watched "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" last night and everything I told him about going out on Halloween made sense to him when he saw the gang of kids knock on a door and receive CANDY! Now, since he's only two, "candy" is fruit snacks and I'm hoping to keep it that way.

I just put the finishing touches on his and his 12 year old brother's costumes. My oldest wanted to go as SpongeBob this year, so I figured I'd do costumes that go together. Therefore, my little guy is going to be "DoodleBob." The DoodleBob costume was easy - I just painted a box white and then made a rough drawing of SpongeBob on it. The large box that I made into SpongeBob, on the other hand, has had me up until 2am for the last few nights (I can only get the paints out after the little guy goes to bed unless I want "help.") Even though it'll only be worn once, I'm very proud of it!

Earlier this evening, we did our pumpkins. I bought pie pumpkins at the farmer's market last week so we could have our Halloween and eat it, too. Since I plan on cooking them, we couldn't cut them into Jack-o-lanterns. Instead, I got out all of my old magazines and cut out every eye, nose, mouth, ear, and hair I could find. Tonight, the whole family sat in the kitchen and taped these parts onto our pumpkins. We had a great time trying out different faces and showing each other! The pumpkins look creepier than anything you could carve, too. Our toddler had the BEST time and, since there were no sharp objects involved, he was able to make his own pumpkin with very minimal help.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION!
Please be patient, I promise to have stuff worth reading posted here soon. Thanks!