All Things Reintjes: January 2017

We had a very busy Christmas season here. Unfortunately, Chris had to take off the week before Christmas instead of the week after which kerfuffled my plans, but, I recovered :)

We made gingerbread houses with cousins, took an epic walk to Old Town on my birthday, spread out the gift opening to keep the excitement going, played board games, waged war against an awful cold, read lots of books, drank copious amounts of cocoa, ate the gingerbread houses, managed one play/devour-Christmas-cookies-date, and generally just lazed around.

It was pretty glorious.

Not the cold part--we're still battling that with very limited success, but everything else. Glorious.

Now the tree is gone, the decorations are safely packed away until next year, the floor is vacuumed, and we're ready to get serious about this new year. This week marks the beginning of both piano and swim lessons and a return to Cub Scouts and co-op so our pace is about to pick up considerably.

Wish us luck.

I'm going to need it to convince a couple of my children that knowing how to swim is an important life skill and also that it behooves them to just cooperate with said lessons because if they fail them one more time, mommy might lost her mind. And nobody wants that.

All my Amazon links are affiliate links, if you click through them and buy something I get lots and lots of cents to put towards more books at no extra cost to you :)

You'll have to forgive me once again for the lack of adorable children, but I do love a good book list post and this is my blog after all. This year, once again, my desire to read came up against my desire to craft and I'm afraid it was the books that suffered. Margaret got an excellent dollhouse though and baby Christopher got his baby quilt so I suppose the lost reading time was worth it.

Probably.

As I'm looking over this list I can see that a large chunk of the books I read fall into either the parenting or homeschooling category--which I suppose makes sense since that's what I spend the majority of my days contemplating. Little Men and Eight Cousins were both full of inspiration on raising a gaggle of boys, and Life Among the Savages brought humor to parenting situations that might make you cry without it. Leonard Sax's The Collapse of Parenting was my favorite, non-fiction parenting book. But then, I love all his books. This one leaves you feeling more confident in your parenting abilities--in a everyone's making this harder than it needs to be, you've got this kind of way.

The Awakening of Miss Prim offers a lot of inspiration in the home-education/self-education department. I would have liked the end to be tied up in a prettier bow, but that's just me--judge if you must. Also, in the non-fiction category, Mere Motherhood is just as good as everyone has been saying it is and would be great for any homeschooling or formerly homeschooling mom to read. I especially enjoyed the section towards the end where she talks about the amount of knowledge she and her friends had accumulated over their years of homeschooling:

"Josef Pieper tells us that leisure is the basis of culture. Most moms would laugh at the idea of leisure, but that is essentially the gift homeschooling gave us--the leisure to learn. Homeschooling moms are what remains of the leisured classes in these hurried, frantic days. We are the Irish monks of our time, carefully preserving old library books (and even reading them)...While we were busy thinking of our small families, we just might have been preserving something much larger." (163)

One of my favorite parts of homeschooling is the chance it gives me to learn all sorts of things I never had the chance to before. One of the last books I read this past year was West With The Night. It's something I would never have picked up or even known about before, but one of the older forms in our co-op was reading it for their geography lessons on Africa and I thought it sounded interesting. It's an autobiography of Beryl Markham who was raised by her father on a British East African farm, became a race horse trainer and then a pilot, and then eventually the first person to fly West across the Atlantic--which she accomplished by herself without even a radio. If I wasn't homeschooling I'm pretty sure I never would have picked this up and now I've learned more about Africa than I ever did in my previous thirty-some years and I will certainly make sure that Margaret reads it as well.

But maybe not quite yet ;)

If I had to choose, I think my absolute favorite book from this past year would be The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. It has nothing to do with homeschooling or parenting, but it is a book about books, and World War II, and romance. What isn't there to love? I had originally borrowed it from the library but when I spotted a hardback copy at a used book sale I snapped it up. It was that good. It needed to come home with me and live in my library forever.

Well, here's the full list and I hope you enjoy it. And happy reading in 2017!