Friesencold

We signed Bauer up for the local library summer reading program again this year. I don’t especially enjoy having to keep track of how many “15 minutes” we spend reading to him, but it will be worth the effort when he gets to turn in his paper and earn some prizes….not to mention all the actual reading aloud that happens in the process. This year Bauer is tracking his progress on his library chart with stickers – in fact, stickers are all the rage at our house lately. He’s been decorating a large brown envelope and its contents with stickers and markers for days now and plans to give to a friend for his birthday, which is next January!

I decided to join the summer reading program at the library too. I guess they’ve had it in previous years, but I was unaware. This time around, though, I’m excited to try and earn a prize for myself and have a little extra motivation to spend time reading. I love reading if the story is good, but when I don’t know of a particularly good story to read, I find that I have a hard time making time for reading. On the other hand, when a book gets me, I’m a goner for a few days. I love it, though. I finished Little Bee by Chris Cleave at the end of May, and then didn’t read for about 2 weeks, mainly because I didn’t know how good of a story awaited me. When I finally got down to business with Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay, I enjoyed the story immensely. I loved the mix of history and a modern-day story line. I loved the sadness and the trueness, even though it was fiction. My mom is superb at recommending books (she told me about and lent me her copy of both of these), which means now I can be superb at recommending books too. So if you are looking for a couple good stories for your summer reading list, these are my top two recommendations. I also highly recommend two books I read earlier this year: The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, both by Khaled Hosseini.

I love this quote I read today in the Frederick Buechner devotional Listening to Your Life:

“Though we would never have had the courage or the faith or the wit to die for him any more than we have ever managed to live for him very well either, his story will come true in us at last. And in the meantime, this side of Paradise, it is our business….to bear witness to, and live out of, and live toward, and live by, the true word of his holy story as it seeks to stammer itself forth through the holy stories of us all.”

And finally, do you remember my story from last year? How TJ surprised me a month before my 30th birthday and starting posting birthday wishes that he had gathered from my friends on this amazing birthday blog, which he later had printed and turned into a book for me to keep forever? I’ve enjoyed re-reading the book every once in a while this past year, and I love that my story has so many lovely people in it. Today is a month before my birthday again and that is why I’m remembering things about turning 30. I also was thinking earlier today that I like being 30 because I have enough stuff behind me to have learned a lot, and there are still many years ahead of me for living out what I’ve learned. 31 will be the same that way. And it’s odd – yay!