The Adventures of Ack and Snowy

Bug was very upset last year because her Elf, Ack, forgot to move most nights.  So the very first thing she asked for when Christmas season started was for her Elf to be better.  Mommy sent him to Elf Retraining School and got him a new best bud to encourage him to be better and Bug was very satisfied with his results.

 His very first night here was a night Bug spent in and out of the hospital for appointments and procedures so he stayed at home with Goose but sent Snowy in his place with a letter and a present for her.

Most nights he just left to go see Santa and came back to a different location but occasionally he brought the girls presents or played silly tricks on them.

One night he took a marker and colored on pictures of family members.

He took off his clothes and made snow angels!

We got a new Christmas tree for our living room and he brought them each new ornaments to decorate it.

Silly Ack took a bath in marshmallows.

I made pancake mix the night before and he got up and made himself teeny tiny Ack-sized pancakes before the girls got up.

There was a very intense game of Tic Tac Toe which we unfortunately never found out who won.

They brought the girls some new mugs and packages of hot cocoa!

Bug looked so forward to finding her visitors every day and is already talking about where they will be next year.

My Christmas Coffee Mugs

I don't have near as many winter coffee mugs as I do fall, but I'm slowly gathering a nice collection up.

My first one was bought last year and I regret not buying the bigger size because I rarely drink cappuccino's anymore and this one is almost too small for my daily giant cups of joe.

Another Starbuck's mug but this is from this year's collection.  I love all of their seasonal mugs but I am going to try reallyyy hard to limit myself to one a year so I don't go overboard.

And my favorite holiday mug is stupid but it makes me smile every time I see it!

My November Book Pile

This was a GREAT reading month for me.  I don't know what it was but I just felt like reading every spare second I had.  I even did one big readathon weekend and got through a few books off my pile.

I cleaned out my bookcase and donated several bags of unwanted books and I found a couple of teeny tiny books that I thought I could knock out really quickly so that helped my total, too.

My favorite this month was Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo.  I wasn't a huge fan of Six of Crows but I absolutely LOVED Crooked Kingdom.  I could not put it down.

There were several least favorites this month but by far the worst was Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell.  I listened to an audiobook of this one and finally had to end it a few chapters from the end because the author narrated it and her voice was about to make me go insane.

December is already proving to be a busy busy month for us so I doubt I will have this good of a pile going.  Oh well, here's to 2017!

My Weekend Readathon

I had a three day weekend and decided to spend it doing as much reading as I possibly could.  It was my own little three day readathon.

I went the library and got myself a giant stack of books to pick through.

By the end of my three day break I had finished four books (three of mine and one chapter book with Bug) and started the two on the right.

Yes, yes Twilight is trash.  I still love it.  Sue me.

I love weekends where you have absolutely nothing planned and all you need are a good book and a hot cup of coffee to be happy.

My October Book Pile

I once again worked eight hour days all week so I was only able to read during my breakfast time or at night if I forced myself to stay up late.  Work hours stink for my reading but are great for our grocery budget!

I read six books on my own this month and three chaptered books with my Bug.  We normally average one and a half books per month but she just LOVES Beverly Cleary and wanted me to read more and more each day.  I ended up reading one book to her for an entire hour at the kitchen table one night.  She's going to be so disappointed when we finish all of the Cleary collection (and we are getting pretty close to it!)


My favorite this month was This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper. I watched the movie a while back and liked it so much that I immediately put the book on my TBR list so I could read and rewatch it again. 

My least favorite was probably The Vegetarian by Han King because the translation was so jumpy and I hated every single character in it.  I am so glad it was a short book.

I reread Six of Crows because the last time I read it I was just eh about it and wanted to give it another chance before reading Crooked Kingdom.  Happily, it went a lot quicker the second time around.

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween from Goose and Bug (and Mini Kitty)!

My September Book Pile

My work schedule went from three hours a day to eight hours a day in the beginning of September so I was very lucky to have been almost finished with several books.  That helped boost up my book count a bit this month.

My favorite this month was probably After Dark by Haruki Murakami and A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. They were both spur of the moment picks that I had zero desire to read until I saw them but I'm really glad I did.
I actually had a pretty good reading month quality-wise.  I loved The Wonder by Emma Donoghue, The Masked City by Genevieve Cogman and the Little House book.
My version of The Jungle Book was the beautiful MinaLima version with tons of amazing pull-outs and fun things to explore.  Bug and I loved it.

Coffee Mugs: In Which I Have a Problem

I collect coffee mugs.  I love them and I go a little crazy

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is one of my favorite holiday movies so I was so happy to see this cute one.  They had one of the kids and one of Snoopy.  I wish Snoopy would have been on the one I chose, too.

This is my newest mug that I got from Starbucks to celebrate the beginning of fall.

The Dollar Store always has such cute mugs for holidays and I loved this one when I saw it.

My absolute favorite fall mug is one I found at Hobby Lobby last year.  They also had a matching rug and I'm still so mad at myself for not grabbing it, too.

This cute little pumpkin was found at a yard sale for 25 cents!

My owl mug was from Wal-Mart and I went a little owl crazy and actually bought two different ones.  I'm a little disappointed the handle is so awkward and I have to use my left hand to drink from it but it's so cute that I can't give it up.

I love collecting coffee mugs and fall ones are just too cute to pass up!

Oobleck

My girls love Oobleck and we've made it a couple of times in the past.  Bug has been asking me to make it again so I whipped up a batch and they took it outside and played with it until it fell apart.

OOBLECK

1 cup water
1.5 cups cornstarch (more if needed)

  

And that's it!  We added some food coloring to ours to make it pretty but it's not necessary to enjoy it.


I made them take the bowl outside and told them they could do whatever they wanted with it.  Needless to say they both were practically covered by the time they finished.

They asked to make it again the next weekend and this time we made a pretty green color.

The more you play with this the drier it gets so you might want to have a cup of water handy to rehydrate it occasionally.  My girls enjoyed using it as chalk when it started to dry out.
They made so much of this that we ran out of cornstarch!

My August Book Pile

I started the month of August strong with my reading and started shooting through books like crazy.  About halfway through the month the girls started back at school and my sporadic work hours turned back into daily shifts.  My writing just kind of dropped off and I had to scramble at the end of the month to finish up a few things I was forcing myself to get through.

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill was my favorite this month.  I've mentioned before that I LOVE Joe Hill.  So far my top three books this year include two by him and one by his dad.  NOS4A2 wasn't as fun as The Fireman but I still raced through this behemoth because his world-building is just so top-notch.  Christmasland was written about in such amazing detail that I could picture it perfectly.  Fun fact:  If you Google this book when you're done reading there is a lot of great fanart that bring the story to life even more.

Ollie's Odyssey by William Joyce was a close second for me which was a surprise.  Honestly I only ordered this from my library because I thought the cover was cute and that it would be a fun picture book for Bug.  Color me shocked when I get handed a giant chapter book.  I was going to just take it back but Goose picked it up one day and told me she liked it a lot so I read it after her.  The story was beautiful, about a little boy who loses his favorite stuffed toy and searches for him.  The illustrations are what put this book over the top for me.  They were gorgeous.

 How could I not love this?

I was pretty proud of myself for reading another nonfiction book again this month.   It was around 300 pages of nothing but the history of the Post Office and while I had a lot of problems with some things I still kind of enjoyed it.  History is my jam.

I am most proud of finishing off the Narnia series and finally completing Crime and Punishment which has honest to god taken me 8 months to get through.  It was a chore. 

The Chronicles of Narnia Wrap-Up

My Bug and I started reading the Narnia series this year and we powered through all seven books but believe me, it took a lot of willpower.

Neither of us liked this series to be honest.  Bug says she liked The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but that's just because she's seen the movie several times and was able to follow along easier with the book even when the writing confused her.

I think that was my biggest problem with this series.  It seems like a Middle Grade type book but the speeches from some of the characters felt like eighteenth century classic literature.  It was really hard for Bug to tell me what the plot was sometimes.  She normally asks questions as we read and sits patiently waiting for the exciting parts but when I read these books she pretty much ignored me the whole time.  I finished the final three pages of the last book by myself because after almost seven books of this world she was just done with it all.

This is a popular classic kid series that I'm glad I was able to cross off my TBR list but I'm disappointed Bug isn't going to look back on it as a well-beloved read aloud with her mommy.

Oh well.  There's always Beverly Cleary.  Her stuff is like sugar to my kid.

Funko Collection

I have a bit of a Funko Pop obsession and it's been very hard for me to try and stop buying so many to save some money up.  They're usually less than ten dollars so buying one here and there is no big deal and it's only when you see them all together that I'm finally like
oh
...
That's a lot of money...

So since I'm on a Funko Pop ban for a while I wanted to showcase my collection as it stands right now.  These are just the ones that I claim.  The other three in the house have their own collections.

My Star Wars collection is small compared to how many there are but I still am happy with it.  There's not really any more Pop's I want to add to it so I think that unless I just randomly come across one later that I like I am saying this is complete.  (I do want Queen Amidala but unfortunately she is very, very expensive.)  My favorite is Darth Maul, of course.  He's been my favorite Star Wars character since high school and I'm not even ashamed that I had a birthday cake of him.

 

The Avengers pops are my biggest collection.  I don't have all of them but this is still a pretty big percentage of what is out there.  Vision was the first Funko I bought and Paul Bettany is the star of my favorite move of all time, Legion, so of course this Funko was destined to be my favorite.

Eventually I would like to buy Twelve to add to my Doctor Who collection.  I love his version of the Doctor, I just haven't had a chance to pick him up yet.  Ten is forever my favorite Doctor though.

Leeloo from the Fifth Element and Diablo from Suicide Squad have to stick together since they're the only ones from their series that I wanted.

Pocahontas is another who's all alone.  The only other character in her series is Meeko but I can't get Meeko and not have Flick, too.

Last we have the Game of Thrones section of my bookshelf.  I only bought one for each book so that's why I stopped at five.  I wanted to buy my favorite character from each book that I read and Tyrion came first since he's the king of Westeros to me.  I watched the series while I was reading the fifth book so that's why Sam's in there instead of a book character.  I loved him from the show more than I loved any one person in the book.  The only thing I regret from this collection is that I have Dany and not Littlefinger's Funko.  After watching the tv show I really don't like her character anymore and would love to go back and buy his instead.