Favorite books of 2021

I almost always set my goal at 100 books, I’ve only met it once, and last year was yet another year that I didn’t meet it. I did read 80 books though. Here are my favorite 10 that I read/listened to. A great number of these were audiobooks. I especially love memoirs read by the author and you will see quite a few of those on this list. Here are all of the books I read this year: 

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1. The Book of Lost Names – This WWII book takes place in France. I just loved this story of a Jewish girl in hiding and a french resistance fighter working together to help get Jewish children to safety.

3. Between Two Kingdoms – If you’ve known anyone who has had cancer as a young person (not child), this book has so much insight into that experience, but can also be very hard to read at times. Suleika is a beautiful writer and I really loved this book.

4. Better than the Movies – This book made me laugh out loud several times and really I find that hard to find in a book. I definitely smiled quite a bit while reading this book. If you like cheesy late 90s/early 2000s rom-coms, this book will give you many reminders of those movies.

5. God Spare the Girls – This is a family drama, filled with secrets from everyone. Two sisters flee to their family ranch to escape much of the drama caused by their father, a local pastor.

6. In the Wild Light – Oh this book (and this new to me author), I just loved it. Two kids growing up in rural Tennessee get the opportunity to attend a very elite boarding school in New England. They both have hard pasts and lots to deal with when trying to decide whether to take the opportunity. This is YA at it’s best.

7. Food Saved Me – I’ve followed Danielle Walker online for years and have tried many of her recipes over the years. This is her health journey in memoir form. While much of her story has been told online over the years, I love reading it start to finish (well to her current situation as she is still alive and doing fabulous). You will learn how Danielle used food to help herself heal. I listened to this on audio, read by the author!

8. Will – Another fabulous memoir audiobook read by the author! Who doesn’t know Will Smith? Well, you will certainly learn much more in this book than you probably know.

9. Broken Horses – I had heard of Brandi Carli before listening to this, but honestly didn’t really know much at all about her or her music. The wonderful thing about this audiobook is at the end of each chapter, she preforms a song! Really fantastic audio book!

10. Hurricane Summer – Another fabulous YA book about a girl and her summer visit to Jamaica to visit her father. Tilla learns so much about her family, herself, and all of their secrets. There are some tough scenes in this book, but it is full of heart and you just want to hug Tilla and help her on her journey.

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Veggie Lentil Chili

This has been the year that my kids will actually eat soup. And while chili is not really soup, this particular recipe was something I tried out on one of our soup Tuesdays. Normally we eat beef chili and 3 of the 4 children really enjoy it, but I’ve been trying to replace some of our meat meals with non-meat options. When I saw this recipe I decided to try it. I changed it up a bit and added some extra veggies to get a few extra veggies into our bellies with one bowl.

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If you are anything like me, you don’t always follow recipes to a tee and have learned how to take a recipe and make it your own, so definitely do that and let me know what you changed.

Ingredients
1 large onion, diced
1 large bell pepper, diced (any color works)
1-2 T oil
2 cups shredded beets
1 cup shredded sweet potato
1.5 cups dry lentils (I used green)
1 cup dry black beans (or you can add a can of black beans towards the end)
5 cups of broth (I used chicken, because that’s what I have, but veggie broth would make it vegetarian)
1 28 oz can of diced tomatoes
4 gloves garlic
1.5-2 TB chili powder**
1 TB cumin
1/2 tsp paprika
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon

I make this in my pressure/slow cooker, but it could be adapted to the stove top as well.

Saute onion and pepper until onion is translucent. Add remaining ingredients. Pressure cook for 10 minutes and then slow cook for about 3 hours. I would check on it in the middle if you are home, but otherwise it should be ready when you are ready for dinner.

I serve it with this yummy cornbread (I usually use about 1/2 the sugar and use coconut oil instead of vegetable oil).

I’m happy to report that all 4 kids ate this without much complaint.

**The first time I put 2 TB chili powder and they thought it was a little spicy, but did still eat it. I cut it back the next time and we are happier with 1.5 TB in our house.

Have you had lentil chili before?

Best books of 2020

As I’m sure you’ve seen mentioned a time or two, 2020 was a different year and it affected every aspect of our lives. For me it definitely affected my reading life. I read less than in the past years and listened to far fewer audiobooks, especially in the second half of the year. I also definitely had trouble focusing on books and mostly read fluffy books with happy endings. I normally love memoirs when the author overcomes something great, but didn’t read very many of those this year.

I’ll post the screen shots of all the books I read and then talk a bit about some favorites (in no particular order). Some of these books seem like I read them years ago.

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1. White Bird by R.J. Palacio – This is a graphic novel that my older two had read and loved. It’s by the author of Wonder and is the story of Julian’s grandmother in World War II in France. It was heartbreaking and so, so good. It’s on our list to purchase.

2. The Dutch House by Ann Pachett – This book was on every reading list last year and it was great. I listened to the audiobook read by Tom Hanks. It is long and a little slow to get started, but I really enjoyed it. It’s a family drama that takes place over many decades. I’ve heard good things about Ann Pachett for years, but had never read any of her books. I’ll definitely be adding some of her others to my list to read this year.

3. American Royals and Majesty by Katherine McGee – These are totally cheesy, but fun books about the Washingtons if we still had a king and queen and a houseful of teenage royals. Definitely a good escapist read.

4. This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger – A beautiful story about a boy and his brother traveling down the Mississippi during the Great Depression. They escape from an Indian School where they have been living since their parents died and are on the run from the authorities most of the book. They meet some wonderful characters along the way.

5. This Promise of Change by Jo Ann Allen Boyce and Debbie Levy – Jo Ann was one of twelve students at the first integrated high school in the US South, before Little Rock. It’s told in verse and just so wonderful. While this is a middle grade book, I enjoyed it the most at our house!

6. When Stars are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed – This is another middle grade graphic novel that is so well done. Both Eloise and Great enjoyed is immensely and I think they convinced my sister to read it when she was here this summer. Omar and his nonverbal brother are Somalian refugees living in a camp in Kenya. Omar has the opportunity to go to school, but worries about leaving his brother. I love that there are so many wonderful true stories for my girls to learn about the world around us.

7. Cilka’s Journey by Heather Morris – This is a followup book to the Tattooist of Auschwitz, which I also read and enjoyed last year. I think I liked Cilka’s story a bit better. Her story takes place in Auschwitz, but the bulk of it takes place in a Soviet gulag, after the war is over.

8. They Went Left by Monica Hesse – As you will notice there are several World War II novels on my list and this is another one. This one takes place mostly after the war has ended and Zofia is searching the continent for her brother, the only member of her family she thinks has survived.

9. Things You Save in a Fire by Katherine Center – This is just a clean, fun love story about two firefighters. Cassie moves to Boston to help her sick mother and so has to start at the bottom rung in the firehouse again. As you can imagine, she is not very welcome as the only woman in the firehouse and so is put through some torture. I really liked her writing style and have read several books by her since.

10. Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar – I listened to this on audio and it is read by the author, which is my favorite! This book definitely had some graphic (and unnecessary)scenes I skipped over, but it was a fascinating story. The especially interesting thing is that it is part memoir, part fiction (and you really don’t know what is true). It is the story of Akhtar and his father’s journey as Pakistani Americans and whether they truly feel at home in America. It covers many decades and brings up many questions about it means to be an American. It would be a great book club discussion book, so much to talk about.

Did you read anything fabulous this year? Or any of these?

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#snippetsquarantine

As I mentioned before, we started a kid-run newspaper in April. In our last issue, we published a story from surveys of kids around the world and what quarantine was like for them. Since the publication of our last issue we have been posting profiles on our facebook page of all of the kids who sent in the survey. I know some people aren’t on facebook and so I thought I would post them all here now that we done posting on facebook. We hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoyed them. It’s so nice to see a little snippet of what life is like elsewhere in the country or world.

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Thank you so much to all of the kids who participated. We are still accepting stories, photos, etc for our next issue of our newspaper, so get busy and send us something at snippetsnews2020@gmail.com We can’t wait to see what you come up with.

sam

graham

sabina

ella

Elijana

hugo

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JE

JE2

olivia

basti

KC

Ken

alden

Ioan

allie

matteo

Snippets

I keep meaning to do a full post about how quarantine is going, but I never seem to get around to it. So for now I wanted to at least post our big project, which has been a digital newspaper, Snippets News.

You can read all the issues here.

Here is first issue and the front page.

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The second issue is posted here.

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Here is our third issue!

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The biggest excitement has probably been around the fact that we submitted it to the Washington Post and it appeared in both the print and digital version of the article!

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And now a few weeks later, our first issue was spotted on CNN! To watch the whole segment that it appeared on, click here.

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If anyone reading this wants to submit something our email address is listed in the newspaper, so click through and read all about it there. We hope you enjoy it as much as we have enjoyed making it.

Library Renovation

Matt is always looking at houses in our area (and I might also do this at times) dreaming of something better. After online looking at many houses we decided we might as well just stick with what we’ve got an make it the way we want it.

Our house originally had a one car garage that was quickly converted by the first owners into a bedroom to make an in-law suite on one side of the house. In our first big renovation two years ago we finally got rid of the extra kitchen and redid the downstairs bathroom. You can see all of that here. We mostly used the one car garage turned bedroom as a guest room/storage room.

Our book collection was outgrowing the current shelves in the family room and we needed to move some out so that we can get some more seating in there. All six of us don’t fit on the one couch anymore, so it was time to find a way to rearrange the house a bit to make it work better for us. The family room is still a work in progress and I don’t think I have any true before pictures for that, but I’ll post some finished ones once we rearrange and get some new seating.

So in order to do this we decided to take the front half of the guest room and turn into a library that connects to the playroom. The bedroom then became much smaller, but still usable as a guest room. As any project in an older home goes (especially ours as the previous owners were tinker-ers and did most renovations themselves and not very well), it ended up taking longer than planned and was more expensive than planned, but we are so happy with the end result.

So here are some before photos:
The guest room after it was completely emptied:
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The playroom wall that came down:
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A few in progress pictures, much to my disappointment they didn’t just bust through the wall like Chip Gaines.
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And some after (about 3 months from start to finish):
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And finally (since we just had our first visitors), the guest room is ready! Here are a few pictures. It’s very simple and a little on the small side, but we don’t often have many visitors (though anyone is welcome anytime). Feel free to come visit!

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What a difference! And now we have pretty much completely redone one side of the house, now on to the other side.

Bathroom remodel

Since we have lived in our house (almost 7 years), we have had some sewer problems. Every 6-18 months our sewer would become backed up and the plumber would come out and unclog it, tell us we should probably get a camera to look at the sewer pipe if it kept happening. The last time it happened back in September we finally found someone with a camera and they took a lovely video (I would post it but it contains our address and I’m not keen on our address being associated with this site, so alas you don’t get to see the lovely inside of our sewer pipe) which showed that the pipe was indeed cracked and also collapsed in one place. So we started planning to have it replaced. The main issue is that the sewer pipe is in the concrete slab in the playroom/downstairs bathroom and runs the entire width of the house, so it was going to be a BIG job.

Since the downstairs bathroom was going to be mostly destroyed during the process we opted to take the time and money to expand it at the same time. We have four girls and two small bathrooms, so this was certainly the time to do it, since I’m sure in the future we will need more bathroom space than we had. To expand the bathroom meant we would loose the in-law suite kitchen, which we didn’t really use except to store miscellaneous kitchen items that we rarely used. We also decided since the plumbing would be getting all redone now was the time to move the washer and dryer upstairs from the basement. So the first step was to remove the in-law kitchen and clean out the playroom (remove the carpet and other flooring below it). Here are some before pictures of the playroom and the in-law kitchen. As you can see they were oh so lovely in their 70s glory.

Here is the playroom (minus the carpet) looking toward the main work area. The far left door is the guest bedroom, followed by the entrance to the in-law kitchen and on the right is the bathroom door. IMG_0221-001

This is the in-law kitchen from it’s entrance doorway. The window remains.
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Here is the full in-law kitchen before we removed anything.
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The countertops.
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The floors, a lovely indoor-outdoor carpet, because obviously that is a good choice for a kitchen.
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And now let’s tour the old bathroom.

You can pretty much see everything from the doorway. In most houses in our neighborhood this bathroom is just a half bathroom, but ours has a shower added as well, which I am very grateful for, but the whole thing is super tiny and has practically zero storage.
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Everyone is totally jealous of this wall tile right?
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The shower was actually pretty spacious and came very much in handy after coming home the pool, all 4 kids could fit in there.
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This little shelf is where we stored a great majority of the stuff, hair stuff, lotion, extra shampoo, dirty cloth diapers in a hanging bag, etc.
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The vanity stored extra toilet paper and that’s about it.
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And the lovely medicine cabinet and light.
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And now it’s time to destroy it! Here is about the worst it was, a huge trench from the front of the house to the back, no walls!
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And the bathroom area.
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Here is the old sewer pipe, pretty nasty looking. Now we have a beautiful new PVC one.
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After more than 2 months, this Tuesday the plumber came and installed the new toilet and other plumbing fixtures. At long last we have two bathrooms again. I will say that I was pretty impressed with how well one bathroom worked for us. I was terrified it would be awful, but we really didn’t have any problems. The bathroom is 95% done. We still need to paint the baseboards and install a toilet paper holder and towel rack, but it’s usable and mostly done. The project continues though, since we still need to replace the carpet in the playroom and set up the new laundry area.

Here is the entrance to the former in-law kitchen (now the laundry room). We closed up the previous bathroom door and moved the entrance to the laundry area.
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The door to the bathroom. The washer and dryer will go under the window.
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The bathroom has a pocket door to save space and we have oodles of cabinet space now! On the far right is a tall linen cabinet that goes almost to the ceiling.
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The toilet area is to the left immediately when you come in the door.
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The shower is a little bit smaller than the previous one, but still plenty of room for a few kids. We got a new window and two little cubbies for shampoo/soap/etc.
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There is endless countertop for us to clutter up. The final details, the sink and the light fixture.
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And that’s it! We have a beautiful new bathroom. We are all very happy with it. Now on to finishing the laundry area and playroom. (P.S. the only work we did ourselves was painting (Matt) and hanging the mirror (me)). I’ll finish up with mounting the toilet paper holder and towel rack and maybe I’ll come back and add some more pictures when I do that.

Updated!
I forgot to show you the beautiful wallpaper that was under the lovely faux wood paneling in the playroom. In many places in our house the previous owners painted over wallpaper and it appears it was this wallpaper. It covers a good majority of our house. I can’t even imagine what this house looked like when it was covered in wallpaper, I so wish we had some pictures.
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