The Natural Treehouse, Chattanooga style

We love visiting our friends in Chattanooga every summer.  In fact, it's our mini-vacation after our vacation that we look forward to every year.

Chattanooga offers so much to do and we tend to try a new thing each year.  We've done the aquarium, Coolidge Park, visiting the Nina (replica of Columbus's ship) and playing on several of the area playgrounds.

We also vastly enjoy playing with our friends' almost three year old son, Joseph.  He had never been bowling, so this year we decided to be there for his first time.

Isn't he a cutie pie!  

We were also impressed with this ramp.  We'd never seen one before.

It's a little blurry, but I liked the action shot.

We had a girls' day out and played around at Charming Charlie's, ate lunch at Chick-fil-a then bought some cheap books at a local used bookstore.

Playground tire dragon.  Love the look on David's face.

Slip 'n Slide fun

But the most fun thing about our Chattanooga trip?

The natural treehouse.

While we were there, they had a HUGE windstorm.  A tree across the street in a vacant area crashed down.  It didn't hit anything and no permanent damage was done, thankfully.  But more than that, Tim saw that tree and said "I'm taking the kids down there to play."  That was the kind of place he would play when he was a kid.  He was right!  It was a wonderful playground.  The children claimed their own "rooms" in the branches of the tree.  They took me on a tour and proudly showed me their sections.  Their "house" even included a meeting area where they loved to call meetings to discuss important things, like when to go in for drink breaks.  

The meeting place

Overall, we had great fun during our 4 days in Chattanooga and can't wait to visit again.  Thanks, Patti and Jon!

Netgalley: The Amish Bride

The Amish Bride by Mindy Starnes Clark and Leslie Gould

In book 3 of the Women of Lancaster County, Clark and Gould continue the stories of Plain women finding true love and determining their future.

Mennonite Ella Bayer is in love.  She is sure that she will marry her teenage boyfriend, Ezra Gundy, join the Amish church in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and live happily ever after.  There is only one thing standing in her way...her mother... who is just as determined that Ella won't be marrying Ezra after all.

Ezra family, like Ella's mom, is concerned about Ella and Ezra's relationship.  Although Mennonites and Amish are both Plain, they are very different in what they believe.  One of the two young lovers must forsake their heritage to be able to marry the other.

Amid mounting tension, Ezra gets sent to Indiana and away from Ella by his father to learn about Amish dairy farming.  Without her family's permission, Ella runs off to Indiana to join Ezra.  While there, she meets young Amish farmhand, Luke, and strikes up an unlikely friendship with him.  When family tragedy forces her to return to Pennsylvania, Ella must face her past and determine which Amish man will share her future.

My Thoughts:

The Amish Bride was a cute, engaging book.  It kept my attention and had me guessing at the ending up until the last page.  I love the fact that Ella's character is fully Mennonite, embracing all their beliefs, but also fully her own, somewhat rebellious person.  She is real and delightful.

I also loved the ending that the authors chose.  It was not a pat, predictable ending.  It was genuine and unexpected.  It was the ending I would want for my child.

If I were to rank the books in this series in order of my favorites, The Amish Bride would come in second.  It was not as good as the first book, The Amish Midwife but better than the second book, The Amish Nanny.

My one complaint was that there needed to be a family tree in the front of the book to refer to.  I got a little confused trying to keep all the characters and all their family relationships straight.  (There may be a family tree in the print version of the book, but in the Kindle version that I read, there was not.)

I give this book 4 stars out of 5.

I received a complementary Kindle version of this book from Netgalley.  All opinions are my own.

Cub Scout Patch Solution

David has been in Cub Scouts for a full year now.  He has progressed from Tiger Cub to Wolf Cub and has learned some great skills in the process.

He has also earned patches, a lot of patches.

When you are in girl scouts, you take those patches and sew (or iron) them onto the girl scout sash.
When you are in cub scouts, you don't.  The cub scout uniform is dressier and "fun patches" can't be put on the dressy uniform.

Therein lies the dilemna...what to do with all the patches.

Then my friend, Erika, gave me a great idea.  She bought a cheap photo album for her son to store all his patches in.

We did the same.

To start, I made David go on a patch hunt and find all the patches that have somehow scattered themselves all across the house.  Then we took bright index cards and taped the patches onto the index cards.  I let him write a few words about each patch, such as "sold over 300 boxes" on the popcorn sales patch.  We slid the index card/patch into the little pockets of the photo album, then taped them shut.  (As a scrapbooker, all the non-photo-safe products were making me cringe, but since there are no photos involved, I got over it.)

Finished product:

A cool, easy place to store current and future patches, as well as a fun project that David can do all by himself.
SCORE!

Summer Fun: T-ball

For the third year in a row, David has participated in a T-ball league, a very low-key, fun T-ball league.

There are no outs, no strikes, everyone keeps swinging til they hit the ball, everyone makes it to first and then they go base by base when others hit the ball to go all around the diamond for a run.

David loves to be the last batter because the last batter gets an automatic homerun (since there is no one hitting after them, and there are no outs).

While I love this league and I love that my boy has a great time playing, I think next year, we are going to try a league with real outs and strikes.

Hitting contest.  David's hit was pretty good.

Sporting the new trophy.

Chilling with Papaw after the game.  Snack time is David's favorite part of the game.

Birthdays and Beaches

Sigh...

Our beach vacation is over...a whole year to wait to visit a beach again...

BUT
on the plus side...
We had an awesome trip!!

Some highlights:

• The kids discovered boogie boards at high tide.
• The pool is way fun when you add some goggles or a face mask with snorkel.
• We found an ice cream shop with 92 flavors, including sorbet that little old lactose-intolerant me could eat.

• Homemade tie-dye can be lots of fun as long as you realize that it doesn't always turn out the way you planned.

• Even at the beach, you can have a battle between the army men and the cars (the cars are the bad guys...of course).

• The first vacation with our cousins brings lots of smiles.

• Two of my favorite people are now a year older!  Happy Birthday, Julie and David!!  I'm glad you got to celebrate it at the beach this year.

Netgalley: Angels on the Nightshift

Angels on the Nightshift by Dr. Robert Lesslie

Based on true life accounts of Dr. Lesslie's time as an ER attending physician, Angels on the Night Shift takes you inside the miraculous recoveries and the heart-breaking losses of patients, doctors and nurses working in the ER.  This is the 4th book Dr. Lesslie has written on the subject.

My Thoughts:

This was a well-written, very engaging book.  Dr. Lesslie did an excellent job of combining patient stories with those involving the nurses and doctors in the ER.  Through it all, he weaves an on-going story surrounding the mysterious disappearance of narcotics from the ER drug cabinet.  The reader is left guessing and re-guessing who the perpetrator might be.

I have not read the first 3 books in this series but I can assume from this one that several of the same characters are in those books as well.  Dr. LEsslie does a great job of fully developing every person he describes.  We feel like we are in the room with them.  I look forward to reading his other books.

I give this book 5 out of 5 stars. 


I received a complementary Kindle version of this book from Netgalley.  All opinions are my own.

Blogging for Books: Tandem

Tandem by Tracey Bateman

The little town of Abbey Hills has been through a lot.  Six months before, brutal murders occurred in the town that led many to believe that vampires were living among them.  All the murders stopped when a house fire reportedly claimed the lives of two people, one of them being the killer.

Now it's time for the estate auction of Markus Chisom, one of the fire victims, and Lauryn McBride owns the auction house in charge of the sale.  As she sorts through Markus's many antiques, she also has to deal with the Alzheimer's that is stealing her father from her.

Amid the estate, Lauryn finds letters that belong to the Dastillion household in New Orleans.  Amede Dastillion answers her inquiries and travels to Abbey Hills, hoping to find her long-lost sister.

Can Amede answer the questions that plague the town?  Will Lauryn be able to survive the secrets surrounding Chisom's home?

My Thoughts:

This book is Tracey Bateman's attempt to write a Christian vampire tale.  I say "attempt" because I don't really think it works.  One of the main characters, Amede, struggles with whether vampires have a soul and can God really accept them into heaven.  In true Twilight fashion, she is a "vegetarian" vampire, eating only animal blood.  But really, human-like creatures sucking the blood out of something?  Even if it existed, can that really be God's plan?  I don't think so.  A lot was mentioned about God making them this way and that they can't help it.  I don't buy that either.

As far as the mystery part of the storyline, it was pretty good.  I did figure out who the bad guy was.  But there were a few twists at the end that I didn't see coming.  I thought Lauryn was the best character in the book.  She was real and struggled with real issues.  In my opinion the book would have been great if it had only been about her and her life.

Apparently there was another book written in this series that comes before Tandem called Thirsty.  There was a lot of information that the reader was expected to know from that book that I didn't know.  By the end of Tandem I had figured out most of what happened in Thirsty but if you are going to read Tandem, I suggest you read Thirsty first.  You will be less confused. 

Bateman can definitely write well, I just think her content could have been better.

I give this book 2 out of 5 stars.


I received a complementary version of this book while participating in the Blogging for Books program.  All opinions are my own.