A huge thanks to Teresa over at Scribble Scratch for this cool theme! I’m working on modifying a few things but I just love it! The colors are perfect and right up my alley!

Hope you like it!

This week, the

Christian Fiction Blog Alliance

is introducing

Embrace Me

(Thomas Nelson March 4, 2008)

by

Lisa Samson

Lisa Samson is a Christy Award-winning author of 19 books, including the Women of the Faith Novel of the Year, Quaker Summer. Lisa has been hailed by Publishers Weekly as “a talented novelist who isn’t afraid to take risks.”

In Embrace Me, the latest novel by acclaimed author Lisa Samson, readers are privy to the realization that regardless of outward appearances…hideous, attractive, or even ordinary…persons are all looking for the same things: love, forgiveness, and redemption.

This story explores a world that is neither comfortable nor safe, a world that people like Valentine know all too well. Masterfully crafted by Samson and populated by her most compelling cast of characters yet. It is a tale of forgiveness that extends into all spheres of life: forgiving others, forgiving oneself, forgiving the past.

She lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband and three kids.

Biting and gentle, hard-edged and hopeful…a beautiful fable of love and power, hiding and seeking, woundedness and redemption.

When a “lizard woman,” a self-mutilating preacher, a tattooed monk, and a sleazy lobbyist find themselves in the same North Carolina town one winter, their lives are edging precariously close to disaster…and improbably close to grace.

Valentine, due to her own drastic self-disfigurement, has very few friends in this world and, it appears as if she may be destined to spend the rest of her life practically alone. But life gives her one good friend, Lella, whose own handicap puts her in the same freakish category as Valentine. As part of Roland’s Wayfaring Marvel and Oddities Show, a traveling band of misfits, they seem to have found their niches in an often curiously cruel world.

Residing in a world where masks are mandatory, Valentine has a hard time removing hers, because of her disfigured face but more so because of her damaged soul. It is much easier for her to listen endlessly to different versions of a favorite song, Embraceable You, and escape reality. Yet, life has more in store for her when she meets Augustine, replete with the tattoos, dreadlocks, and his own secrets. With his arrival, Valentine’s soul takes a turn.

If you would like to read the first chapter, go HERE.

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Well, we are about to venture into high school. I’m trying to map out our course schedule for the fall but this requires me to really map out some sort of schedule for the next four years. In order to gain the credits we’d like our daughter to have, I have to plan what she will take each year. One thing that I hadn’t thought of was physical education. At some point in high school, our daughter will need one credit. One credit is 150 hours of physical education. Today I’ve been racking my brain to try and figure out what we’ll do for that. I know one family whose son got into juggling and that was his PE. He became quite good at juggling and even performed locally. That’s another cool thing about homeschooling. We can choose some form of PE that breaks out of the traditional box. When I was in high school, we were required to take “gym” for three years. We did things like played kickball, basketball, and running. I liked it because I was an athlete but many girls hated it. They didn’t like to play kickball, basketball, dodge ball, or to run. Our daughter is the same way. She doesn’t care for many of those games. So, we are on a mission to learn a unique skill for PE. I think it would be fun to learn how to walk on stilts. I even found these cool stilts we could order! They are relatively inexpensive and we’d have a blast learning.

If stilt walking bombs, we could try something a little more difficult. Both sides of our family are Scottish so maybe we could learn to toss a caber, although I’m thinking we’d have to grow (A LOT) in order to do that. LOL! How about your family? What have you done to fill your PE credit? I would love to find something really unique to do. After all, we are supposed to devote 150 hours to this :-o)

I have to confess that I have a new fix. First, let me say that I really love teaching my children at home. I enjoy every aspect of teaching them and would not trade it for anything in the world. I know there is no better place for them than right here with me….all day long.

I’m always looking for ways to incorporate interesting videos, books, tv shows, and such into our learning. Sometimes I happen upon these things without really searching. Such was the case last night. We don’t watch tv much but lately we’ve had it on for March Madness. I was flipping to see if there were any games on when I came across the Discovery Channel. There I found a show called How It’s Made and was hooked when I heard them explaining how panty hose were made. I left it on and for the next hour, I learned the process of making panty hose, toilets, RVs, styrofoam packaging, pottery, hard candy, decorative candles and erasers. Oh….My…..Goodness. It was so neat! I made a mental note to set the DVR to record this show when it comes on so that we can use it for science. If you haven’t seen the show, you owe it to yourself to sit down and watch it. In fact, I’m going to do just that. The current episode will show how to make prepared mustard, violins, nuts and bolts, and toilet paper. Pretty soon, I’ll know how everything is made!

In teaching our children at home, we use a mixture of the classical and Charlotte Mason models. This has proven  quite effective for us and learning is exciting.  Below you will find a reworded summary of the 20 Charlotte Mason Principles.

(See a parallel with the original text here: http://www.amblesideonline.org/CM/20Principles.html)

1. Children are born persons - they are not blank
slates or embyonic oysters who have the potential of
becoming persons. They already are persons.

2. Although children are born with a sin nature,
they are neither all bad, nor all good. Children from
all walks of life and backgrounds may make choices for
good or evil.

3. The concepts of authority and obedience are true
for all people whether they accept it or not.
Submission to authority is necessary for any society
or group or family to run smoothly.

4. Authority is not a license to abuse children, or
to play upon their emotions or other desires, and adults
are not free to limit a child’s education or use fear,
love, power of suggestion, or their own influence over
a child to make a child learn.

5. The only means a teacher may use to educate children
are the child’s natural environment, the training of good
habits and exposure to living ideas and concepts. This is
what CM’s motto “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline,
a life” means.

6. “Education is an atmosphere” doesn’t mean that
we should create an artificial environment for children,
but that we use the opportunities in the environment
he already lives in to educate him. Children learn from
real things in the real world

7. “Education is a discipline” means that we train a
child to have good habits and self-control.

8. “Education is a life” means that education should apply
to body, soul and spirit. The mind needs ideas of all kinds,
so the child’s curriculum should be varied and generous
with many subjects included.

9. The child’s mind is not a blank slate, or a bucket
to be filled. It is a living thing and needs knowledge
to grow. As the stomach was designed to digest food,
the mind is designed to digest knowledge and needs no
special training or exercises to make it ready to learn.

10. Herbart’s philosophy that the mind is like an empty
stage waiting for bits of information to be inserted puts
too much responsibility on the teacher to prepare detailed
lessons that the children, for all the teacher’s effort,
don’t learn from anyway.

11. Instead, we believe that childrens’ minds are capable
of digesting real knowledge, so we provide a rich, generous
curriculum that exposes children to many interesting, living
ideas and concepts.

12. “Education is the science of relations” means that
children have minds capable of making their own connections
with knowledge and experiences, so we make sure the child
learns about nature, science and art, knows how to make
things, reads many living books and that they are physically fit.

13. In devising a curriculum, we provide a vast amount
of ideas to ensure that the mind has enough brain food,
knowledge about a variety of things to prevent boredom, and
subjects are taught with high-quality literary language
since that is what a child’s attention responds to best.

14. Since one doesn’t really “own” knowledge until he
can express it, children are required to narrate, or tell
back (or write down), what they have read or heard.

15. Children must narrate after one reading or hearing.
Children naturally have good focus of attention, but
allowing a second reading makes them lazy and weakens
their ability to pay attention the first time. Teachers
summarizing and asking comprehension questions are other
ways of giving children a second chance and making the
need to focus the first time less urgent. By getting
it the first time, less time is wasted on repeated readings,
and more time is available during school hours for more
knowledge. A child educated this way learns more than
children using other methods, and this is true for all
children regardless of their IQ or background.

16. Children have two guides to help them in their
moral and intellectual growth - “the way of the will,
” and “the way of reason.”

17. Children must learn the difference between “I want”
and “I will.” They must learn to distract their thoughts
when tempted to do what they may want but know is not right,
and think of something else, or do something else,
interesting enough to occupy their mind. After a short
diversion, their mind will be refreshed and able to will
with renewed strength.

18. Children must learn not to lean too heavily on
their own reasoning. Reasoning is good for logically
demonstrating mathematical truth, but unreliable when
judging ideas because our reasoning will justify all
kinds of erroneous ideas if we really want to believe them.

19. Knowing that reason is not to be trusted as the final
authority in forming opinions, children must learn that
their greatest responsibility is choosing which ideas to
accept or reject. Good habits of behavior and lots of
knowledge will provide the discipline and experience to
help them do this.

20. We teach children that all truths are God’s truths,
and that secular subjects are just as divine as religious
ones. Children don’t go back and forth between two worlds
when they focus on God and then their school subjects;
there is unity among both because both are of God and,
whatever children study or do, God is always with them.

~ 2004 Leslie Noelani Laurio

*used with permission*

I receive the epistula from Veritas Press every month. In it this month, was a nice article about the importance of reading. What I didn’t expect was the statistics included from a survey done by the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m including it below:

Rhonda over at Whatever! Congratulations Rhonda! I’ve emailed you to let you know you are the winner and to get your address!

The Mom Blogs tipped me off to this cool place called Wuzzles and Puzzles, that my kids are going to enjoy! Go check it out!

Synopsis:

Snake and Lizard find out there is more to friendship than deciding whether to eat raw eggs or bugs for lunch. And when “LIZARD AND SNAKE–HELPER AND HELPER” go into business, they learn even more about friendship.

Caroline and I just finished reading this book tonight. We took turns reading to each other and we both really enjoyed it. It’s a short bookk at 62 pages and a relatively easy read for a nine year old.

The relationship between snake and lizard is very entertaining. Our favorite chapter was “Money.” In this chapter, Snake finds a dime in the dessert. Shortly after, Snake and Lizard decide to go into business together. They decide to set up a cactus juice stand and a corn cake stand. When no one comes to buy their goodies, they decide to buy from each other using the dime. Snake uses the dime to buy some cactus juice from Lizard. Not long after this, Lizard decides he’s hungry and uses the dime to buy some corn cakes from snake. The pair continue to “buy” from each other until all of their juice and cakes are gone. In the end, the only money they have to show for their work is the same dime they started with. Very funny!

We really enjoyed the book and would love to pass it along. If you’d like a chance to win our copy, leave a comment and I’ll draw a winner on January 30.

My oldest daughter and I will be participating in this challenge. She has read a couple of the books on the list so she will replace those with choices from our alternates list. This will be a great way to spark book discussion and I’m looking forward to the challenge.

1. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
2. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
3. The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis
4. The Ocean of Truth: The Story of Sir Isaac Newton by Joyce McPherson
5. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
6. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeliene L’Engle
7. Valiant for Truth: The Story of John Bunyan by Anne Arnott
8. The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom
9. Prison Letters by Corrie ten Boom
10. Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment by James Patterson (*Dd completed 1-16-08)
11. Maximum Ride: School’s Out Forever by James Patterson (Dd completed 1-12-08)
12. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

Alternates:

• The Diary of Anne Frank
• The Hobbitt by J.R.R. Tolkien (Dd completed 1-18-08)
• Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis

This challenge is being hosted by Thoughts of Joy.