Aware?

http://www.dothetest.co.uk/

Click on the link and try this out. Makes me want to paint myself from head to toe in glow in the dark neon yellow and attach about 50 blinkies to various parts of my body whenever I'm on a bike.

Sneak Peek

Moses went up to Flagstaff over the weekend to complete the inspections of our new house. We don't feel like we can show you a bunch of pictures of the house since it isn't ours yet and hasn't been publicly advertised. But I am offering the following sneak peek of the best room in the house:



This is the sun room in the backyard, off of the dining room. I'm planning on putting a container garden in here with all of my favorite greens. I'm hoping that even though the room is on the North side of the house it will get enough sun from the East and West for the greens to take off. I'm also hoping all that snow will magically disappear by April. Burrrrrr.

Short Stack

This week's theme in the Washington Post was "overlooked novels by great authors." I thought and thought about this theme and decided that I am not well read enough to come up with a list. I've read a lot of novels by a lot of authors, many of them great, but I don't think I'm tuned in enough to know which ones qualify as "overlooked." So instead, I'm providing you with my 5 favorite books on Garion's bookshelf:..

(1) How I Became a Pirate by Melinda Long: a young boy joins a crew of pirates for a night, learns how to speak pirate, and teaches the pirates how to play soccer.
(2) Skippy John Jones by Judy Schachner: a young siamese cat pretends, much to his mother's consternation, to be a chihuahua and has outrageous adventures.
(3) Knuffle Bunny and Knuffle Bunny Too by Mo Willems: hard to describe without giving away the plots, but these books are about Trixie and her very precious Knuffle Bunny (Stacy, if you haven't read the Knuffle Bunny books, I highly recommend them. Izzy's a little too young to really truly enjoy them, but they'll make you laugh...and really, story time is all about the mom).
(4) Edwina, the Dinosaur who Didn't Know She was Extinct, by Mo Willems: Reginald Von Hoobie-Doobie tries to prove that his town's beloved dinosaur, Edwina, is actually extinct.
(5) Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram: because this was the first book I ever read to Garion and we still pick up our dog-eared, chewed on, drooled on, run over copy every once in awhile and Garion and I have a "guess how much I love you" contest. (Garion: I love you all the way to Jupiter! Me: Oh yeah? I love you all the way to Pluto!, etc., etc.)

So, my bookish buddies, what are your favorite overlooked novels by great authors or favorite children's short stories?