Cousin, Cousine

 Rose's cousin Sam left last week, after staying with us for two weeks. The most entertaining part of their entire visit was watching the two babies play. They played in the pool and in the tub, they shared their food. Rose started butt scooting around as quickly as possible to catch up with Sam, who started walking in earnest a few days before he celebrated his first birthday with us. Sam taught her how to climb stairs too, which means we now have to keep an eagle eye on her at every possible second.

This is how their time together looked.

Here is a balloon from my birthday, would you like to play with it?

On second thought...

I'd rather bash you in the face with it.

Neener, neener, neener, you can't catch me.

Two babies each with his or her own veggie straw.

Why don't you try one of mine?

Yes, you DO want it!

 We all miss Sammy, especially Rose. He sure did teach her a thing or two.

Book Review: Midnight in Austenland by Shannon Hale

Title: Midnight in Austenland
Author: Shannon Hale
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Kindle for iPad
Books I've read this year: 82

One of the things I find interesting about Shannon Hale is that her young adult fiction feels much more highbrow than her fiction for adults. All of the adult-market novels she's written have been escapist romances (two set in Austenland and one where Brad Pitt falls in love with a housewife, basically) while her middle grade/YA books (like The Goose Girl) are rich in symbolism and descriptive language. Because I knew this about Hale's books going into reading Midnight in Austenland, I was expecting escapist romance, and not anything nuanced or complicated. I was not expecting the heroine of the story, recently divorced Charlotte Kinder, to turn into Angela Lansbury and start solving a murder. But that's what happened. The book deviated from being a romance and became a mystery-cum-romance.

I don't know if it was the company at my house or the book, but I had a really hard time getting caught up in Midnight in Austenland. I know that Shannon Hale's Austenland wasn't all that well-received when it was published in 2008, but I thought the book was kind of sweet; it was definitely a page-turner. But this time I found myself skimming. For at least a hundred pages I wasn't even sure who Charlotte's romantic interest would be. I think that move was purposeful on Hale's part-- Charlotte needed to know herself and become comfortable with herself as a single person before she could open her eyes and fall in love again, but that made the love story, when it did happen, feel a bit rushed.

Maybe if this book had caught me in a different, less rushed, time of my life, I could have gotten wrapped up in the story, but I felt that this was one where the reader really had to work at enjoying the romance of the story.

Sealed!

More than twenty years ago, the summer I was fifteen, I sat in the nursery at the Washington DC LDS temple, waiting for my parents to get married. That isn't true, exactly, since they'd been married for nearly twenty years at the time, but a year after we joined the LDS church, they had the opportunity to be "sealed" to each other "for time and all eternity," to covenant to each other that they wanted their relationship to extend beyond the bounds of death.

After they were sealed to each other, they brought the kids into the room, and we were sealed together as a family. I'd heard that temple sealing rooms had mirrors facing each other where you could stand together and "look into eternity" but I was so caught up by the solemnity of the service and the whiteness of the room and being overwhelmed by this moment in my life that I don't remember looking in the mirrors.

Seven years later, in a sealing room in the Salt Lake Temple, Ed and I were married. When Bryce, Annie, Isaac, and Maren were born, they were "born in the covenant," sealed to us upon the moment of their births because we were married in the temple prior to their arrival.

But Rose was born on the other side of the world, and we had the blessing of becoming her family when she was eleven months old. So last Saturday, we found ourselves once again in a temple sealing room, with all of our five children gathered around us, as Rose became our daughter, not just for this life, but for eternity. It was a sweet moment for all of us, and here are a few pictures, courtesy of my talented friend Scott Morris.

Book Review: Naughty in Nice by Rhys Bowen

Title: Naughty in Nice (Her Royal Spyness Mysteries #5)
Author: Rhys Bowen
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible for iTunes
Books I've read this year: 81

Once I finished Royal Blood, I looked in my audible account and realized that I was almost done with the Her Royal Spyness books. Boo. These books have been so much fun to listen to this summer. In fact, I think they're a perfect summer read/listen. Katherine Kellgren does a fantastic job with the narration-- easily switching from Georgie's high class tones to her grandfather's Cockney to the snooty French inspector's exasperated accent. Furthermore, you know what you're going to get with a Royal Spyness book-- it follows a comfortable formula, although each story deviates just enough to make it interesting.

In this book, the Queen sends Georgie off to Nice to reclaim a snuffbox that was stolen from her several months earlier. The only problem? Before Georgie can sneak the snuffbox away from the house, the "gentleman" robber first tries to rape her, then he turns up dead in his swimming pool, with Georgie as the prime suspect. Is she able to clear her royal name? Does she get the snuffbox back? Does she finally get Darcy into bed? Which evil murderer puts her life in danger this time? Read the book, and you'll soon find out.

Book Review: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Title: Gone Girl
Author: Gillian Flynn
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Kindle for iPad
Books I've read this year: 80

I think the highest praise I can give this book is that once I started reading it, I could hardly put it down. We had company here, and every afternoon I put Rosie down for a nap and promptly sneaked off to my bedroom to read for an hour or so. When I finished it, I told Eddie he HAD to read it, and he spent the next weekend our company was here holed up in the bedroom reading. I've already bought Flynn's first book (she wrote two other suspense/thrillers before Gone Girl).

Before you get too excited, and before I figure out a way to talk about the story without giving any spoilers, let me say that if you're at all squeamish about murder, sex, violence, foul language, or just plain evil, this might not be the book for you. I'd say that Flynn definitely leans toward the gratuitous when it comes to the vices. In fact, at one point in the novel, one of the characters proclaims the protagonists to be the two most screwed up people he's ever met.

Gone Girl opens with Amy Dunne disappearing on her fifth wedding anniversary. Her husband, Nick, becomes the immediate suspect. Over the next 432 pages, we hear Nick tell his side of the story, as he sees it fit to tell us (he freely admits that he omits certain details). But we also hear from Amy through her journal, a chronicle of their five-year marriage that makes it quite evident that all was not well behind the closed doors of their Carthage, Missouri home.

I can't say more. I'd love to say more, but I can't. You just have to go read it yourself and watch how Flynn unfolds her story. Just be prepared to have a messy house and unfed children while you hole up reading.

Book Review: Royal Blood by Rhys Bowen

Title: Royal Blood (Her Royal Spyness Mysteries #4)
Author: Rhys Bowen
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible for iPhone
Books I've read this year: 79

After a while, Rhys Bowen's books tend to blend together. Is this the story where someone tries to kill Georgie in Scotland or France? It's been several weeks since I finished Royal Blood, and despite the somewhat formulaic nature of all of the books in the series (the Queen sends Georgie off to do some covert operation for her-- something like spying on her son's girlfriend, Georgie gets herself involved in a situation, someone gets killed, she almost gets killed by the killer, she gets rescued by Darcy, etc...), I remember this book very well, and I think it's my favorite of the Her Royal Spyness Mysteries so far.

In this incarnation, the Queen sends Georgie off to Transylvania, to be the representative of the English royal family at a wedding of a Hungarian princess to a Romanian prince (or vice versa). But when Georgie arrives in Transylvania, nothing is what she expected it to be-- the chubby old school chum who will be the bride has become a svelte, beautiful woman. The castle seems to be haunted. And then there's the creepy man who Georgie found standing over her bed at night. He has to be a vampire, right?

If you've read the other Royal Spyness Mysteries, you're in for more of the same, executed deftly. Georgie's character gets more endearing as the series progresses, and she manages to pick up a maid who provides excellent comic relief in this novel.

Sesame Street Party Gone Very, Very Wrong

My family is in town for Rosie's sealing (more on that later), and today was my nephew Sam's first birthday. In typical fashion (for my mom) the birthday cupcakes were extreme-- in this case, they were extremely red, as in an entire bottle of the highly-pigmented fancy food coloring red. And they turned our cute little babies into, well, vampire babies.

Check it out:

In the beginning, there was a sweet, adorable little Elmo cupcake.

Mmm. I'm eating Elmo. His blood is very tasty.

Nice fangs.

I'll eat you up I love you so....

The kiddie coven.

My arms and legs are out of control! I must be turning into a bat!

I vant to suck your blood.

Book Review: Abundance by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Title: Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think
Authors: Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Kindle for iPad
Books I've read this year: 78

Reading the newspaper or watching the Today show (especially watching the Today show), you might think that the world is going to hell. In five years there won't be any food left, there won't be clean water, there won't be oil, and it will be 100 degrees in January. But according to the authors of Abundance, life is only going to get better. They give many very convincing arguments for how the world is going to get better as technology improves. Africa will get clean drinking water and power. Cell phones have already given the average African tribesman as much information as the US president had 20 years ago.

The book reads like a TED talk, and I felt like my faith in human nature was restored by the end. Through innovation, technology, and a few well-placed prizes, we'll be able to solve the problems of global warming and renewable energy, and we'll all be driving around in computer-driven cars in 20 years. One thing I really didn't like is that the book is written by two authors, but someone kept referring to himself as "I" (when I was in medical school, when I established the X prize) but they never made it clear which "I" was speaking. That made the book a little bit annoying.

Book Review: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Title: The Fault in Our Stars
Author: John Green
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Kindle for iPad
Books I've read this year: 77

Hazel is sixteen, and she's was diagnosed with cancer three years ago. Her lungs are crap, and she's not a transplant candidate, so she walks around with an oxygen canister. Her parents pulled her out of school when she got sick, and now they have a tendency to hover. Her one break each week is her support group for teenagers with cancer, which is where she meets Gus, a seventeen-year-old who's osteosarcoma is in remission and who came to support a friend who's going blind. Sounds like a pretty grim story, right?

I laughed harder reading The Fault in Our Stars than any other book I've read this summer. Hazel and Gus, who fall in love, don't feel sorry for themselves, and they don't want anyone else to feel sorry for them either. They hate all of the cancer platitudes and tropes, and realize that their lives are decidedly not normal, even without everyone skirting around their issues. Hazel also has a major thing for this book, written about a girl who has cancer. She's read it at least a dozen times, and she has Gus read it too. Gus decides to use his Make-A-Wish wish to fly Hazel to Amsterdam where they meet the author, and where they have to confront the beauty and sadness that comes with the lives they've been consigned to lead.

The book has been compared with 50/50, and I can see some similarities. Green has written several other books, all for a YA audience, but it wasn't until I'd finished this book and looked at the amazon page that I realized that this is also intended for a YA audience. I thought it was a perfect book for an adult to read about kids with cancer, but I'm a little torn about the YA audience. These are very realistic, flawed, imperfect teenagers, and they do dumb things and things which find them out of their league. And while they would hate it if others accused them of playing the cancer card, they occasionally do things that they might not do if they didn't have to focus on their mortality every day.

The Fault in Our Stars is not a happy book, but it's an entertaining, enjoyable book. And a horrifying book, because as a reader I fell a little bit in love with Hazel and Gus.

Book Review: Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Title: Secret Daughter
Author: Shilpi Somaya Gowda
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Kindle for iPad
Books I've read this year: 76

The year is 1984, and Somer, a young physician living in San Francisco, is devastated to learn at at 31, she's going through menopause. After a period of grieving, she and her husband, Kris, decide to adopt from India, where Kris was born and raised.

Halfway around the world, Kavita gives birth to Usha, the daughter she knows her husband will kill, just like he killed the one she bore last year. So when the baby is only a few hours old, she walks for a whole day to an orphanage and tearfully leaves her daughter there. Usha becomes Asha, and soon Asha is adopted by Somer and Kris and brought to the US.

For the next 21 years, the book follows the lives of Somer and Kavita, as well as both of their husbands and the daughter they share. It's an interesting story, especially as it concerns some of the issues that Somer has with wanting her daughter to be "American" and not to embrace her Indian roots too much, along with Kavita's persistent sense of loss. The book also presented great insights into how an internationally adopted child might feel growing up in the United States. However, there were so many voices and so much time passing that I felt like I was just scraping the surface of this story rather than getting a full, rounded picture.