Book review(s): Anne of Green Gables series

Alrighty, in a recent post, I mentioned how I had just finished reading all the Anne of Green Gables books for the second time. The post focused on the last book, but I wanted to list the other books and give a little blurb on my opinion of each.

Anne of Green Gables - LOVE. Anne is so much fun and she tries so hard but makes mistakes anyway. I think this is a big reason so many people love these books.

Anne of Avonlea - Ditto. These first two books are easy to love.

Anne of the Island - I love the romance in this one, and how Anne learns so much about herself.

Anne of Windy Poplars - Not as good. This books was more disjointed (there were a lot of .short stories unrelated to the main story) and had a lot of negativism in it.

Anne's House of Dreams - This one was good, but kind of boring. One of the characters did have depression and I liked reading about how Anne learned to relate to that character; it helped me to understand people who have depression better.

Anne of Ingleside - Ditto to Anne of Windy Poplars, except worse. There was a main character who just spouted unhappiness, Anne's kids had negative experiences, and Anne was worried that Gilbert didn't love her for pretty much the whole book. Everything was eventually resolved, but I wonder if Montgomery really wanted to end the book like that, or if she was just trying to make her readers happy?

Rainbow Valley - Lots of fun! This book is more like the original books, but this time it's Anne's kids and their friends who get into scrapes. It's actually more about her kids' friends and their family. I think I liked Anne of Green Gables more because it focused on just one person, but this was still a really fun read!

Rilla of Ingleside - I really enjoyed this book. It's a much more mature book than Anne of Green Gables because it focuses on how WWI changed life in Canada, and more especially how it changed Anne's daughter Rilla from a frivolous girl into a responsible and caring woman. I feel like my world was expanded by reading this book. I wrote another post about this book.

Rilla of Ingleside and World War I

Wow.

I just finished reading the Anne of Green Gables series. There are eight books in the series, and I've read the first three many, many times. The first time I read through the latter five books, however, I thought they were all incredibly boring and not worth my time. I was probably around 9 or 10 when I finished the last book. Since then, I've grown and matured and can appreciate more things in life.

The two last books in the Anne of Green Gables series, and especially the last one (Rilla of Ingleside) are really good. The last book takes place during World War I. I haven't read any novels or accounts about either World War--I just learned the cold hard facts and not much else. Rilla of Ingleside made it real to me. These were real people; they lost their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers. I never realized the agony of wartime on the home front, where everyone was physically safe but feared for their loved ones. I knew that the World Wars changed lives, but I didn't feel it. Now I do.

If you want to stretch yourself a little and expand your vision, read this book; read Rilla of Ingleside. Read it not just with a desire to be entertained, but also with empathy for the experiences real people went through that provided the foundation for this novel.

Hot Indian Levi?

Levi did two things yesterday that I'm so proud of!

1. He saw some steam and said, " 'Ot!"
2. He followed some indirect directions: He was making a whining noise while I was holding him, so I started putting my hand over his mouth and then quickly removing it to interrupt the flow of air for a split second. Levi thought it was pretty funny, and liked the noise. He stopped whining, but kept making a noise so he could hear the interruption of air. After a few seconds of this, I was ready to put him down. Before I did so, I told him, "You can make the noise with your own hand, too," and Levi proceeded to make the noise himself with his own hand.

Eeee! What a fun little guy :)

A Day in the Life

So a few months ago I saw a blogging idea that I thought was pretty interesting. The idea was to take one picture for each hour of the day and then put it up on your blog. I finally tried it! Here we go:

We start out with breakfast. Levi is my alarm clock, and I get up when he does (~7:00 AM). As soon as he wakes up, he wants breakfast. Depending on his mood, he'll either yell until he gets it or desperately say, "Aah, aah, aah," (translation, "I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I'm hungry!") until he does.

 Playing with the tablet is not part of Levi's routine, but it was in his reach so I let him play with it this time. This picture was taken around 8:00 AM. In the time since breakfast, I cleaned up the living room some (gotta clean for those pictures, right??) and did some cleaning in the kitchen (dishes, I think?)

 "Mom, let's go outside!"

Going down the stairs, ~9:00 AM

 My son is so cute that I couldn't stop myself from taking a few more pictures ...

Mid-morning snack!

Losing it for no reason. We were both sad :(

~10:00 AM, Levi's favorite show Pocoyo. It's really cute and he can watch in either Spanish or English.

Levi was able to relax while he was watching, and he was fine for the next 2 hours.
[EDIT: Levi did not watch Pocoyo for 2 hours. 30 minutes was all that took to calm him down.)

Levi saw me cleaning up some food he spilled on the floor, and wanted to try it out, too :) (~11:00 AM)

I make about one smoothie per day. It's great for helping both Levi and me eat more healthily! (~11:30 AM)

Naptime! (~12:30 PM)

Me telling myself, "You're so cool!" to try to psych myself up for having a flattering 

expression for a selfie. It worked better in the next picture ....

A better selfie! I figured if I was chronicling MY day, then I'd 

better put some pictures of myself in there.

After the selfies, I did some FamilySearch indexing! If you haven't tried it, then you should. It's basically crowd sourcing out the work to make all of the world's records searchable by computer. (~1:00 PM)

Mmmmmm! I made lunch and ate it. Which of these three pictures do you think is the yummiest looking? I did a much better job with these pictures than with the soup that I thought was so good :) (~2:00 PM)

We went on a walk (~3:00 PM)

We splashed in the pool to cool down our feet after the walk. (~3:30 PM)

I got tired of and forgot to take pictures for a couple hours. This is Levi and me after driving to 

a missionary appointment that fell through (sad day!), waiting around for a while, and then coming 

back, all without air conditioning. We were both kind of pink when Austin took 

this picture, but you can't really tell here. (~7:00 PM)

Austin watched Levi while I cooled off and exercised at the same time in 

the pool for my apartment building. (~7:30 PM)

I forgot to take any more pictures at all yesterday, so this picture from today will have to suffice to represent all the hours after I came back from the pool, because I spent all of them with Austin!

I did a lot of things not pictured, so don't think that this was everything I did all day