Andrea J. Buchanan

Marvelous. My sons and I would have had so much fun with so many of these.

Picnic games like Water Balloon Volleyball, and, even better, sponges instead of balloons for Catch. Especially for Catch the Baby.

The sneaky "A Paper You Can Walk Through." Just take a sheet of junk mail, fold & cut a certain way, and you'll have a ring large enough to circumscribe your body.

Of course I loved the Labyrinth section. They're explained clearly enough you can copy their design, and almost clearly enough show more you could design your own.

I adore the I'm Bored section. Especially Call the Oldest Member of Your Family. Seriously.

Even now:
My young adult son and I played Dots today, a game I used to know, simple pencil and paper. We're going to investigate the Tic-Tac-Toe Around the World pages soon. And the card games.

The Decoupage Bowl looks doable. I might do it, even though I don't need another display bowl.

The ABC sentence game will be good for when we walk together and have nothing to converse about (even though we walk together every day we usually talk almost non-stop, though...). We tried it, started at D and got to N before we got distracted.

And making a windowsill garden from kitchen scraps like sprouting sweet potato is something we kind of do already, but it has more ideas and help for us. show less

I can see where this book could appeal to boys, if not for the fact that so many of them are tethered to their game consoles and thus unable to enjoy it. But this is a good book to give to boys and send them outside to do things. It also has a lot of good trivia, poems, historical events, allusions, so on that boys (and just any educated person) should know. I would have enjoyed this book as a boy. Nowadays, I think it is more a book to browse at leisure rather than read straight through, show more which is what I ended up doing. Personally, I found it a little reminiscent of the Boy Scout Handbook I had when I was a scout (though the scout book had much better illustrations). It is also reminiscent of older manuals, which I am sure is intentional. There is a bit of everything here, and I think anyone can learn something, or maybe remember something they learned as a child. show less

GoodReads Synopsis: High school sophomore Daisy Jones is just trying to get by unnoticed. It doesn’t help that she’s the new girl at school, lives in a trailer park, and doesn’t even own a cell phone. But there’s a good reason for all that: Daisy has a secret, unpredictable power—one only her best friend, Danielle, knows about.

Despite her “gift” (or is it a curse?), Daisy’s doing a good job of fitting in—and a cute senior named Kevin even seems interested in her! But when show more Daisy tries to help Vivi, a mysterious classmate in a crisis, she soon discovers that her new friend has a secret of her own. Now Daisy and her friends must deal with chilling dreams and messages from the beyond. Can Daisy channel the power she’s always tried to hide—before it’s too late?

My Thoughts: I totally got sucked into this when Daisy goes to check on a classmate in the restroom and finds what looks like a suicide attempt. Who could close the book on that? I had to find out what the deal was! What I found so interesting was that there were a few different supernatural elements at work.

The characters were vivid and fully fleshed out as was the storyline. While the main story was about the 3 girls, it was Patrick that brings them all together to figure out who and what he is. The story moved at a steady pace and touched on a lot of different issues which added depth. There is plenty of suspense as well as a few twists that surprised me. Overall, it was an enjoyable read. I’d be inclined to read more from Buchanan! show less

I bought this book right after having my son and realized that motherhood isn't always the dreamy la-la land that I had imagined when I was pregnant. The title pretty much says it all -- the author finds motherhood to be a land filled with great and shining moments and not so shining moments. I loved that she writes about how real mothers are often ambivalent about being a mother at times -- and that is OK. Becoming a mother is total shock to your system; your world is turned upside down and show more inside out, and this was one of the books that I felt was closest to my experiences as a new mom and captured some of those "not so good" feelings about becoming a mother. show less