18 Weeks

That’s how far along I am in this pregnancy.

Each pregnancy I have I get bigger faster and yesterday my husband told me that the way I was sitting with that particular maternity shirt made me look seven months. That reminded me of this post by Elizabeth Foss.

My husband didn’t tell his parents until last month, which sounds late for grandparents to know, but his family has a tendency not to tell people things. For example, I found out today (from reading her blog) that his sister-in-law is pregnant and due in May.

Besides being amazingly tired the first six weeks, I have been feeling much better this pregnancy than in my previous ones.  In fact, several times I have wondered if I was still pregnant because I thought I felt so well something must be wrong. But then I would hear the baby’s heartbeat and feel relief.

Another Book List

Some British media group came up with this list based on a request for readers to submit their ten favorite books. Here are the rules:

Bold the books you’ve read, italicize those on your “to be read” list, and tally the total. Then list three books that you think should be on the list.

According to the media group that did this, the average number of books read from the list is six.

(My notes: Some of this seems a little redundant, like 33 and 36, and some of it seems to be somewhat-pop fiction like 37,42 and 50. )

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Read some of them)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (I currently reading this and am about halfway done.)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hussein
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Read at least one book of stories, but not all SH.)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery 
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Read: 32

Want to Read: 25

The “Want to Read” number looks a little ambitious, but since I have the rest of my life ahead of me, it might happen.

My three books:

The Betrothed
The Divine Comedy
The Little House on the Prairie Series (obviously I can include the entire series because there were whole series included on the list).

So, anyone else up for this meme? Flannery? Mrs. Bear?

Interesting

During yesterday's homily, the priest mentioned that Mount Moriah, the mountain on which Abraham attempted to sacrifice Isaac, and Mount Calvary are one and the same mountain. My husband and I looked at each other in surprise because this was something we had never heard before.

Today my husband asked his Bible-scholar brother-in-law about this and was told that they are generally believed to be the same. Here is the verse that lends credence to that belief:

Then Solomon began to build the house of the LORD in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, which had been pointed out to his father David, on the spot which David had selected. (2Chronicles 3:1)

I guess the reasoning is that since the Temple is in Jerusalem, obviously Mount Moriah is in Jerusalem. Mountains are not that common in Jerusalem, so Moriah and Calvary are probably the same.

Maybe Not

Today I mentioned to Happy Boy that I had to make a grocery list for SuperTarget. He took a piece of paper and scribbled out his own grocery list.

As we were leaving for the store he said to me, "Here is my grocery list, Mama."

"What do you have on it?"

"After SuperTarget, we go to Toys R Us."

That's what YOU think, dear.

Fraternal Love

The other day Happy Boy and Reeda were playing together and they bumped their heads together. Happy Boy just sat there a little stunned, but Reeda started crying. When Happy Boy noticed her crying, he ran to me and said, "Mama, I need a Kleenex for Reeda! She is crying and I need to dry her tears." I probably don't need to mention that my heart melted instantly for his love and concern for her.