I'm back for another year. Going to try to get the Bingo challenge done again, and also try not to buy any books - not for the first 4 months, but for all year (gasp! - we are actually trying to not spend any money in 2018 on anything besides necessities and I have lots and lots of books at home to read as well as easy access to a good library system). My other goals are to finish last year's shelf of books (6 to go) and complete the half shelf that lies in between last year's shelf and the previous year's shelf. Also to read at least one book in French. And - this is a big one - I'm going to try to read while I eat breakfast/lunch instead of hanging out at the computer. Our dining room table is at last free again as we created a giant crafting space for DD last week so she won't be colonizing the table with all her many large and involved projects (we hope!). So I intend to intentionally sit down at the table to eat with a book in hand. My word for the year is nourish, as in nourish myself both emotionally and physically and nourish the rest of my household members in the same way. I'm starting off the year with a book from the shelf called Georgia: An Arctic Diary, which was written by a woman (named Georgia - no last name given) who went north to Alaska and then the Canadian Arctic in 1964 and has chronicled her experiences living there in the 60s and 70s. So far it's been an interesting snippet of life as it was in these remote hamlets during that time, as the dance between traditional living and modernization continued for the Inuit I'm also reading We Were Witches by Ariel Gore - Gore is the founding editor of Hip Mama, which I found to be an important publication when my kids were young. This book explores her experiences as a very young single mother in the 90s - a time which doesn't seem to long ago to me, nor as unenlightened as it was - it's funny how we forget how things that are commonplace now were shocking then to many people. Happy reading to all!

10 minutes away from my parents and 25 minutes from DH's parents. And yet we hardly ever see MIL and FIL. My parents we see 2-3 times a week usually. My brother is on the west coast and we are prairies so we don't see him that often. DH's sister is 20 minutes away. My mother's family is also nearby but we don't see them much; my dad's family is spread out more across the western half of Canada.

2006 3 books: Adventures in Gentle Discipline Playful Parenting Unconditional Parenting DD was just moving into the toddler phase as she started walking in Nov of that year. Pretty much everything I've ordered was a book (one CD, a couple of sets of markers in 2016). It wasn't until DH got Prime last year that we started to order a lot more (and a lot larger) items.

Popping in between walking the dog (minus 36 Fahrenheit out there folks) and thawing the supply line to the dishwasher (yes, the house is heated but minus 36 folks! for days on end) to outline my bingo. B Prime Number - 11 Walks by Alexandra Horowitz Flufferton - Wild Strawberries by Angela Thirkell Eastern Europe - Dear Fang, With Love by Rufi Thorpe Bestseller written in child birth year - A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini Steampunk - The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman I Science Fiction - Shift by Hugh Howey Your Name in the Title - Edwina, Countess Mountbatten of Burma by Richard Hough Collection of Short Stories - Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne Seaworthy - Miracles on the Water by Tom Nagorski Middle Ages - Morality Play by Barry Unsworth N Western - The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin Ancient - The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Free Space - Wild Swans by Jung Chang Dystopian - Dust by Hugh Howey Mystery - Death comes to Pemberley by P.D. James G Translated - Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich Outer Space - Radiance by Catherynne Valente Finance - Evicted by Matthew Desmond one Word Title - Pandora by Sylvia Fraser Debut Author - All our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai O Over 500 Pages - Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett Local Author - Prairie Bridesmaid by Daria Salamon Female Adventure - Love Among the Butterflies by Margaret Fountaine Classic - Howards End by E.M. Forster Selected by a Friend - A Sense of Direction by Gideon Lewis-Krause Overall my favourites were probably The Invisible Library, Evicted, Shift and Dust and Miracles on the Water. Looking forward to doing 2018 bingo but I haven't even looked at it yet! I didn't do any of the other monthly challenges as I was also trying to get through my chosen shelf for the year - I didn't quite manage that - I still have 6 books left on the shelf (out of 35 or so). I'm going to finish off that shelf next year and do a half shelf that lies between the two shelves I will have then completed. I've read around 100 books but I'm still hoping to finish 3 more before the year is up and my lists are all still mostly inaccessible due to not having Office installed on the computer yet. Next year I guess my goals are to complete Bingo, complete my 6 shelf books and half shelf, and read two books in French. I realized that the Outlander series is probably available in French in our library system, so that will be a good one to try I hope. And to pick a few letters from the alphabet and get books out from the library for authors with those last names who are on my list of books to be read.

I just finally got a computer back last night after a few days without and I'm heading to the gym in a minute so I haven't had time to check on the thread this week at all. Looking forward to reading everyone's wrap ups! But - I'm so excited about finishing Bingo that I just had to come and post! For my last two books I read The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin as my Western (title obtained from a list of 'westerns for people who don't like westerns' thanks to google). It was alright. Quiet. I felt a strong sense of impending disaster for pretty much the whole book which made it hard to read at times although in the end nothing as terrible as I anticipated happened. It was very interesting to me how introspective the author was able to make it, and her use of dialogue - people spoke but she told you what they said rather than having conversations occur. It helped solidify the quiet, interior nature of the characters. And then I read The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman for my last square - Steampunk. I was not looking foward to this square - but I loved this book! It was the first time in a long long time that as I got to the half way point of the book, I started hoping that this was not the only book with these characters. I got my wish - the book resolved nicely but it is the first in a series! I'm very excited and it was such a lovely way to end the year. I loved the premise of alternate worlds that are all slightly different to explain the steampunk-ness of the world in which the characters have their adventure. I enjoyed the characters and what looks like might be the beginning of a slow romance. I even enjoyed the villains as they were complicated villains. I have to go pack for the gym but I'll be back to wrap up both my bingo squares and my overall list and see what everyone else has read. Also, this bingo experience really goes to show exactly why I could never have finished my master's degree - I am very good at focusing and doing things at the last minute. It is not possible to focus and write an entire thesis at 'the last minute'. Hence - I finished all the master's coursework but dropped out after finishing my proposal for my thesis and dragging my heels on actually writing anything for several years.

You are officially my favourite person today. I was feeling pretty bad about our lax vacuuming standards but now I'll tell people we do it for health reasons. To be honest, we are all pretty ridiculously healthy - we might each catch one cold a year, sometimes not; I can count the number of tummy bugs my kids have had during their combined 22 years on the planet on the fingers of both hands and still have some fingers left over. Entirely possible that has nothing to do with my inability to vacuum but I'll lay claim to it.

And then there was the 'matching' names trend. My cousins were named Tannis, Travis and Trevor, I had friends with a Trevor and a Troy, another set of friends with a Tania and a Tara, DH is a Trevor and his sister is Tania. I think that is also a hallmark of that era.

Umm, before company comes over? And that's only the main floor. So, maybe every 2-4 weeks depending on our schedule. This despite 3 cats and a dog. Yes, the house is a pit. Although I do a fair amount of 'spot vacuuming' several times a week. The upstairs room with the guinea pigs is getting vacuumed more often as their hay somehow keeps escaping the cage. But the rest of the rooms? Well, I can't actually see the floor is DS and DD's rooms so that's right out. Our bedroom gets spot vacuumed when I am cleaning cat boxes and have the small hand vacuum out. I hate vacuuming with a burning passion - it makes me want to destroy things. So far this seems to be passed down to the offspring and DH would not notice that something needed vacuuming if he was wading through 6 inches of pet fur. So, I do the bare minimum and no one complains.

Mom-ninja - congratulations on Bingo! I finished The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs last night. Subtitled A Memoir of Living and Dying - it is amazing how much living still goes on while you are dying. Riggs is almost 40 year old mother of two when she is diagnosed with cancer - this is the story of how she lived during those final years. It was a beautifully written, evocative, and managed to elicit my participation in thinking about life - about how we make create our lives with our choices in response to choices that are not made by us. I also now want to read Michel de Montaigne's works, as he (a philosopher during the French renaissance) is frequently referenced in the book. That might be a project for 2018. I'm hoping the library has my western available and then I need to find a steampunk. I better devote my holiday reading time to finishing these two books! In irritating news, I could not figure out what the burnt hair smell was this morning as I was getting ready for work in my bedroom, but as it has followed me to work, I have now determined that it is in fact cat pee smell and it is on my skirt. I can't exactly take off my skirt at work so I am doomed to smell like cat pee for the day. Grr. Also, why have the cats elected to pee on my clothes (small pile left on my dresser) when DH leaves piles and piles of laundry, both clean and dirty, all over the house?

We all quite enjoy Dixit, particularly DD who is my artsy child - the only aspect I don't enjoy is the game board because the silly bunnies they use as pieces fall over all the time and it's easy to lose track of where your piece is (especially with three helpful cats). We liked it so much that we've gotten expansion sets - one last year and one this year under the tree. I'm always amazed by the creative clues the kids can come up with for their cards when sometimes I am stumped with mine.

Ross Doug Travis Craig Allison/Alison Nicole Tara Shawna

We don't buy for many people due to tiny family and all of the grandparents are quite insistent about wanting nothing so this limits my book buying since I'm really only buying for DD, DS and DH. However I counted and there are 9 books under the tree - I think I'm most excited about giving the latest Phoebe and Her Unicorn collection to DS because I can't wait to read them myself!

Congratulations and welcome baby Irene! What a lovely name choice.

He'd be happy with an audiobook but our library seems to have a terrible selection so I think we'll get this as a paper copy. DH has a bunch of the adult books by Gaiman but you have confirmed my suspicions that none of those are suitable yet.

Just as a different perspective, we actually started with Caesar's English and then moved on to Grammar Town. Once we had completed Grammar Town, we started Practice Town, doing one sentence a day and started Paragraph Town. We continued to do one sentence a day from Practice Town all through Paragraph Town and then through Building Poems as well as Paragraph Town did not take us too long to finish. We didn't read the trilogy, so I can't comment on that. Having down it this way for Level 2, I've chosen to go with the same flow for Level 3, and we've begun that with Caesar's English II.

Congratulations Mothersweets on 75 books! Congratulations to Laughing Cat for finishing the Bingo! So DS just finished Stardust and he loved it. It's quite possibly the first book he has chosen and enjoyed so much that he's hoping to find other books by the same author or in the same vein. Having not read Stardust or any Neil Gaiman myself, if you have any ideas for books that are similar to this and suitable for a 10 year old, I'm all ears. (Obviously we are not too fussed about language in books.)

Oh exciting! I can fulfill this challenge with pleasure. DD has chosen our previous night time read aloud and I was not enjoying it at all. I tried to beg off, tried to convince them to read the book on their own, and managed to read 8 chapters in about 30 nights (normally it's one chapter a night; this is an indication of how I dreaded the book - I kept on coming up with excuses as to why I couldn't read that night). At any rate, I finally convinced them to shelve it and I chose our next book - The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery. We just started it two nights ago and I am so much happier and they are also enjoying it, which is a relief since it's one of my all time favourite books. Just yesterday I finished The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni for my Ancients square in Bingo. Recommended by a few people on this thread, I was very happy to read it. It was a great introduction to the Indian epic Mahabharat, which I've always found to be pretty intimidating. I loved that it was told from a female point of view. Overall a good read. Started reading The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs and despite having to pause and cry on occasion, it is going quickly.

My mother and MIL have similar tastes in reading to your mother and some that they have enjoyed in the last few years include: The 100-year-old Man who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson Wild by Cheryl Strayed Finding Gobi by Dion Leonard A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr If she liked The Glass Castle, she might also enjoy Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller.

Mumto2 - Congrats on finishing Bingo! Kareni - thanks for all the interesting links as usual - I've added some more books to my holds at the library as a result. I'm reading three books at the moment. First off is The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni - thanks to some recommendations from other BaWers, I'm using this for my Ancient square and it is a good choice. I'm enjoying it so far. Next is Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer - a sci-fi novel about 4 women who entered a mysterious Area X and what ensues. Seems like people love it or hate it; so far I'm intrigued and not bored but I'm not very far in. Finally still plugging away at the awful memoir from my shelf project. I'm aiming to finish this in 2017 but I won't finish The Shelf, as I had planned to do. There will probably be about 6 books left (out of 30+). Next year I'll finish off this shelf and then probably do the half shelf that lies between the shelf I'm doing right now and the shelf I did last year. Since that won't quite equal a whole shelf, I'm hoping that I'll also be able to make some headway on my TBR library list. It's been a busy week at work (end of term, final assignments, panicking students cheating and dealing with the aftermath of that) so I haven't had time to read the thread til today.

I love doing this. I scramble the eggs with some sausage, red peppers and onions and cook in a muffin tin. This recipe calls for turkey sausage but I just use whatever sausage I feel like using. They freeze nicely.

I send out "post festive holiday season" cards in early February. These would have photos (selected from our regular photos taken during the past year - we've never had professional photos done nor do we own any coordinated clothing - so these are all about real life) and a short note about what everyone in the family is up to/the pet situation/the house situation. I started doing this because DD's birthday is in January and I'd have her add a quick thank you note for her gift to the card. Now I just prefer it because it's one less thing to do in Nov/Dec. We hardly get any cards (1 so far this year) but I'm not going to hold it against people. I have had to cut down my list from an all time high of over 150 people to probably about 50. Postage is expensive and a lot of our cards are sent internationally so that's even more expensive!

DS, 10, enjoys Sushi Go, Dragonwood, King of Tokyo, Cardline: Animals and has finally gotten around to enjoying Ticket to Ride and Catan.

I've done one of the Woolpets kits and found it frustrating (as an adult) and DD, 11, tried one this summer and was not happy. She's very crafty/arty and knits, sews (hand and machine), and even weaves on occasion. What we found better for her to start with was a kit we found that had flat kind of coasters - ah ha, this one. The 3-D shapes can be tough to make as you really need to stab them with that needle a lot, more than you might expect. That being said, DD is hoping to try a kit she got from Lullubee this holiday season - it's an owl, we shall see how it goes.

I love clothes. They are my weakness. However I get almost all my clothes at thrift stores with 30% off coupons, so I don't spend much - I just accumulate a lot (and then get rid of a lot - it's a cycle). I wouldn't include beauty products in my clothing budget if I bought them, but I don't wear make up, or jewellery. We've spent just under $1000 on clothes this year, with it being split almost half and half between adults and children. That's probably about average. DH usually gets most of the clothing budget for adults - he needs new dress shirts for work, new white tees for under the shirts, new pants for work and new undies quite often. I get a much smaller amount of the clothing budget but usually actually buy more clothing than he does. The kids - usually they will need shoes or jackets or sometimes we just randomly have no hand me downs of shorts for the summer or pants that fit. Again, a lot of the time we buy from thrift stores for them. DD is actually pretty convinced that all clothing can be provided for through three mechanisms: 1. Hand me downs from my friend with kids 2 years older than each of mine, 2. thrift stores and 3. Costco.

We're 50 feet wide in one of the earliest suburbs of our city, now so central that's it's practically not a suburb. Most of the lots around here even in the far suburbs are no more than 60 feet wide. A lot of the ones in the early, now interior, suburbs are 35 feet wide. One thing that makes a difference for us is that our house is not situated in the middle of the lot. Depending on your building codes, you might be able to have a fairly narrow portion of land on one side and a much wider section on the other. That's what we have and it makes for a much nicer yard (although we are also thankful to be friends with the really close neighbour).