Birthday Boy

My baby is turning 3!

 

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To Men Everywhere...

In Broken Places

 

It took me awhile to warm up to this book. I felt there were too many adjectives. Too much wordiness. It took too long to let me know what was going on...but maybe I was in a bad mood the day I started it because before too long I was emotionally enthralled. I was completely in the world spun oh-so-cleverly by a gifted author.

 

This is a powerful story about overcoming the crippling and often generational effects of abuse. Specifically child abuse. Shelby and Trey- survivors, drawing life from each other, siblings that overcame. I can't say how much I adored the relationship these two characters have. All of the characters are amazing, the writing is witty and the story heart wrenching and then heart warming. Completely believable.

 

Reading the portions that were set in Shelby and Trey's childhood was often hard. Abuse is brutal and the author did a genuinely vivid job of portraying it, as well as the damage left in the wake of it. I suppose because she knows firsthand, having experienced it firsthand and calling herself a survivor. I love that God took something horrible in her life and brought something beautiful in the healing of it. Woven into the story is a life-strengthening message of hope. That Suffering doesn't kill us. Not at all. We get to choose what we do with what's done to us. We do, too.

 

I'd say this book was astonishingly beautiful once I got into it. If you want to be touched, healed a little...helped a bit, then this book is for you. I recommend it.

*This book was given to me by Tyndale House Publishers in exchange for a non-biased review.

 

 

Preview, order the paperback or e-book here.

 

 

 

Product Description

Shelby's life isn't glamorous, but it is predictable-and that's the way she likes it. A survivor of her father's violence, she has spent a lifetime creating a safe existence devoid of dependence. But her carefully managed world begins to break when, under staggering circumstances, she becomes a single mother to four-year-old Shayla. In a drastic attempt to escape her childhood's influence, Shelby moves to Germany, but she quickly discovers how intimately linked memory and healing are-and how honestly she must scrutinize her past in order to aspire to a richer future. As she juggles a new job, a new culture, a new daughter, and the attention of an enterprising man, Shelby's fresh start becomes a quest for the courage to be not only a survivor, but someone who prevails.

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Workin' the Bees

This morning before it
got too hot I put on my gorgeous purple bee suit and headed out to my bee yard behind the barn.

My original hive has a bad queen and my bees are just plain mean. I got a new, marked queen from another bee keeper.

My plan was to inspect the hive and find and kill the old queen and replace her with the new queen. I was going to allow the split box make their own queen and see how they all fared.

However being inexperienced as I am I looked at all 20 full frames and couldn't find the queen. There were lots of queen cells and the hive was crowded so they were likely scheduling a swarm any old time!

I ended up splitting to colony in half and leaving the old queen in her hive and placing the new queen in her cage with candy in the hole in the new hive. I sprayed it with some syrup for good measure.

I put Api Guard in both boxes and an empty 10 frame box on each.

Hopefully they both do super and I get lots of honey the end of the summer.

The bees are ticked! In was sweating and covered in them by the end. Praise The Lord for a husband who bought me a purple bee suit and out up with all of my projects!

A Dream So Big Review

 

I'm so glad I read this book! You know when someone says, " I laughed...I cried..." well I really did. Steve has a sense of humor- this guy shares his heart, he's humble and completely real and he is really funny. I read incredibly sensitive words but always, in every chapter there is humor. I loved this book! This is definitely one I recommend you get for your summer reading. You'll be entertained, yes, but also informed, challenged and maybe you will actually be moved enough to do something with what you read.

Steve and Nancy and their two older sons experienced tragedy and let God turn it into something beautiful. Steve will encourage you, he might make you cry, sniff sniff, he will make you laugh, regale you with stories of baboons, giraffes, and impossibly brave, every day people.

Bottom line: this one is not to be missed.

Order it here

check out the website, kenyakids.org and sign up for the newsletter here  (I highly recommend the newsletter!)

*I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an unbiased review

 

Publisher's Description

A Dream So Big is the story of Steve Peifer, a corporate manager who once oversaw 9,000 computer software consultants, who today helps provide daily lunches for over 20,000 Kenyan school children in thirty-five national public schools, and maintains solar-powered computer labs at twenty rural African schools. Steve and his wife, Nancy, were enjoying a successful management career with one of America's high tech corporate giants during the dot-com boom of the 1990's when, in 1997, he and his wife Nancy discovered they were pregnant with their third child. Tragically, doctors said a chromosomal condition left their baby 'incompatible with life.' The Peifers only spent 8 days with baby Stephen before he died. Seeking to flee the pain, Steve and Nancy began a pilgrimage that thrust them into a third-world setting where daily life was often defined by tragedy---drought, disease, poverty, hunger, and death. They didn't arrive in the service of any divine calling, but the truth of their surroundings spoke to their troubled hearts. A short-term, 12-month mission assignment as dorm parents for a Kenyan boarding school turned this ordinary man into the most unlikely internationally recognized hero, and his story will inspire you to pursue similar lives of service.