Here are my (however lame) excuses:
- I kept waiting to write the post about our challenge this month until Justin produced some work for me to photograph...which alas, on February 19th has still not happened. (I'm giving the slacker some grace though, due to that one month I totally failed our challenge. And because he's cute.)
- James was sick last week with the flu for the second time within a few weeks. :( :( :(
- I've been pretty busy myself. And tired. (mmmm welcome to mommyhood and first trimester pregnancy, that's nothing new, right?)
- We have been carrying over last month's challenge (reading) well into this month. Not because we didn't do it last month, but because we enjoyed it so much we just kept going. Which has been a good/fun thing, but may have also been a large contributing factor to bullet point A for the hubster.
But I'm getting ahead of myself...
January's challenge (read 30 minutes a day) was a smashing success. We didn't read every single day for 30 minutes, but we read most days, and I'm sure we averaged 30 min/day because many days we read for much longer than 30 minutes. Here's a quick overview of the books we devoured:
Justin's Reads:
- Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card- Enjoyable science fiction, fast read, JP kept saying as he was reading, "There's no way a 6 year old could do all this stuff!"
- Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi- Justin listened to this one while he was painting at CrossFit 673 Jerudong. He came home everyday with interesting stories and facts for me at lunch time so I learned some too!
- (currently working on) The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy by Bill Simmons- Making Justin grow in his appreciation for the NBA, and is also making him want to get more into following it, which would mean choosing a team. The current frontrunners are the Celtics, Bulls, and Spurs.
- Allegiant by Veronica Roth (also finished Insurgent first)- Finished book 2 and started and finished book 3 of the Hunger Games copycat trilogy. I actually cried (a lot) near the end, which I was not expecting AT ALL and I'm super duper excited for the movies to come out now.
- (still working on) Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain- Justin kept joking with me that I was "finding myself" as I read this one, though I think I embraced and accepted my introversion looooong ago. There were a lot of interesting facts I found myself sharing with Justin, however, but at times her scientific study exploration/explanation gets a little long for my taste.
- (still working on) The Fault in Our Stars by John Green- There is a reason I put myself on the 77 person long waiting list to check out this book at the beginning of January and I finally got access to it a few days ago. I'm only halfway done, but so far I have found it witty, charming, funny, tragic, and intelligently written, especially for a young adult novel.
February's challenge was to be a "create" challenge, so we settled on an idea that I came up with: choose one item to add to a collage that we will hang in our bedroom. The item can be anything- something we made or found online, a quote, a photo, whatever. Just needs to have some meaning or could be something we just really like how it looks. The goal would be to expand our creative horizons in getting us to either make things or find sources online we like, and to add some life/decoration to this huge blank wall in our room.
It has been a semi-successful challenge thus far. So far I have accumulated a lot of items but have yet to put them on the wall. Justin didn't do anything with it until February 15, but when he sat down to work on it HE WENT TO TOWN. I'm not kidding you, the man spent a couple hours on Pinterest. ON PINTEREST!!!! And he actually said to me, "This is kind of cool, Nicole." He has basically found cool artsy representations of a lot of his nerdy interests (his words, not mine), like Star Wars, superheroes, LOTR, TMNT, The Walking Dead, sports, Breaking Bad, etc. and compiled them all onto a Pinterest board. (To my Pinterest followers, yes, that's why your feed was flooded with boyish pins...many apologies). He hasn't printed anything out yet, but we'll get to it. I'll try to do lots of photos of the collage in progress at the end of the month, but for now, here's a preview of some of my pretties thus far:
I'm also "reading" 'Quiet' and 'The Fault in Our Stars!' Didn't dislike them; I just got interested in other books :)
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