Author: cvegnad

November 18, 2015

Beautiful Creatures A Boundless Coloring Book Adventure by Nicole Stocker

Colour over the greys to bring the images to life in this unique adult colouring book by Nicole Stocker.

About Beautiful Creatures

Immerse yourself in the space between black and white and explore the many shades of your imagination. Unique in its sophisticated grayscale format, Beautiful Creatures is deceivingly simple. Using the gray as your guide, you will feel like a professional artist, bringing depth to each image and creating lifelike artwork that is uniquely yours. Take a moment of solitude to rediscover your creativity, and replenish your calm.

Optimized for coloring, each image is printed on acid-free, archival quality paper, perforated and watermarked for framing. Simply select your palette and color over the gray, letting the depth of shading guide your choices as you bring this thoughtfully curated collection of 48 striking images to life. Feel the thrill of artistic accomplishment that comes from creation, and the pride of seeing your work framed and displayed. Where the simplicity of coloring meets a refined aesthetic, Beautiful Creatures opens the door to artistic expression and all the joys that come with it.

My Thoughts

Colouring is one of my favourite calming activity. It helps me unwind from the day, clear my mind and even spend some time with my boys!

Beautiful Creatures is a whole new concept for colouring books with a grey scale that you colour on top of. Which at first sounds confusing but the end result is stunning. The grey scale helps with the tone of the image, helping those that may have little experience with colouring and painting. It can sometimes be hard to remember to shade depending on the light source so this was a fun way to get back in to drawing for me. It brought back all of my art classes while giving me artistic freedom with colour. I was easily lost in my colouring and spent over an hour colouring with the news on in the background. Even my children were jealous of the book and wanted to colour in it (I was a meanie and said no!).

Beautiful Creatures will make an excellent gift for the budding artist in your home as it allows them to improve on their skills while giving them artistic freedom in how they make the picture come alive. It was so much fun watching my image pop up on the page. The book itself is professional and even has a place for your signature waiting for you.

You can purchase a copy of Beautiful Creatures on Amazon.

Rating: 5/5

About the Author

As a young girl, Nicole was enchanted by a black and white photograph hanging in her parents summer cabin, wishing she could bring it to life with color. An artist at heart, Nicole imagined a collection of coloring books filled with inspiring, carefully curated photographs. The first in a series, Beautiful Creatures marks her publishing debut. A mother of two young children, Nicole treasures any moment to lose herself in color and creation in her Vancouver home.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book in order to facilitate this review. All opinions expressed are my own.

November 16, 2015

The Knights Before Christmas

The Knights Before Christmas is not your usual Christmas story but brings with it silly humour and a new kind of Christmas fun.

About The Knights Before Christmas

‘Twas December 24th, and three brave knights were just settling in for the night when out on the drawbridge, there arose such a clatter! The knights try everything to get rid of this unknown invader (Santa Claus!), a red and white knight with a fleet of dragons.

‘But nothing would stop
their white-whiskered foe.
No matter their efforts,
he just would not go!’

My Thoughts

Silly, fun, rhyming humour is what you can find with this trio of Knights as they protect their King from a jolly invader with his fierce dragons (think red suit and his sleigh!). The rhyming follows the much-loved, Twas the Night Before Christmas, which helped as my children could almost guess the next words. We have so much fun whipping this story out, snuggling on the couch and reading it to each other. We have read it almost every night for the last week and it still hasn’t grown old! It definitely puts a new spin on an old family favourite, while adding in humour, excellent illustrations and a theme most young boys and girls can relate to! A fantastic addition to our Christmas book collection.

You can purchase the book on Amazon.

Rating: 5/5+

About the Author

Joan Holub is the author and illustrator of more that 130 children’s books, including Zero the Hero, Little Red Writing, and the Goddess Girls series. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

About the Illustrator

Scott Magoon is the illustrator of many books for young readers, including Spoon and Chopsticks by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, and the author and illustrator of The Boy Who Cried Bigfoot and Breathe. The art director at Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, he lives in the Boston area with his wife and two sons.

Disclosure: I received a copy of The Knights Before Christmas in order to facilitate this review. All opinions expressed are my own.

November 16, 2015

The Spirit of Christmas

The best gift at Christmas? The gift of time, family and love!

About the Spirit of Christmas

Bells jingle, sleds dash through the snow, trees are topped with sparkling stars, and children everywhere dream of candy canes and presents. But the best gift of all-the most magical gift of the season-is when we spend Christmas with those we love.

My Thoughts

What a perfect, heart warming book just in time for the Christmas season!

It is perfectly sized for little ones hands and comes in a board book format giving it sturdiness for little hands. The images are adorable and bring you back to your own childhood. The book is written in rhymes that allows you to read aloud quite easily to your child with natural pauses.

It is the actual story that brought tears to my eyes and which makes this the perfect gift from a parent (or grandparent to a child). It is love and the birth of a child that is celebrated at Christmas. All the other things may be toppings we enjoy but it is love and family that means the most especially at this time of the year. It is a fantastic book to remind not only yourself and child about the true meaning of Christmas but also how much we love our children. This will be one of the best books you could buy a special child in your life this Christmas season!

You can purchase a copy of The Spirit of Christmas on Amazon.

Rating: 5/5+

About the Author

Nancy Tillman is the author and illustrator of the bestselling picture book On the Night You Were Born ; its companion journal, The Wonder of You: A Book for Celebrating Baby’s First Year ; The Spirit of Christmas ; The Heaven of Animals ; and the New York Times bestsellers, Wherever You Are, My Love Will Find You ; The Crown on Your Head ; and I’d Know You Anywhere, My Love. She also created the mischievous cat Tumford in Tumford the Terrible and Tumford’s Rude Noises, and illustrated It’s Time to Sleep, My Love by Eric Metaxas.

Nancy’s mission in creating her books is to convey to children everywhere that “You are loved.” She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Disclosure: I received a copy of The Spirit of Christmas in order to facilitate this review. All opinions expressed are my own.

November 16, 2015

Ditching the Drive-Thru

After an exhausting day at work, hitting the drive-thru or nuking a pre-fab meal is all too often the go-to decision for feeding a family. Cooking a meal from scratch using fresh ingredients can seem beyond the average person’s time, energy, or financial means. But with mounting evidence pointing to processed food and our industrial food system as the culprits behind many of our nation’s health problems—including obesity, diabetes, and cancer—it’s now more important than ever to be fully informed about what goes on your family’s dinner plates.

About Ditching the Drive-Thru

If you’re ready to take control of your food choices but don’t know the difference between grass-fed versus grain-fed, pastured versus free-range, or organic versus sustainable, read this book to discover:

• How to create your own thirty-month plan to convert your family from junk food to real food, without a revolt!

• Recipes and advice on planning and prepping meals so you can make home cooked a habit for your family

• Instructions for getting the most out of produce using techniques such as lacto-fermentation, dehydrating, and canning

• introduction to the world of farm-direct sales, including tips on locating local farms, seeing through marketing buzzwords, and shopping with CSAs Ditching the Drive-Thru exposes the insidious hold the commercial food industry has taken over the fast-paced lives of the average American and the danger these processed foods and diet plans pose to our health, environment, and emotional wellbeing.

Learn how to break free from the grind and return to a simpler relationship with food from farmers, not factories, and home-cooked meals that are created in your kitchen, not on a conveyor belt.

Book Excerpt

Getting Your Family to Eat Better ─ Meet Your Sherpa Guide

by Joel Salatin

Every time I talk to a group about getting in touch with their food supply, healing the planet one bite at a time, or cultivating enthusiasm for domestic culinary arts—all common sound bites— I receive thunderous applause and then . . . then the queries and excuses start:

“I don’t have the time.”

“I don’t have the money.”

“I don’t know how to cook.”

“My kids are picky eaters.”

The script plays out every time, on every socioeconomic level, in every geographic region. Our modern American culture is profoundly ignorant about eating.

Most modern Americans demean and cheapen body fuel to a mundane afterthought, less than a comma in our helter-skelter, plugged-in, harried lives. Running on dirty fuel, our people now lead the world in per capita health care costs, all the while spending the least—in both money and time—on food.

It’s time to leave the sidelines. It’s time to play the game. Natalie Winch, through her book Ditching the Drive-Thru, is both mentor and coach. Yet this New Jersey high school English teacher, with husband and two children creates a plan as simple and fundamental as a shopping list. Applying the most tried-and-true goal-setting templates to the traditional heart of the home, Winch takes us on a delightful journey—along with her beloved Homer’s Odyssey as metaphor—and leaves us empowered to exit our bleacher seat, charging onto the field, game plan in hand.

What makes her saga even more special is that she’s not a scientist, food nutritionist, or gourmand. She didn’t wait for a grant or a reality TV show offer. She started where most of these stories start—how can I be a better mom for my kid? It’s really that simple.

So if you want to walk instead of talk. If you want to do instead of dream. If you want to play instead of observe. If you want to change instead of wish, here is a great little book to get you going on your own food empowerment odyssey.

Joel Salatin is a Virginia family farmer who was made famous by Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the award-winning film Food, Inc. Time magazine called him “the most influential farmer in America.” This posting was excerpted from Ditching the Drive-Thru, by J. Natalie Winch.

My Thoughts

Changing my eating habits has been a huge item for me in the last two years, more so in the last six months. What we eat affects our health and well-being, and I had come to realize I was not eating things that were making me feel good (nor helping with my weight!). I have done a complete overhaul of my habits but there is always something new to learn and try out.

Ditching the Drive-Thur helps you work through some of the new and emerging terms that you probably hear a lot about (GMOs, organic,etc) by breaking these themes down chapter by chapter and explaining them in simple terms.

The layout in this book is perfect and makes sense from a readers standpoint (with the progression of terms, recipes,etc..). The writing is easy enough for most adults and youths to understand and relate to their own lives. She also provides great recipes, tips and ideas on how to make healthier choices and how to stock your home. All of which are key themes to eating healthy!

For me this was a great reminder of why I am choosing to eat healthier and why it is so important for my family to do so also. It gave me fresh new ideas to try out while giving me opportunity to adapt it to my own home. A great read for those looking to change bad habits and adopt a healthier lifestyle!

You can purchase a copy of this book on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Rating: 4/5

About the Author

J. Natalie Winch lives in southern New Jersey, not far from where she grew up, with her husband, two children, and dogs. When she isn’t mothering, teaching, grading, or making lesson plans, Natalie runs the Hebrew School at her synagogue, coaches soccer, teaches lacto-fermentation classes, writes the occasional entry for her blog Food Empowerment (tradsnotfads.com), and fights the dust bunnies that threaten to take over her family room. You can connect with her on her website.

The Giveaway!

You can now enter to win one of twenty copies of Ditching the Drive-Thru and One $30 Amazon Gift Card. You can enter via the Rafflecopter form below. Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book in order to facilitate this review. All opinions expressed are my own.

November 13, 2015

Make Time For YOU at Lunch Time

I get it. We are all super busy, we have time constraints at home, work, school and just life in general. Multi-tasking is a skill that many of us have had to learn just from pure necessity! As I am currently writing this post, I have my Consumer Behaviour tutorial playing in the background, my lunch half eaten on my desk, answering the odd back line calls while answering resident questions. And this is my break and I am trying to juggle five different items and none of them are relaxing (except maybe this post because I love writing!). Not much of a break right?

And statistics prove that I am not alone:

70 per cent of workers take a lunch break that is 30 minutes or less
20 per cent of millennials take fewer than 15 minutes for lunch, as compared to 11 per cent GenX
More than half of all workers wish they could take a nap during lunch, with millennials leading the way over Gen Xers (57 per cent vs. 46 per cent)
49 per cent feel they would snack less and make better meal choices if they took a lunch break

This survey was conducted by Subway Canada and while it scares me, I am not shocked by it. More and more we are giving up dedicated ‘us’ time (aka lunch break) to get work done. We try to pack in as much as we can, in as little time as possible.

But of course this means more than just losing a lunch time break. It has negative mental and physical health consequences. We are clearly making poorer food choices so that we can eat quicker, we are not eating slowly (I know I now ‘shovel’ food in my mouth so I can keep typing), we are sitting more (which has its own health problems) and not giving our minds the mental break it needs.

So how do we fight the working at lunch time battle?

Get up and go for a walk. Take fifteen to twenty minutes of your hour lunch break and get outside. You will feel better for this plus you are getting the blood flowing through your legs again.
Eat healthy! Make better choices, pack and time your snacks so that you are not munching aimlessly throughout the day.
The survey by Subway Canada also found that most workers report they would prefer to reach for a sandwich piled high with meat and veggies (27 per cent) before a greasy burger with a side of fries (21 per cent), last night’s leftovers (21 per cent), a salad with mixed greens (16 per cent) or snacks from the vending machine (3 per cent). So keep this in mind when making take out options! How will you feel after eating a greasy (but quick) meal.
Put away work. I mean it, cover it, hide and log out of anything work related for at least ten to fifteen minutes. It will do your mental health wonders.

How do you fight the never-ending battle at lunch time to make time for you?