The Kids (Yes, plural)

Kaylee is now 7 months old. She has two teeth, loves to smile and laugh, and scoots around on her butt a lot. She is almost crawling, and can pull herself up to stand. She may skip the crawling altogether and go straight to walking.

Emma is 3. She loves to climb things, spin, and run. She likes dinosaurs, trains, and cats. Sometimes she will help wash or feed Kaylee, but most of her interactions involve the phrase "No, Kaylee, don't grab it."

They do enjoy having tummy time together though.

Pop Culture Funnies

Letters, memos, text messages, diary entries, and online forums are just a few of the formats that the correspondences take in Dear Luke, We Need to Talk, Darth: and other pop culture correspondencs.  The pop culture references range far wider then I expected. From the titular Star Wars to Jaws and The Walking Dead to the Superbowl to The Eagles and Lenard Cohen, plus a lot more. There's reference for every genre (movie, music, tv) and decade, starting from the 1950s on. While I enjoyed this book, I'm not sure of its fit in my library. The other few pop culture books we have do not check out much, except for How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You, so there may be hope for it.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.

3.5 Stars Because all humor is subjective and some things were just funnier then others.

Returning to Art

I am not an artist, artist, but I like creating art. I'm one of those people who doodles in the margins. Colored pencils are easy to use, they're very portable, they come in lots of variety, and you can use them on just about anything. I've always been a bit frustrated with them though, because I haven't been able to get the same type of richness and depth out of them that I see other artist do. The New Colored Pencil book by Kristy Ann Kutch explains how to do that, and you don't have to have the most expensive, made for the serious artists only, pencils.

Kutch reviews different types of colored pencils, wax based, water-soluable, and wax pastels, and explains how they work on different surfaces and how which techniques work best with them. She even has a chapter on how to mix them together. I love all the charts and tables. There are many techniques, new to me, that I will be testing out.

4 stars.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.