TJ Hirst

Try-It With-Me Tuesday, an interactive weekly time and place to foster connections that challenge and encourage the process to become a well-rounded person.

We awoke to temperatures in the 40’s or 50’s the last few mornings, and the sumac is turning red. Our summer is changing to fall and the children are going back to school. The change of season brings relief from the feeling of always being on the go, but I will miss the summer help from my children and reading Watership Down after lunch, the garden flowers, sleeping in later, and easier routines. This week’s challenge to anyone who wants to try it with me:

Preserve a piece of summer for the future.

I’m making salsa with my children from all those peppers in our garden. Preserving isn’t just about canning vegetables or making jam. To preserve is to maintain or keep intact or prepare for future use.

Take a picture of a flower in your yard or a scene along a walk that you take. Write a journal entry to preserve a memory. Spend an hour with your child talking about what they liked doing this summer. Tell a story from your own childhood.

What are you doing to preserve this summer?

Join in by trying the challenges with me, commenting, linking, or suggesting a challenge. If you want to write a post on your blog about what happened when you took the challenge, I will publish your link. Just link to my website in your post and send me your link. Feel free to use the TIWMT image in your post.

Try-It With-Me Tuesday, an interactive weekly time and place to foster connections that challenge and encourage the process to become a well-rounded person.

“I don’t want to tell you again to leave your sister alone,” I yelled down the stairs.

“OKKKK. . . .” my son said.

Does this sound familiar at anyone else’s house? For some lucky souls, school starts this week or next; we have two more weeks to go. I thought I’d lose my mind when I tried to comprehend all that we have piled into those two weeks.

In addition to all the last minute doctor appointments, schedule pick-ups, open houses, meetings with teachers, band camp, we still need to buy school supplies and school clothes, and we’re going to try to squeeze in a much-needed family camping trip. Shopping for school supplies is on the schedule for today.

When I woke up yesterday I just want to sit down to the computer and write a thoughtful post for Try-It-With-Me-Tuesday challenging myself to spend some quality time with my children. In actuality, I really wanted to escape and spend some quality time alone.

Instead, I did my motherly duty and I ignored my computer and my desk and my “me time” and went to check on my kids’ assignment to clean out their individual cabinets and organize their desks. What I saw seemed hazardous, but I held on and suggested I could work with them. Then, they knew what that would mean.

We spent most of the morning cleaning, tossing and reorganizing. We emptied every cabinet and reassigned each child a new cabinet, plus one for me and one for supplies.

I’d avoided this project all summer. Ironically, now, the more we did, the more energy I felt to tackle the other projects that would domino from this one. The final result impressed all of us. Now, if we can just keep it that way until school begins.

Back to school is my new year. Is it that way for you? What do you plan to organize?

Join in by trying the challenges with me, commenting, linking, or suggesting a challenge. If you want to write a post on your blog about what happened when you took the challenge, I will publish your link. Just link to my website in your post and send me your link. Feel free to use the TIWMT image in your post.

Try-It With-Me Tuesday, an interactive weekly time and place to foster connections that challenge and encourage the process to become a well-rounded person.

I kept my promise this week and didn’t challenge myself, except to sit for long hours in the hammock reading. The bright red V8 juice that I just poured into my glass for a snack looks suspiciously like Bella’s drink of choice in Breaking Dawn by Stephanie Meyer and seems an appropriate beverage now that I’m finally finished and ready to comment. I don’t anticipate spoiling the book for any of you who haven’t read it, but if you want to be safe, you can wait to read this.

I anticipated Breaking Dawn’s release as much as my 14-year-old daughter, who read it first and squirmed through the entire first half. The passion intensifies beyond any that we’ve seen in the other books of the Twlight series, but comparetively, it’s mild, not to mention legitimate. If I were recommending this to other mothers of younger teens, I’d caution you to read it first and discuss, discuss, discuss.

The young adult series isn’t just a love story or an adventure or a vampire fantasy that we can’t wait to see how it’s resolved. Breaking Dawn challenged me to think about two contrasting, but powerful forces—the strength of family bonds and the forces that work against family solidarity.

First, the strength of family bonds. The gifts of communication that Bella, Edward, parents and siblings experience brings family communication to a new level that I wish I could attain. But despite what seems to be an ideal, they still experience limits to their gifts, and must sacrifice, learn to develop trust, and practice controlling their emotions. In time they experience strong familial love (albeit a weird family), which one house guest witnesses as the power behind this family’s bond.

Second, the forces that work against the family. Edward and another character explain how the antagonists, the Volturi, use one of their guards, Chelsea, to manipulate their enemies. She uses her gift to gain “influence over the emotional ties between people. She can loosen and secure those ties. She could make someone feel bonded to the Volturi, to want to belong, to want to please them.” They go on to explain that by separating family alliance, they could defeat more easily by breaking the ties that bound them together.

To some extent, these contrasting forces existed throughout the book, but the intensity of action is less than in earlier books in the series. The struggle identified itself in more subtle ways, which introduces the discussion point about the danger of forces that lurk around us in equally subtle ways. The conclusion of this clash rests upon a woman learning to use her gifts for good and protect her family from those forces that try to tear it apart.

On a personal note, this story resonated with me. Both forces have worked on me. The strength of my family is irresistible, but the contrasting force is not evil on its surface and so difficult to detect without the gifts of the Spirit. There is power in finally identifying those influences and putting my shield in place against the attack.

The real challenge for readers of Breaking Dawn is not to see who can read it first or fastest but how each of our own family’s story will conclude.

Try-It With-Me Tuesday, an interactive weekly time and place to foster connections that challenge and encourage the process to become a well-rounded person.

Last August I returned to the library, my bookshelves and the bookstore after years of having little time to read for pleasure. Even though I’m plowing through books and reviewing them here, my GoodReads bookshelf stayed bare after my sister encouraged me to join. I surprised myself today when I began adding up the books I’ve read—18 of the ones I can remember—since last August.

Are you on GoodReads? How do you like? How do you use it?

August is the perfect time to not stretch myself in the last few weeks before my children return to school and the routine begins again. Instead, I’m going to stretch in the hammock with a few more summer reads like these:

And of course I will be reading the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the Bodacious Bloggity Book Club. Holly at Marathon Bird picks great selections. We read them, write our own reviews in a post on our own websites and link up on August 25 for an on-line discussion. New readers can jump in any time and add their thoughts.

Hmmm. Doesn’t seem like such a slow month after all?

What are you reading in August before saying goodbye to summer days? Do you want to try any of these books with me?

Try-It With-Me Tuesday, an interactive weekly time and place to foster connections that challenge and encourage the process to become a well-rounded person.

I believe in life after death. In the last year I researched many of our ancestors’ lives and the close connection to our family history confirms my belief even more. What I believe happens to us after death is dramatically different from the fictional story by Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Yet, I appreciated a fresh look at this topic that we rarely discuss for fear of offending one another with our personal beliefs.

Following Eddie through his death is like wandering beside him through his search for understanding. His death is not the cliffhanger but the impetus for his journey. The story is his process of coming to terms with his life, his relationships, his choices.

In addition to moving Eddie forward through the steps of heaven, Mr. Albom uses flashbacks to his birthdays in life to inform the reader of Eddie’s history. These flashbacks, like most flashbacks as a literary tool, are difficult to comprehend and fit together in a reader’s mind. However, they establish the circumstances better than a chronological story would and keep the immediacy focused on Eddie’s life after death rather than those moments themselves.

Eddie meets five people who have also died and they assist him in his journey to learn about his life. Each person crossed Eddie’s path—some he knew, others he didn’t—and changed his life. Now in heaven, these five people meet with him and “illuminate” his life as the first person explains to him.

One of the main concepts of this book is that in life we do not know the impact of our lives, for good or for bad, on other people. In heaven Eddie has the chance, with the aid of these five people, to learn about his relationships with his family, seek the peace he desires, look past himself to forgiveness, and discover redemption.

The story does not identify God or His purposes in heaven or in our lives. Rather, the author focuses on the five individuals to bring Eddie through a process. This prompts a curious question for me. If I were in Eddie’s story, “Who would my five people be?”‘

I believe it might be some of those people in my life who have played an important, but less verbal role—like my mother or my oldest daughter. It would certainly include several strangers and an acquaintance or two.

So, I ask you, which five people would you meet?

By having Eddie meet five people in heaven the story is more universal for all faiths. Still, I lead my life with faith in God, assured that he is there and lives even though I cannot see him and do not have tangible evidence of him. Faith makes possible the restoration of relationships through forgiveness and redemption here in this life.

So, I would maybe change my question from which five people would I meet once I died, to whom should I meet now?

Did you read this book with me or have you read it before? What did you think? Leave a comment below or go to my contact page and send me a link to a post you have written about it and I will publish it.