Book Review: Sacred Path of Tears

The Sacred Path of Tears is an amazing story about a young girl named Mokee who it torn from her family and life because of war between her tribe and the military. She finds refuge with a family in Kansas who takes her in and teaches her English and “civilized” customs. When she is truly comfortable in her new life, the old one sneaks up on her and she is forced to choose and fight for her decision. It is an amazing story about love, faith, and heritage.
I really enjoyed this book. I love stories with a good Christian base and good books on American Indian history. This story is a wonderful blend between the two. This was a hard book to put down once I got into the story.

The author did a great book with character development and fully depicting the entire situation. It makes me realize how hard it was for 80% of the settlers and Indians that were thrown into war and didn’t agree with the extremist on each end. The story of Mokee and her new family show how the two cultures could have peacefully lived together with compromise.

Note: I did receive a copy of this book free from www.booksneeze.com to read and review online. I was not compensated for positive reviews and the opinions above are my own.

Hannah the dancer, speller, singer

Hannah loves to dance around the house. For most of January Hannah and Mommy danced every night before bed. We were able to get a few videos of her dancing. Unfortunately they were taken on our camera that does not have sound. So here are the silent video of Hannah's dancing.

Note: the laying on the floor and rolling back and forth was from my asking her to do a somersault. I taught her how to do them about a week before and every night we (yes WE) would do somersaults in our living room. Apparently I caught her off guard and she just rolled back and forth.

Hannah also loves to read and spell. She has been working on reading and spelling words at school and at home. Here is a video of Hannah spelling (and sounding out) CAT.
This video is Hannah's Christmas concert at church. She did a wonderful job singing.

And 6 months later....

Sorry I haven't posted video or pictures in a long time. I'm sure I could come up with 1000 reasons why it didn't happen, but I know is it something that i need to strive to do more.

So without further delay here are some videos and pictures from the last couple months. I hope you enjoy.

After I caught this video, I captured this one.. I have never seen him reenact like this before. I couldn't help but keep videoing.

Titus is walking

Titus has been slowly walking more and more around the house. I was finally able to get some footage of it for the blog. Enjoy. As he improves, I'll try and get more videos.

Happy Birthday Titus

On Monday Titus got his first piece of birthday cake. I think he enjoyed it almost as much as Hannah did. Here are a few videos we were able to get during the party.

This was the birthday cake. I made a dinosaur train cake (because it was Hannah's favorite show that weekend). I do know that the decorating is not the best but it turned out pretty well. It was decorated in ~5 minutes.

For those of you who need help deciphering my interpretation of the dinosaur train, the first dinosaur is a tyrannosaurus Rex. The second dinosaur (the yellow triangles thing) in the second train cart is a pterodactyl.

Hannah was very excited about singing "Happy Birthday" to Titus. She kept asking us where his birthday hat was.

And then.....

Titus got his first bite of cake.

He had a great time eating the cake and the icing. He was VERY happy and excited for about 30 minutes afterwards until the the sugar high crash. All in all it was a great 1st birthday.

Titus is crawling... sort of

Titus is mobile and he loves it. Here is a video of his pseudo crawl. Enjoy!

Titus is also at the wonderful time in his life when he loves to smile for the camera. Every time he sees it we get this beautiful smile with a laugh and a squeal.

Videos of Hannah

Hannah truly makes us laugh every day. Here are two great videos of her that I was able to catch this week.

1. Hannah got a stick pony/unicorn at the dollar store and has had hours of fun ridding it around the house. Whenever you push the button Hannah always prances with the horse in a circle and then shakes him when he whinnies.

2. Hannah and I go to the library every Saturday morning to exchange movies and pick out a book or two. This week Hannah wanted this book on octopus. We read it to her Saturday night. Sunday morning Hannah followed Job around the house trying to read him the book. She was finally able to sit down with him and read.