Category: Books-DVDs

I firmly believe that crafting can be a great way to reduce stress, which is why I was immediately attracted to the idea of Crafting Calm. Written by Maggie Oman Shannon, this DIY guide showcases projects designed to help you achieve serenity and satisfaction.

Even if you can barely draw a smiley face, this book will convince you to find joy from living the handmade life.

There are no photos of the finished projects, so this is not the craft book for you if you’re looking for visual inspiration or something easily recreated using a specific list of supplies. The suggestions are very general, such as a quick rundown of the various properties of essential oils and a short description of how to make bath salts for relaxing using the oils of your choice.

The focus of Crafting Calm is more on crafting as a therapeutic pursuit. The author is more concerned with reducing your stress level, helping you seek comfort, and encouraging you to connect with others than providing the sort of detailed “how to” guide that most other craft books provide.

If writing is your thing, there are inspirational quotes and journaling prompts scattered throughout the book to encourage you to reflect on your challenges, goals, and dreams.

Crafting Calm’s project suggestions are designed to be completed at a low or intermediate skill level, so you don’t need to be an expert crafter to create something you’d be happy to share.

In fact, I think many of these projects would work well for making with your children if you need a way to encourage them to slow down and improve their focus. I know making a tabletop Zen garden or painted prayer stones would be appealing activities for my 9-year-old son.

Disclaimer: A review copy was provided by the publisher.

Photo credit: Barnes & Noble

Do Less: A Minimalist Guide to a Simplified, Happy, and Organized Life is Rachel Jonat’s guide to helping you toss out your massive to-do list in favor of a more streamlined approach to managing your life. Jonat is the creator of the popular blog The Minimalist Mom and a widely recognized expert on the minimalist lifestyle.

Do Less includes sections on the basic principles of minimalism, organizing your home, adopting a minimalist approach to work, minimalist money management, and a minimalist approach to your daily routine and social commitments. The book is neatly organized so you can skip to the parts of greatest interest if you don’t want to sit and read it straight through.

There were several suggestions in Do Less that I found helpful. Jonat inspired me to do a major purge of my son’s old clothing and toys, instead of holding on to them in the hopes we’d someday need them. Creating a rotating weekly meal plan has cut out a considerable amount of stress related to grocery shopping and cooking. Creating a firm bedtime routine to resist the temptation to stay up late reading or watching TV has made me much more productive in the mornings.

That being said, there were some of Jonat’s suggestions I just couldn’t get behind. I like the idea of a minimalist wardrobe of just five outfits, but I can’t make up my mind which ones those should be. As an avid scrapbooker, her suggestion to “take less photos” to reduce digital clutter is simply never going to happen for me.

Fortunately, I don’t think Jonat expects readers to adopt every single idea. If you pick and choose what’s right for you and your family, I think Do Less will inspire you to move towards a happier, less stressed out lifestyle.

Disclaimer: A review copy was provided by the publisher.

Photo credit: Amazon

I’ve always loved arts and crafts, but I’ve never been a big fan of science. Maybe I would have managed a better grade in my high school anatomy class if I’d had one of the Color Yourself Smart kits featured on the MindWare website.

The Color Yourself Smart anatomy kit includes a 128 page book as well as a set of eight high quality colored pencils. There are 52 different technical illustrations to color. The goal of the coloring exercises is to build a visual memory that sharpens your child’s ability to recall the names and functions of all the human body’s systems.

In addition to the human anatomy set featured here, MindWare also has Color Yourself Smart kits covering geography, bird watching, and art history. Each kit sells for $19.95.

All of the Color Yourself Smart kits are recommended for children ages 12 and up. The designs are very intricate, so they would be difficult for younger kids to color in properly.

I can see the Color Yourself Smart kits being great gifts for curious children as well as clever resources for homeschooling families looking for a way to make lessons more appealing.

Have you ever tried any of the Color Yourself Smart kits? If so, what did you think of them?

Photo credit: MindWare

Rescuing Julia Twice: A Mother’s Tale of Russian Adoption and Overcoming Reactive Attachment Disorder is award-winning journalist Tina Traster’s new memoir detailing her journey to motherhood through international adoption.

Like many Eastern European adoptees, Traster’s Siberian-born daughter Julia struggles with reactive attachment disorder (RAD). If you’re not familiar with the condition, RAD is characterized by a lack of bonding with caregivers and extreme difficulty forming personal relationships. It is typically seen in children who were abandoned or neglected in their early years.

Rescuing Julia Twice discusses the feelings Tina and her husband struggled with as they searched for a way to help their little girl feel safe and secure. Because Julia seemed exceptionally well behaved to the casual observer, they often felt like they were imagining or exaggerating her condition.

Finding other adoptive parents who were dealing with similar problems made them realize that Julia could be helped and that her issues were not a result of their inexperience as parents.

I admit that I do not know much about RAD, other than the tidbits gleaned from news stories of parents struggling with children who suffer from this condition. Rescuing Julia gives you an interesting look at RAD through a mother’s perspective.

However, please keep in mind that Tina is a journalist and not a child psychologist or medical doctor. Her family’s methods were somewhat unconventional and it’s not advisable to make any treatment decisions for your own child based on one person’s experience.

Rescuing Julia Twice ends on a high note, but Julia is just five and you can’t help but wonder what’s in store for her future. I hope Traster considers writing a follow up once Julia is a teen or young adult.

Disclaimer: A review copy was provided by the publisher.

Photo credit: Amazon

If you have a daughter in need of positive role models, She: A Celebration of Greatness in Every Woman makes an excellent gift. It’s the perfect thing to flip through when you’re having a bad day and in need of a little pick me up.

This beautiful book by Mary Ann Radmacher and Liz Kalloch features quotes from women in many different fields, including:

• Virginia Woolf
• Marilyn Monroe
• Anne Frank
• Oprah Winfrey
• Madeleine Albright
• Emily Dickinson
• Hillary Rodham Clinton
• Ellen DeGeneres
• Julia Child
• Margaret Cho

“We both celebrate women who embody qualities that are important to us,” Radmacher and Kalloch write. “These women, by virtue of how they live out their days, become a guidepost for our own practices and habits.”

The quotes are loosely organized into chapters that celebrate the special qualities present in every woman, such as nurturing, collaboration, leadership, compassion, imagination, and creativity. Each chapter features quotes, illustrations, and an introduction with advice from the author.

My personal favorite is from the chapter “She Is Nurturing.” The excerpt below is one I think any woman can relate to, especially when she’s raising a family.

Dear Generous Heart,

In the quiet moments those sweet times or pauses in which you feel your weariness, you might wonder what it is you have left to give. Hear, then, the whisper of your own support system, the legacy which comes of your many miles, like a wind down a deep canyon.

“You have everything you need. Begin again, nurture your own garden. It is from that growing abundance that you are able to provide hope to others.”

Disclaimer: A review copy was provided by the publisher.

Photo credit: Amazon

My family has been undergoing a shift toward minimalism over the last year. Our initial reasoning was purely financial, but once you start making an effort to buy less stuff you begin to see what a huge environmental impact our consumer culture has.

All You Need Is Less: The Eco-Friendly Guide to Guilt-Free Green Living and Stress-Free Simplicity by Madeleine Somerville, is a straightforward and down to Earth guide to minimalism. Somerville discusses her own family’s journey towards simplicity, including resistance from her husband Adam when she tried to implement some of her more radical ideas.

All You Need Is Less is part memoir, part guidebook, and part recipe book. Somerville shares personal stories, tips for downsizing, and her own favorite recipes for things like homemade laundry detergent, all natural toothpaste, and eco-friendly shaving cream.

Some of the tips and recipes were ones I recognized from other resources, but I did find a few new ideas. The DIY newspaper cat litter recipe is on my list of projects to try this summer.

Somerville is funny and non-judgmental, so you don’t come away feeling like a failure if you’re not willing to give up your salon shampoo to wash your hair with baking soda and apple cider vinegar. Somerville’s philosophy in regards to green living is similar to my own. She believes that going green is a process and that whatever small steps you choose to take will eventually add up to a real difference.

I found Somerville’s breezy commentary enjoyable enough that I read the entire book from cover to cover, but All You Need Is Less is nicely organized into chapters if you want to skip around and focus on just one subject area:

• Home
• Body
• Lifestyle
• Food and Drink
• Gardening
• Relationships
• Health and Wellness
• Baby
• Pet Holidays

Disclaimer: A review copy was provided by the publisher.

Photo credit: Amazon

An Eye for Art: Focusing on Great Artists and Their Work introduces young people to noteworthy works from more than 50 great artists, including works by Raphael, Rembrandt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

The corresponding activities and explorations are designed to inspire a child’s artistic development and improve creative writing skills - making this an especially useful book for homeschooling families.

The book is edited and produced by the National Gallery of Art, which maintains one of the world’s most noted collections of American and European masterpieces from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art’s collection includes photographs, sculpture, paintings, drawings, prints, decorative arts, and new media arts. It is located in Washington, DC.

You can find An Eye for Art: Focusing on Great Artists and Their Work at The Gallery Shops, which is the National Gallery of Art’s new online store.

This recently revamped site carries more than 1,000 products, including Gallery publications, special exhibition products, framed art prints, and an assortment of gift items such as jewelry, home decor, stationery, and children’s toys. The selection reflects the most requested items from the three gift shops located with the museum’s buildings.

A new offering for the Gallery online store is Mercury Rewards, a loyalty program that awards points to registered shoppers to redeem for discounts on future purchases. The online store also now will redeem an array of promotional codes and cross-channel coupons, as well as honoring discounts for Circle Members.

Photo credit: The Gallery Shops

My daughter started to read on her own (and enjoy it!) lately, so I went a little overboard with the book-buying. We branched out and got a single chapter book for her since we saw that it involves not just fairies, but candy, too—two of her favorite things!

Chocolate Dreams is the first book in the Candy Fairies series by Helen Perelman, and I think we’ll be picking up more as soon as my daughter gets a little more used to the idea that yes, she can read these long books all by herself if she’ll stick to it and use a bookmark instead of trying to devour the whole story at once.

She’s intimidated by the length and some of the words are a little challenging for beginning readers, so I read it to her.

I have purchased some absolutely horrible chapter books in the past to use as bedtime stories. The writing in those was painful to read, especially out loud. Sometimes it seemed as if the author only knew between three and five adjectives, and every other sentence needed an adverb. Then there was the lack of plot.

Chocolate Dreams, and probably all the other books in the series, doesn’t have any of those problems. I think I was more into the story and solving the mystery than my daughter was at times.

The chocolate eggs needed for an event in Sugar Valley are missing, and Cocoa the fairy was responsible for keeping them safe. A troll named Mogu really took them. The fairies have to figure out who did it and get them back. Instead of violence, they outsmart the troll and save the day. It’s a cute story, and even the troll isn’t that scary. My daughter was a little nervous about him at first.

I think this is a cute book series for girls ages five to eight, whether you have to read the to them or they’re able to read them on their own.

Photo credit: Amazon

LittleBLUEPRINT books give kids an actionable plan to help them handle a tricky situation. The books cover topics such as dealing with the death of a loved one, the loss of a pet, or the change in routine that comes after your parents get a divorce.

The series was created with the assistance of Dr. Dan Siegel, a world-renowned neuropsychiatrist, best-selling author, and professor of psychiatry.

The littleBLUEPRINT books can be purchased as ready made books or as books that can be customized with photos of your child and special friends or family members.

The personalized books are just $10 more than the ready made books, so I think this would be a nice way to create something meaningful for your child. I can see a book filled with photos of your child and his grandparent being something that could bring great comfort after a loss.

My son is a little too old for these books now, but I think the concept is a great one. I like that the books give specific suggestions for things kids can do to take control of a situation, such as planting flowers in a garden to honor a loved one who has passed or making plans to spend special time with each parent after the divorce.

There’s also a page in the back of the book where the child can write down his own ideas, which further encourages a proactive attitude towards life’s challenges.

Visit the littleBLUEPRINT website to see previews of each book or to order a story for your child. You can also purchase gift certificates in $25, $50, $100, and $200 increments.

Photo credit: littleBLUEPRINT