It’s a very cold morning in Georgia. 19 degrees is practically unheard of in this part of the country. All of the schools are closed…expect for ours. Can you hear the crying and wailing of my fourth grader? I have been told that her screams can be heard all the way across Atlanta. That is the disappointment of a homeschooler who attends a University Model School. The assignments were handed out ages ago and the schedule must be kept, or so we’ve been told. Being a mother, that used to be a child, that lived for snow days, I decided to offer a delay in the schooling portion of our day. We started our morning with a movie, hot chocolate and chocolate chip scones. Why scones? Because they are very, very, very easy and quick. I didn’t want to spend one more minute away from the comfort of my chair with the BIG blanket than necessary. So, here are my instructions on how to have a F aux Day or a pretend Snow Day of your own. Unless of course you actually are at home because of a Snow Day.  Dont’ worry, these instructions will apply to you as well!

1. If you have a fireplace, get it started!
2. Remove the comforters and quilts from all of the beds in the house and pile them on the sofa.
3. Tuck your children in and turn on a favorite movie.
4. Quickly whip up the scone recipe below and get the hot chocolate started. You can see my recipe for Christmas cocoa, if you really want to make it a special occasion. But, we just went for the non-indulgent version today.
5. Serve the scones and cocoa to your children at the kitchen table, but take yours, along with a pile of magazines and books and bury yourself deep into the recesses of your blankets.
6. Don’t come out until lunch time.

If you are really having a snow day, then repeat steps 1-6 for lunch and then again for dinner. If your day must go on, like ours, untangle yourself from the covers, put on a double pair of socks and make grilled cheese and tomato soup for lunch. I move to hot tea in the afternoon, but no one will know if you sneak in a second cup of cocoa.

Enjoy your Faux Day or your Snow Day!  Stay warm, drink cocoa and read good books!

January books I have finished.  This is what I am reading today.

Ed Smith Designs on Etsy

(This eclectic reader block is found by Ed Smith Designs on Etsy.)

School is on holiday.  I wish you could see me smiling.  We have planned to start pajama day week tomorrow and we are going to stay in bed all week and read.  We might move to the floor in front of the fire place, but I refuse to go any further than that!  This time of year, I always sort through my list of books on my “already read”, “want to read” and “should read” list. In 2010,  I am going to start a reading journal and keep a list of the books I have read and loved.  I read somewhere, that even if you aren’t a natural born list maker, that  making a list and checking it off makes you feel more productive.  I see no room to apply list making to my life without having to do a complete overhaul on my personality, and daily routine-it’s organized chaos and it works very well for me.  But, I think I might enjoy being able to do a year end review on all of the books I read and even though I read about a book a week as it is, I can’t recall them all and I certainly don’t remember if it was this summer’s beach trip or last that I fell in love with Jasper Fforde.  I think it was last…

Anyway, in preparing a list of book titles to request from the library, I found this list of 100 books everyone should have read.  It’s by the BBC and they claim that the average adult has only read 6 out of the 100.  I  find that hard to believe!  Or maybe I  just surround myself with bibliophiles who can claim a much higher number. I have highlighted  in blue what I have read.  Maybe I will add a couple to my reading list for this week.  Who knows, maybe a list will prove to be magic, and by the end of next year I will be able to say I have read them all!  Or not.  Shakespeare’s complete works????  Not making it to my list this year.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -REALLY?
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger–Reading right now-before I see the movie!
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame–Achildhood favorite!  I may reread this one!
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown-How did this make the list??? Exciting story-but a must read??
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery-Favorite book of all time! And why my daughter’s middle name is Montgomery!
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth.
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce–Extremely painful, but I read it once, and once is enough!
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt.
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams-I love, love, love this book!  A must read!
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo-It’s a book? Not just a Broadway show?  Who knew?

I took a quiz today called "Which Classic Heroine are You?" A few quick questions determined which literary woman I most resemble.  Apparently, I am most like Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice fame.  While I modestly admit to my wit and intelligence, I never even considered the similarities between us. I took the quiz as honestly as possible and although I don’t mind being Elizabeth Bennet, I am truly disappointed that I am not Anne Shirley, from Anne of Green Gables.  L.M. Montgomery is my favorite author and I have spent the better part of my life wishing to be Anne, Anne with an E.  My sister is expecting a little girl to be born this summer and she plans on naming her Abby, without an E.  I fear that the child will always feel she is missing something.  I imagine that at about the age of eleven she will have a conversation with her mother much like that of Anne with an E.

"But if you call me Anne please call me Anne spelled with an E."

"What difference does it make how it is spelled?"

"Oh, it makes SUCH a difference.  It looks so much nicer.  When you hear a name pronounced, can’t you always see it in your mind, just as if it was printed out? I can, and A-N-N looks dreadful, but A-N-N-E looks so much more distinguished.  If you’ll only call me Anne spelled with an E, I shall try to reconcile myself to not being called Cordelia."

I have been stomping my foot and balling my fists while screaming, but no one is listening to me about how Abby should be Abbey with an E.  Apparently it is only important to me and that is why I am convinced that the quiz has made a mistake in determining my character be likened to that of Elizabeth Bennet.  Anne Shirley is my soul mate and I am most definitely a Brooke with an E –and for that, I am very thankful!

(By the way, I took the quiz to see which character from Little Women I am most like, and thank goodness they saw that I am Jo. It would have been a disappointment to find out that I was Beth. Not that I don’t want to be good and nice, but it would have been a heartbreak to find out so late in life that I am not nearly as interesting as I think I am.)  Who are you in Little Women?