The Big Read estimates that the average person has only read 6 of the 100 greatest books ever printed.

Copy and paste to your blog and play along! Bold books you've read, and italics books you love.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling (have this on the shelf to read at some point)
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 – Phillip 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 The Complete works of Shakespeare Most of ‘em.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife
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
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 - CS Lewis
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
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
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
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
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons
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 St. Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
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

Anniversary tattoos!!

We got a babysitter for a few hours so we could go out and get our new tattos. The tattoo we got is called an eternal love knot and we got it to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. Mine is on the inside of my left wrist, while Peter's is on the inside of his right.

We went up north to my inlaws cottage for lunch today to celebrate my BIL's 30th birthday. While we were there I got these great pictures of the kiddos that i just needed to share.




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I can not wait for tomorrow night. I have an appointment to get my 8th tattoo. This one is going to be on the back of my wrist...i'll post pictures once its done.

My parents come up for a visit on Tuesday, we were just down there but I can't wait to see them. Its been almost a year since they were last up here.

The kiddos start swimming lessons again tomorrow. I'm hoping that M, J and L get a different teacher then the last lesson just so i don't get called out for moving Lucas ahead even though he didn't pass.

Peter and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary last week. We went out to dinner to celebrate and we even tried somewhere new which is unheard of from me, because i'm like the epitome of a picky eater. We went to this new Italian place literally right up the street from our house and the food was amazing. I even ate zucchini and asparagus for the first time, and i liked them both LOL. Anyhow, the food was great, and for a good price...defintely going to go back another night.

Tink, i had no idea that each Ripley's believe it or not was different. I guess that just goes to show how much strange stuff is in this world that they can make each one unique. I'll have to check it out when we head down to Disney again. In the meantime tell Hoop that you guys are more then welcome up here in Canada...and if you need a place to stay while you get settled we just put a king size bed in our basement that you are more then welcome to.

We went on vacation last week. We spent the first two days of our vacation at Great Wolf Lodge in Niagara Falls. This was our first visit and we weren't disappointed. Everything was super clean, all the staff was amazingly friendly. Daynah made friends with a girl named Jillian who worked in the Cub Club, Daynah looked for her every where we went. Jillian even made Daynah a friendship bracelet and let her help DJ. The kids loved the waterpark, and i absolutlely adored the outdoor pool. I swear if i could have spent my whole time out there i would have been a happy camper...but the kids wanted to do the slides inside. The first day all the kids stuck to the little slides, but the second day the lifeguards noticed Daynah and said she was too tall for them, so we went off to a few of the bigger slides that the kiddos were just big enough for. Peter had been raging on me to do a slide the whole time we were there. I've never gone down a waterslide in my life, and am quite frankly afraid of them. Of course since my 4 and 5 yr olds went down this waterslide, mommy had to as well. When i reached the bottom of the slide, my leg was quivering and my heart was racing...dear lord was i scared lmao. Of course the kids wanted to go again, and after walking up the 88 steps to get to the slide, i had no other choice to go back down. While not as scared the second time, i certaintly didn't enjoy it. We had a great time, but i was happy to leave when we did. Between the water park all day, and late evenings i was beat!!

We went to the touristy area of Niagara Falls one night for dinner and walked by Ripley's Believe It or Not. How cool is this dress??!! Its made completely from starburst wrappers...i love starburst.
The kids in front of some dinosaur minature golf fountain in Niagara Falls. Lucas loved this because he likes to pretend he's a baby sharp tooth and I'm the mommy sharp tooth.


After our two days in Niagara Falls we drove to visit my family and friends in Annapolis Maryland. We chilled, we visited, we ate things we can't get here in the Great White north (mmm Rita's). The pictures above are from when we visited my mom and dad at work on the Naval Academy....growing up that place was my second home (my dad was enlisted for 20 yrs and will celebrate the anniversary of being retired from the military for 20 yrs at the end of the month). We spent 3 full days there and 4 nights...and then we drove the long drive home. We made it back Friday night and everyone was thrilled to sleep in their own beds (me especially, three people in a double bed just does not work).

Of course now that we are home, we've got a broken washing machine, a house that needs cleaned and the weather has been crappy so the kids are driving me crazy. Peter and I celebrate our 10 yr wedding aniversary on Thursday and we are getting tattoos on Monday!! My parents come up on Tuesday for 3 days so have to get ready for that, and the kids start swimming lessons again on Monday...they have gymnastics on Saturday, squeeze in speech for Juleigha and Lucas and i'm busy busy busy.

I was tagged for this meme a bit ago now...figured i'd put this up for now until i can go thru the pictures from our vacation this past week and blog about Great Wolf Lodge :)

1. Where is your cell phone? In my purse, in the front closet
2. Your significant other? at the theatre with Daynah watching High School Musical
3. Your hair? is i dunno growing...its sorta like a short shaggy bob
4. Your mother? forgetful
5. Your father? falling apart
6. Your favorite thing? silence lol
7. Your dream last night? no idea, i think i was too tired to dream
8 Your favorite drink? water
9. Your dream/goal? to raise happy kids...i don't know what i want to be when i grow up
10. The room you’re in? family room
11. Your hobby? reading, scrapbooking
12. Your fear? losing one of my children
13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? gosh i dunno...in a bigger house would be nice...
14. What you’re not? today motivated....i'm just chilling today
15. Muffins? blueberry
16. One of your wish list items? a new tv stand
17. Where you grew up? all over the place, philippines, maine, hawaii, maryland...here
18. The last thing you did? emailed peter
19. What are you wearing? black capris and a turquoise tank
20. Favorite gadget? my macbook
21. Your pets? none yet
22. Your computer? new and LOVE it
23. Your mood? tired
24. Missing someone? my folks and friends...even though i just left them yesterday
25. Your car? a pontiac montana
26. Something you’re not wearing? socks
27. Favorite store? right now lane bryant
28. Like someone? lots of people
29. Your favorite color? blue/pink/brown
30. When is the last time you laughed? hmm...yesterday for sure...
31. Last time you cried? a few weeks ago i think