Monthly Archives: February 2010

School Days!

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I’m going to blog a bit about my personal life today. Do any of you have kids? If so, did you send them to private school or public school? Our child is only four years old and we’re looking at different schools – wondering where we should enroll him. It just feels a bit weird, looking for enrollment options for a kid that’s going to kindergarten next year! The reason it feels kind of weird is because, when I was growing up, we just got on the big yellow bus and went to school. There was no discussion about curriculums, private vs. public, etc.

I didn’t go through all of this discussion about school until I was eighteen, getting ready to go to college, filling out financial aid forms, getting my high school transcript, etc.

After all this talk and discussion, our son might just be going to the elementary school around the corner! But everybody else is doing this, and my friends think I should research all of my options, so, that’s what I’m doing!

~Cecelia Dowdy~

Breaking Dawn – A Secular Novel

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I’ve finally finished Breaking Dawn, the last book in the Twilight Series. Also, I’d read a short review of this book about a year ago in the now-extinct Today’s Christian Woman magazine. I did find the same review online on Christianity Today’s Kyria blog. I do agree with some of what the reviewer said in that post. From my reading the four books, the romance does seem to be more obsessive than a regular romance novel.

SPOILER BELOW:

In Breaking Dawn, Bella is still human at the beginning of the story. She marries her boyfriend/vampire Edward Cullen. They spend a romantic honeymoon on a remote island. Out of the entire book, I enjoyed the first section the best. I especially loved reading about their honeymoon days. The book got kind of weird for me when Bella gets pregnant by her vampire husband. The child makes Bella sick, literally. While pregnant, the child sucks all of the energy from Bella, making her ill, tired, and barely able to move. She drinks blood to nourish the child and once the child is born, it’s apparant that the little girl is advanced in development – she has a full set of teeth and she bites. The child grows several inches per day and develops mentally very quickly. Giving birth to the child kills Bella, so Edward bites her, giving her his venom which ultimately turns Bella into a vampire.

Having the werewolf, Jacob, around, with his pack made things kind of weird too. When Renesmee’s (Bella’s vampire/human child) life is in danger, the vampires, along with their cronies, and Jacob’s pack of wolves prepare to go to battle.

Jacob’s point-of-view dominates the second part of the book, and then the point-of-view switches back to Bella during the last portion of the story. When Jacob phases into his werewolf form, it kind of reminded me of watching The Incredible Hulk when I was a kid! He would rip his clothes when he’d go into werewolf form.

Out of all the Twilight books, I enjoyed the first one, Twilight, the best. It just had more of a realistic feel to it. The romance was strong and riveting and I just couldn’t put the book down I was so mesmerized by it!

The second book, New Moon, was pretty good for about 2/3 of the book but about the last 33% of the book was boring, so I skimmed that last section. I skimmed Eclipse last December and I didn’t like it very much. I read the first 80 pages word for word and that’s when I started skimming the rest of the book.

However, I did manage to read Breaking Dawn word for word. It’s over 750 pages, so it’s a pretty big book. So Twilight was the strongest book, and Breaking Dawn was the second best out of the series. I did think that Breaking Dawn was very weird and science-fictionish, too. Fantasy and sci-fi are not genres that I’m very fond of. I read those kinds of books sparingly.

These stories are not my usual reading fare, but I had to read them because everybody was making such a big deal about the Twilight Series that I just had to read it myself.

You can see my earlier posts about the Twilight series here, here, here, and here.

Have you read this series? If so, which was your favorite book and why?

~Cecelia Dowdy~

Still Snowed In

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Same story here, still snowed in. Job was closed again today, that’s the fifth consecutive day that they’ve been closed! This is the worse storm I’ve seen in Maryland in my entire life, and I’ve lived in Maryland since birth! My husband and I will be shoveling snow today. The icicles outside our bedroom window have grown even larger, but, I was too lazy to take a picture today!

Here’s the Apple Coffeecake recipe that I promised you! It did turn out yummy and it goes great with a plate of eggs and pork sausage!

Apple Coffee Cake
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 cups white sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
4 eggs
1/2 cup orange juice (I did not have any orange juice, so I substituted apple juice instead.)
4 apples – peeled, cored and sliced
5 tablespoons white sugar
5 tablespoons brown sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Lightly grease a 10 inch tube pan.
2. In a large bowl, stir together flour and baking powder. In a separate
bowl, beat together 2 cups sugar, vegetable oil, eggs. Stir egg mixture into
flour mixture, alternately with orange juice, until smooth. In a small bowl, combine 5 tablespoons white sugar, 5 tablespoons brown sugar and 2 teaspoons
cinnamon.
3. Pour 1/2 of batter into prepared pan. Add 1/2 of the apples then 1/2 of the cinnamon sugar mixture. Repeat with remaining ingredients.
4. Bake in preheated oven until a toothpick inserted into center of cake comes out clean, about 50 to 70 minutes. Let cool for 15 to 20 minutes, invert on a plate and
serve.

Enjoy!

~Cecelia Dowdy~