The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius

The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius by Kristine Barnett. Random House 2013 ISBN 9780812993370, ebook 9780679645245

It was a total pleasure to read this book. While my son isn't the genius that Jacob in the book is, it was interesting to read about a woman and her autistic son, Jacob, that in many ways traveled some of the same paths that I have been traveling for year. This is a very special book which showed not only the help she gave her son, but also other autistic children. The author, Kristine Barnett, is a very giving woman even though dealing with chronic physical problems and another child in the family that also had special needs.
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Here is the review that I wrote for Amazon.

I could so much relate to this woman's story and how she is raising her autistic/genius son. No, I don't have a genius son, but I do have an autistic son who is rather bright and in many ways their stories are roughly parallel. The author tells the story of how her son who seemed normal at birth became more and more distant and different as he got older till at around age 2 he became non-verbal. Then she hunted down the doctors, therapists, and treatment ideas that would hopefully be able to help her son. She found though, that their ideas didn't seem to be doing much for her son and at times seemed almost detrimental. Please note that she is not knocking these people trained in dealing with autistic people, only that what they were doing didn't work for her and her son Jacob. I ran into the same thing when I was having trouble getting my son to eat. The recommendation: if he doesn't eat dinner, send him to bed hungry and he will soon learn to eat his dinner. Well, two mornings with my son throwing up on the kitchen floor due to being too hungry was enough for me. That didn't work and I wasn't about to see just how many mornings my son would be sick until he decided to eat supper because some childless therapist thought it was a great idea. I doubt that any therapist would give that sort of advice now, but that was close to 30 years ago when as much wasn't known about treating autistic children.

The author learned to combine her talents as a mother and a daycare provider with how she helped her son. As she started to notice and encourage his unique talents to get him to react to everyday situations and to talk, he started to respond. I called this going through the backdoor with my son. Instead of the normal frontal approach, you have to go out back and find a different way, or many different ways of reaching these children. Happily Jacob responded and then was able to pour his intellect into math, physics, and astronomy.

This book is one about hope and finding each child's unique talent or interest to help them come into normal relationships. Well written by one very busy mother whose family spent everything they had to not only help Jacob but also to open a center for other autistic children where they can participate in activities that usually they are kept out of such as sports of all kinds (many autistic children have coordination problems). If you have an autistic child and are looking for new ideas to help them, this book just might give you some answers and food for thought, although I'm sure that it will upset some mainstream providers of care.

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I hope many of you will read this book or pass it on to families that are coping with autism in any of its shapes and forms.



  

Joni & Ken: An Untold Love Story

As a member of the Amazon Vine Group, I get to review 4 or more books and items each month. For a prolifica reader like myself this is a jackpot. even more so when a book comes my way that touches my heart and this one did. Here is my review that I posted on Amazon for Joni & Ken: An Untold Love Story by Ken & Joni Eareckson Tada with Larry Libby.

I was only 12 years old when Joni had her accident. She dove into some water that was too shallow and broke her neck. Instantly she became a quadriplegic destined to live the rest of her life in a wheelchair with someone else taking care of all her physical needs. It would have been hard to grow up in any youth group in the late 60's early 70's without hearing about Joni, so it was refreshing to hear the latest on what is going on with this woman. At this point in time she is one of the longest surviving quads, which I am sure that Joni would lay at God's feet and those of her faithful caregivers over the years.

In her thirties, Joni meet a young man named Ken Tada and after much time together, prayer and discussion they took the step to get married. At this point you would think their marriage would somehow be `different' because of Joni's difficulties. Yet as I read this book I couldn't help but compare it to my marriage and others that I have seen. Marriage is hard work whether you are a quad, suffer from severe arthritis like I do, or happily have no health problems. It is so easy to drift apart or just be living in tandem, and forgetting why you married in the first place. As their marriage started getting stale, Ken had an opportunity to both read a book by John Eldredge Wild at Heart and also visit and talk with him. As Ken started understanding himself as a Godly man things started to change for the better with their marriage, but Joni was facing another health care crisis. She noticed a lump on her breast and at the point of diagnosis, it was already at stage 3 cancer. Within days of discovering it, Joni was taken into surgery where she had a mastectomy followed by chemotherapy. I can't even imagine the horror of the nausea when you can't even bend over and aim where the nausea would go or not even be able to wipe off your own mouth. And that would only be the least of dealing with cancer. Yet God was good and Ken with a renewed love for Joni was with her every step of the way.

As I said the story of their marriage really isn't so different than many of ours. They just found out what to do to rescue it from the doldrums and put God back in the center of it. This was a fantastic book to read and I also look forward to reading Wild at Heart as well.

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I found it interesting after writing my review, I read some of the others that were posted and found that some writers felt like the book didn't tell the story well. For someone like me though, who 3 weeks after I got married to my husband came down with a devastating chronic disease that had been creeping up on me for years, but it exploded almost eleven years ago now I knew what they were talking about. We in many ways live through what Joni and Ken do so I didn't need the details for what Joni and Ken go through. I live it every day. I have learned that when we start feeling distant from each other, the best thing to do is pray about it and pray for God's blessings on your mate. I think it is enough that we know that even this woman, that so many look at as so spiritual, also has troubles with her marriage jsut like the rest of us do. It takes work and dedication to your marriage vows to keep a marriage on the same set of tracks instead of parallel ones. I did appreciate the book very much and have also put John Eldredge's books on my wish list. I hope you will read this book and be touched by it as well.

Needing to Read

On a forum I participate on, someone wrote a post about wants vs. needs and I thought abut what do I feel that I need and I realized it is books. Some people could go a year while only reading one book (according to my son and a statistic he once quoted me, that is the average amount of books read in the US in a year. Obviously they would never consider books a need. I see some people with 'needs' that I think are pretty silly. Who really needs shoes with 5" heels? But as I thought about it, this is what I came up with for my need to read.

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I could go without a cell phone (I do), I could go without the internet (that would be tough), I could go without TV (no problem), but I personally need books and lots of them to keep me sane. Not sure what would happen if I went without a book for a week, but I suspect I would spontaneously combust. That being said, I know this particular need and handle it in the most economic way. I don't constantly buy new books, or download a new one to my Kindle as soon as I have read my latest book. Nope I buy them at bag day at the library, I borrow them from the library, I use the library to library exchange if I need to, I download FREE Kindle books, I read and review books for Amazon and they send them to me for free (maybe 30-40 a year). So a habit that could cost me at least a $1000 or more a year at the rate I read, probably costs me $50 or less a year. I think this is an example of dealing with ‘needs’ in the cheapest way possible.

 

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I do love my books! I hope you do to!

My Kindle and Me

Been a long time since I posted, but not a long time since I read a book. I've actually read a lot of books, but get side tracked from writing up reviews on them. anyhow, for my birthday I received a Kindle Keyboard 3G .  When Kindle's first hit the market, I thought that there was no way in the world that I would ever want one. I love books, I love reading books, holding books,and having selves full of books all over my house. Then I started noticing just how sore my hands were getting when I read, especially books like thick paperbacks that are constantly fighting you. With severe arthritis, the last thing I wanted was more pain in my hands. I was also having authors asking me to review their work that was, surprise, only available on a Kindle or e-reader.

So I checked into Kindles, studied the descriptions and realized that since we are too far out of town to get WiFi and we didn't have it at our house, I would need a 3G Kindle so I could actually connect to Amazon's Kindle store. So with hubby's blessing I bought one and expected to only read some books on it. When it showed up in just a couple of days, I had fun figuring it out. I was happy to see that I had a dictionary on board and that turned out to be one of the first things that really got me happy. Now instead of having to pick up our 5# dictionary, I can look up words on my Kindle. I also found that I was able to download for free many of my favorite authors like Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte, Jean Stratton Porter. I found that my Kindle would alert me to my newer favorite author's latest releases and I was able to use it get a sample of their books to be sure whether or not I had read it yet or if there was another book in the series that I needed to read first.

This past week really showed me though, just how nifty a Kindle can be. I had checked a book out of the library, Jane Austen's Guide to Dating , when I started reading it, I kept finding references to Northanger Abbey one of Jane's books that I had read but only once so the references were obscure to me. So I pulled out my Kindle and looked up Northanger Abbey and started reading it. The book itself kept making reference to yet another book that the young ladies in the novel were reading. So I wondered to myself, could that be a real book? I looked up Udolpho on my Kindle and sure enough it was there!  Now I know I can find a copy of all Jane Austen's works at my local library, but the chance of finding this book that a book written in 1818 was commenting impossible and yet here I now have it on my Kindle! If my Kindle only had a good US and world atlas and a dictionary of old fashioned word usage it would make reading really fun. I think using my Kindle for more than reading, had made me realize what a valuable addition to my reading it can be even when I have  my  nose buried in an old fashioned book. Is this 6 degrees of separation when it comes to books?

Make an Embellished, Denim Fold-Over Bag - Threads

Here is a great looking Threads Magazine website bag project. Make it in your own fabrics with your own embellishments to make it truly your own. Let's see some photos of your finished bag! Make an Embellished, Denim Fold-Over Bag - Threads

Saving For Retirement by Gail MarksJarvis

Saving for Retirement without Living Like a Pauper or Winning the Lottery by Gail MarsJarvis, Updated & Revised, August 2012 ISBN 0132271907 Kindle Edition.

This is copy of my review for this book for the Amazon Vine program.

I wasn’t exactly sure what this book would contain, secrets for how to get the money to save so you don’t retire penniless, or would it be about investing strategies? It turns out to be a well written guide book to the basics of investing in the different retirement accounts available in the USA. I was impressed by this book and even though I have read many books on investing, none were as clear and simple to understand as this book. I learned quite a few things, including what a Roth IRA can do for you. Any other time that I have read about a Roth IRA I never understood why it had such appeal. One simple paragraph or two and I comprehended. That is a sign of a good “How-To” book. Make it simple enough that not only can the reader understand, but they can also put the advice into practice.

One of my favorite things in this book was the constant pushing to remind young adults that starting to save now in a 401K or IRA would over the long haul leave them with a tidy retirement fund of somewhere in the vicinity of $1,000,000. Yes, we are aware of inflation on that amount over 30-40+ years, but how much better to have that million dollars even if its spending ability has diminished, than no money saved at all? This is a book every parent should read and then give a copy to each of their high school age kids or college kids at the latest, so they can secure a future for themselves. I will be passing my copy over to my son to read and I anticipate some good conversations with him about the book and what investing plan we both should come up with. I’m so late in the game but financial problems have reared there ugly heads for me way too many times, but I do look forward to trying to get our finances earning the best they can.

For anyone who doesn’t understand the stock market, how to invest in their 401Ks and IRAs, this book will help you to not only understand but make wise choices because of the knowledge they have gained. A must read book for the baffled.

One thing I was very impressed about in this book, is that it was written without ever once saying this or that fund is ‘sexy’. Somehow over the last few years, the word sexy has come to replace words like great, fantastic, etc. Since stocks and investing are asexual, they literally can’t be ‘sexy’ and I’m glad that this writer knew that. Unfortunately this bad habit of some writers tends to feel like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.

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I've been on disability for about 8 years now, so effectively I'm retired, but that doesn't mean I have a nice little nest egg and with my hubby 9 years younger, he has almost 20 years to 'retirement'. Do self-employed people ever actually retire? Well anyways, I still want to try to squeeze as much out of what little we have invested as possible before his body gives up entirely. This book gave me lots of good ideas and ideas for things that I want to investigate. I hope you get a copy and study it yourself.

Here is one of my latest reviews for Amazon. It is for the book Get Up to Speed with Online Marketing: How to Use Websites, Blogs, Social Networking and Much More by Jon Reed. ISBN 0133066274

As small on line sellers at ecrater.com, our world has been rocked by Google deciding that they will no longer show listing of items for sale for free in their search. As small sellers, we can't afford to pay the cost of the product just to drive someone to buy from us. So getting this book and reading it was like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Ideas! Good ideas. I ideas I can use! Techniques I didn't understand. I have never marked up and highlighted a book as much as this one. I couldn't believe how much my understanding of the different social media sites worked.

One of my frustrations with the internet over the years is these new, neat things like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc. hit our computers but nothing ever comes with instructions manuals anymore. It is difficult at times to truly understand how to use these programs to the fullest. That is what I liked about this book was the understanding of the different social media sites and how they worked and how a person can use them to drive interest and customers to their business.

Now that I have read the book, I plan on going through it and setting up a plan of action showing which social media sites I will be using (or using better) and how we will use them. This thing with Google could really be weighing us down, but after reading this book I feel hopeful. Unless you already have a PR team in place and lots of money to drive customers to your business, this is a good book to read for the basics. Even if you have a PR team, this book could help you know what they are talking about. The only thing that I missed with the book is Pinterest came on the scene in the midst of the book being published and so it isn't mentioned in the book. I guess I will have to figure that one out myself. I highly recommend this book to anyone running an online business of any type.

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NOTE TO THE AMAZON REVIEW TROLLS THAT LIKE TO DIS REVIEWS BECAUSE WITHIN 24 HOURS OF READING A BOOK LIKE THIS, OUR STORE HASN'T ACHEIEVED 1ST PLACE PLACEMENT ON ALL THE SEARCH ENGINES. I am not interested in your comments nor do I believe anyone else is. Online marketing involves work. We understand that. We will be working on our on line marketing along with everything else we do to run a business. This is a great book and will be helpful to many who read it. I know it will be helpful to us as we put many of its principles into practice.

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Over the bit of time that I have been writing book reviews for Amazon I have been astounded by the rude people that tell me basically that I'm stupid because if the book was so great why is my store, Moonwishes Sewing and Crafts, not ranking #1 in searches. Okay, well DUH! It takes awhile to work through new ideas and get them into practice! However, I think this book would be a great one for anyone who is selling on line to read. I plan to put a lot of the ideas into practice ASAP!