Welcome to another Sunday Bookends where I share what I’m reading, watching, writing, eating, seeing, smelling — no, wait. Only what I’m reading, watching, writing, sometimes what I’m listening to and a little about what we’ve been up to. Feel free to let me know what you’ve been up to in the comments.

What I’m Reading

I am reading A Christmas Carol with my son for school (we will be reading Lord of the Flies and To Kill A Mockingbird next semester and already read another classic – Silas Marner.)

I’m also enjoying a slow read through Home to Holly Springs by Jan Karon and Maggie by Charles Martin, but will take a break from them this week to read A Shepherd’s Abiding by Jan Karon because it has a sweet Christmas theme.

What I’m Watching/Have Watched

I watched a really stupid, cringe-worthy movie on Amazon prime that I had to fast forward through part of because the acting was pretty bad but then also cried through – and not because the acting was bad.

It was called Holiday Switch and the whole premise was that this woman was unhappy with her life with her poor husband and kids and when she runs into her rich ex-boyfriend, she wonders what her life would have been like if she married him instead. She bumps her head and crawls in a — hang in here with me — a dryer and comes out in an alternate life where she would have been married to the ex-boyfriend instead of the current husband. Long story short, she discovers life with the boyfriend wouldn’t have turned out like she had hoped, even with all that extra money. While in the “other life” she runs into her real life husband and children and falls apart at the idea that the don’t know her and her real husband is married to another woman.

I’m sure my having a sinus headache and being very tired had nothing to do with me crying while this poor woman cried, thinking about how awful my life would be if I didn’t have my family (kids and husband) and holding my kids in vice grips while I sobbed into their hair. They were so bewildered, poor things.

“I love you too, Mom,” The Boy said, adding quickly to ruin the mood, as he always does, “The cat scratched my nipple last night.”

With that mood ruined, I sent him off to do the schoolwork he’d skipped doing when I gave the kids a snow day on Thursday (more about that later).

Sunday night we watched a livestream of The Chosen Christmas Special on Youtube. It’s still available on Youtube but it will also be shown on some Christian cable networks on Christmas and Christmas Eve. It will also be on TBN on Christmas at 8:00 PT/9pm MT/10pm CT/11pm ET and on UPtv: December 24th @ 4:30pm PT/5:30pm MT/6:30pm CT/ 7:30pm ET.

You can still watch the livestream on Youtube and I highly recommend it and staying until they show The Shepherd, which was a short film Dallas Jenkins (writer and director of The Chosen) made for his church, before he made the series. Season 2 of The Chosen is supposed to start airing sometime around Easter, I believe.

This upcoming week we will watch The Man Who Invented Christmas, which is a movie about Charles Dicken’s and how he created A Christmas Carol. It’s a fun movie that I am sure ‘takes liberties’ with the real story, but is more entertaining than seeing yet another retelling of the story. We are watching it because my son is reading A Christmas Carol for English and is scheduled to finish it this week. He’s cheating some by listening a reading of it and earlier in the week he tried to do that while playing a game on the Playstation. I have informed him that’s not how school works and he can play games after his work is done. Homeschooling is not for the faint of heart.

What’s Been Occurring

As I mentioned yesterday in my Photos of the Week post, we had 24 inches of snow dumped on us Wednesday into Thursday. We spent the rest of the week digging out. Or I should say, my husband spent the rest of the week digging out. I really didn’t help at all other than making a couple lunches and dinners and cheering him on. Towns about 40 minutes north of us ended up with between 3 and 4 feet of snow.

I shared the majority of the photos yesterday, but will share a few here as well .

One adventure I didn’t mention yesterday was that one of our neighbors actually tipped her car over the embankment leading to their house during the beginning of the storm. It was almost completely tipped on it’s side. My neighbors and I watched in horror as her car slid sideways, (slowly thankfully) and ended up on it’s side and she had to be lifted from the car through the passenger side door. My neighbors had been on their way to help her get unstuck from the snow next to the long driveway and I was looking out the window, getting ready to head out to see how I could help (which would have been very little, I imagine), which is how we watched it all unfold.

It was surreal to see a car of that size and weight move like a matchbox car and tip over. Thankfully she was fine, the car was able to be pulled upright about a half an hour later, and all ended well. I did not take photos of the incident, even though I was sorely tempted since I had never seen a car end up tipped like that without completely tipping over.

This is our first winter at our new house, but I grew up a few miles from the town we now live in so I’m used to the heavier snow the county we now live in can get. This area had not had two feet of snow dumped on it during one storm in quite a while, though, so the neighbors assured us this isn’t the norm for our little hill. I asked my neighbor, “Are you ready for the snow?”

He said he was but when I said, “This is our first snowstorm up here. I’m sure it will be fine,” he looked a little worried and said, “Well, two feet is a lot of snow.”

At that point the Weather Service was telling us we could get anywhere from 8 to 20 inches, so they didn’t even seem to know what to expect.

My neighbor’s apparent lack of confidence that the storm wouldn’t be so bad made me a little nervous, but we still tried to anticipate the storm with some sense of wonder and excitement. We had worried we would lose power (aka WiFi!) but somehow we didn’t. We live in a more rural area than we had for the last 18 years and while digging out of snow can be a downside, we still love our new house, our new neighbors, and are glad we made the move.

We’re even glad we made the move when we are chasing our six month old kitten out through two feet of snow (three foot snow drifts in some places) or digging our happy puppy out a spot in the backyard where she can use the bathroom.

This upcoming week we might get some more nasty weather on Christmas Eve and Christmas day but not 2 feet. That we know of anyhow.

We don’t have anything too exciting planned for the week. There will be three days of school for the kids before a week long break, making sausage balls with my mom one day (in memory of my aunt Dianne), making homemade pizzas on Christmas Eve, and then spending Christmas with my parents.

What I’m Writing

I will not be writing as many blog posts in the upcoming weeks as I have lately. Posting a blog post a day for a week was a personal challenge, but I don’t have as much to write about this next week (lucky for all of you, huh?!).

I’m still working on editing The Farmer’s Daughter and am starting a couple of other stories that are connected to The Tanner’s story.

On the blog last week I wrote a lot (too much), but couple of them I didn’t write myself:

Photos of the Week (our first little snowstorm)

Victorian Reading Challenge

Want A Way to Delete Your Facebook And Never Look Back?

My Grandfather’s Pipe (written by my husband) (By the way, he says ‘thank you’ to all those who commented on it. He doesn’t always hear feedback on his columns unless a reader disagrees with him and wants to complain.)

Fiction Friday: The Secrets We Hold

Photos of the Week: Now That’s a Lot of Snow ( I had two Photos of the Week because I am moving Photos of the Week to Saturday. I think. Maybe. We’ll see.)

So that was my week in review, what was your week like? Let me know in the comments and if I don’t talk to you again before the end of the week, have a Merry Christmas!