Hey friends!! Welcome to the last day of the Five Fall Favorites blog party, hosted by Kate @Once Upon an Ordinary! Today’s prompt is a very fun, but super hard one – my top 5 favorite books of 2023 so far. Man, it’ll be hard to choose that few. But let’s go for it!
I read this book earlier this year because I was very drawn to the cover. Little did I know that Melanie Dickerson would soon become one of my very favorite authors!!
I just read this one recently, and loved it so much – it made my feel so many things! XD Such a beautiful and deep story. ❤️
And that’s it! Of course, I’ve read so many more amazing books this year, but I did my best to limit this post to 5 books. 🙂
Thank you guys for joining me for the Five Fall Favorites blog party! It was so much fun, and I hope you discovered some new books to read. Have an amazing rest of Fall!! ❤️ 🍂
Welcome to day 5 of the Five Fall Favorites blog party hosted by Kate at her blog, Once upon an Ordinary. Today’s post is about my favorite indie books. 🙂 I have read so many amazing books by indie authors, and I’m excited to share a few of them with you!
I read this book when I was little, again when I was older, and yet again as a read aloud to my siblings, lol! I’m currently going through the whole series.
I hope I’m allowed to include entire series, because that’s what I’m doing. This series is phenomenal! I’ve read the whole series to this point, except for the last book which just came out, and I’m and SO hyped for. These also have the coolest covers.
Hey friends! Welcome to day 2 of the Five Fall Favorites blog party hosted by Kate at her blog Once Upon an Ordinary. Today’s theme is my top 5 secondhand favorites. This one is really easy for me, because pretty much all my books are thrifted! It is very rare that I buy a new book, lol.
I mentioned loving Janette Oke’s book in my last post. This book is one of my favorites of hers! I read it aloud to my siblings, and they loved it as well.
To be honest… I haven’t actually read this. But I have read many of her books, and have yet to come across one I didn’t enjoy. I’m so excited to read this one sometime!! And it’s set in WWII, which is awesome.
Hello friends!! I’m SO excited to be participating in the Five Fall Favorites blog party, which is being hosted by Kate over at Once upon an Ordinary this year. I remember seeing several of my favorite blogs doing this when I was younger, and always wanting to participate someday, and here I finally am, lol! Basically how it works is a group of bloggers are getting together and sharing their top 5 books of different categories or prompts. You can go visit Kate’s blog to get more details and find link to all the rest of the blog participating!
Today’s prompt is my top 5 library finds. I don’t have a library where I live in Mexico, but whenever I visit my grandparents in the U.S. I ALWAYS check books from their library. It’s an extremely small library, so it can take some searching to find a good book, but I’ve definitely found several great books there. 😀
This had been on my tbr for quite a while before I found it at the library, so I was very excited to find and read it. I ended up loving it so much that I bought my own copy and read it out loud to my siblings! They really loved it to, and we enjoyed reading it together. 🙂
Another one that had been highly recommended by friends, and I’d wanted to read for awhile. I found it at the library when I was visiting there just a few weeks ago! I wasn’t able to finish it while I was there, but I found an audiobook copy and finished reading it literally today. XD I found it a very enjoyable and clever story!
When I got this at the library several years ago, I was just being introduced to Janette Oke’s writings. Now, I’ve read many books by her, and highly recommend them! I especially love her Women of the West series, which this book is part of. Even though this book may not have been my favorite she wrote, it got me interested in the rest of her good books.
This was a fun historical fiction romance. It was a typical girl goes West to become a school teacher and ends up falling in love, lol. I loved the characters a storyline. It’s the only book I’ve read by this author, but if the rest of her books are like this one it’d be fun to read more someday.
5. Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys
To be honest, I can’t think of many more full length books that I particularly loved that I’ve gotten from the library. It’s a bit of a tradition that I always get Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books whenever I go, even though I don’t really read them any other time. I enjoy getting them and reading the whole thing in one night, lol!
I’ll see you tomorrow with the next five fall favorites prompt!!
Hey friends! I have some really exciting news!! As of this morning, I have officially finished school!!! *HAPPY DANCE*
I have rather neglected this blog for the past few months because of the amount of work I was having to put into schoolwork. (I’m hoping that will change soon.)
School has been a huge challenge for me most of my life. But it wasn’t always. When I was little I loved my schoolwork, and worked at a faster than usual pace for my age. However, when I was 11 years old I received multiple Traumatic Brain Injuries in a short period of that resulted in concussions, Post Concussion Syndrome, and what we thought were absence seizures. (They weren’t, but it was very similar. My brain would literally randomly stop for a minute or two. This resulted in another concussion when it happened while I was riding a bike… XD) The doctor’s said that my brain was just not able to handle stress, and would simply shut down if it started feeling overwhelmed. And it didn’t take much to do that.
I was completely down from school for over a year. (I was down from even reading for months. Now that was devastating…! 😂) When I finally started school again, my mind was mentally performing as someone much younger than I was. When I should have been starting 7th grade, I was struggling through 3rd grade level work.
Needless to say, this was very discouraging, and all schoolwork (math especially, haha!) was extremely difficult for me. Ever since then, it has been a struggle to not only keep up, but also catch back up to where I should have been in school.
Over 8 years later, I am doing so much better from the affects of my head injuries. I still struggle with some things, but not to nearly the same extent as I used to. I don’t have constant head aches anymore, and I’m able to handle life much better, praise the Lord!
Now that I’m finished with school, it feels like a huge burden has been lifted off my shoulders. I’m so thankful to God for giving me the strength to get through it, and to my mom for being patient with me when I was struggling (and sometimes being difficult, lol…).
I’m SO excited to be finally finished with school!!! It’s been a long (or shall I say, looooongg) road, but I’m finally done, and I’m SO happy. 😀
Now that I’ve finished, I plan to focus on helping teach my siblings school for a year. I may potentially take some college classes sometime, and I’m considering getting certified to teach English as second language. We’ll see! I’m excited to have time to spend on other things. I’m also planning on going to a 5-week discipleship training program in Colorado later this year, which I’m looking forward to!
Thank you all for sticking around here, and I hope to have more posts, more often for you in the future! 😀
Social media has many pros and cons. It can be used for both good and bad purposes. Here are some things to consider if you are considering getting social media
Social media can be a big time-waster. It’s easy to accidentally spend much more time than planned just scrolling through friend’s posts and stories online. You sit down to relax for a few minutes, and before you know it, half an hour or more has passed! Not only does this waste a lot of valuable time, it also leads to depression. There are some times when it’s ok to spend some extra time online, but most of the time we should be very mindful of the time we spend on social media. If it is a struggle for you, it may help to put offending apps on a timer, so that they automatically close down after a certain amount of time.
It can take the focus off of more important things. This relates to the first point – spending too much time on social media distracts us from the important things in life. How often do we unthinkingly prioritize media over spending time with God and with our families? It can happen all too easily, without us even realizing it. That is why we need to be very aware of the amount of time we are spending online, and how much importance it has in our lives.
The internet presents unrealistic lifestyles. The photos that we see on social media are often pictures that have been carefully staged and edited to look their absolute best. That is fine, but we need to be aware of it! We frequently assume that is how their everyday life looks like. A pang of envy enters our hearts when we realize that we could never have our lives quite as put together as random-internet-lady, with her clean house and perfectly behaved children. Do not get caught up comparing yourself to things you see on the internet. It’s not real!
It opens up the door to dangerous or unhealthy relationships. While good, lasting friendships can absolutely be formed online, there is a danger if we are not careful. There are predators online who want to trick you into trusting them and take advantage of you. As long as you are careful and don’t talk to, or share too much with suspicious strangers, the danger is minimal. Be wise about who you decide to spend time talking to over the internet. Because it’s online, anything that can be faked.
All of this to say, social media is by no means all bad! It can still be used for God’s glory and edification. God’s Word can be shared and an example of Christ’s love can be shown. It is great for keeping in touch with friends and new friends (carefully!). It can be used to encourage and inspire others, and share your life with others. When used wisely, social media can be good, useful and fun. When used carelessly, it can be dangerous in many regards. Be sure that all you do is done for the glory of God!
I enjoyed writing this essay! The topic was suggested by a friend of mine, and I thought it would be a good thing to write about. I have Instagram, and I love it and have had good experiences with it, but I want to be aware of the potential dangers of social media.
Love, Rosy ❤️
Do you have any social media? What do you think about it?
Hello friends!! I hope this post finds you well. I’m sorry that I’ve been a bit MIA lately. I haven’t been too motivated to post on here the last few months, but I’m back now with with a life update from March and April. 🙂 It’s been an enjoyable last couple of months, the highlight being some of our friends in the States coming for a visit for a a few days. That was SO much fun, and I have lots of pictures of that to show you later on in the post. 😀
Actually, I was going to start with March, but honestly not that much happened. XD It was a difficult time ministry wise, but everything was pretty much normal at home. We worked on school and chores, and I did all of my normal activities like reading, blogging and practicing instruments. I made a few Youtube videos which I will share in a bit. I shared some about what happened in March in THIS POST. 🙂
You may remember how my brother, Andy, was hit by a truck and had to get a splenectomy. That was a very hard time, but since then he has recovered significantly, praise the Lord! We are very thankful that he is alive and doing well. He still can’t do much hard work and heavy lifting, but he is so much better than he was. 🙂 Thank you to everyone who prayed for us during that time!
Apple Orchard photoshoot
Where we live, we have apple orchards on pretty much all side of our house. I love going there in the beginning of Spring when the blossoms are blooming! I always have so much fun taking photos there.
I made fruit pizza for the first time. It was SO much fun, especially putting the fruit in a design on top. And it tasted pretty good too. 😁
A few of my siblings and I. The first two photos were taken on Ruthie’s 11th birthday, and the last two were on Bekah’s 13th birthday. ❤️
We’ve had a lot of beautiful sunsets. 🧡
I really like this painting I did, after months of not painting at all. It felt good to finally get one done after so long!
We spent a lot of time in mid-April getting ready for our group of friends from the States to come for a visit. We had SO much fun with them! Some of them were old friends, and some of them we were just getting to know for the first time. Everyone had a wonderful time together.
We took them to The Mirador, a place where you can look out over the town.
One of the people who visited was one of my closest friends, Kyra. I hadn’t seen her in around 8 months, so it was really good to spend time with her! ❤️
Kyra and I wrote a song together, which was a lot of fun!!
Books
I read more books than I normally do in March, but less than average in April.
March
There were SO many good books here! I read lots of books in series that I’ve been loving. I read a whole bunch in the Red Rain series as you can see. XD They were so good! The three books by P.D. Atkerson I read out loud to a few of my siblings. A good missionary biography and random child training book, LOL. XD I read Wuthering Heights, which I’d been wanting to read for quite a while. I liked it, didn’t love it, but I’m glad I read it!
April
I read two books by Jane Austen, and the entire Refuge series by my friend Kristina Hall. (They were really good!) Again, all of the P.D. Atkerson books were read alouds. I really enjoy reading to my siblings! The book It’s Not Supposed to be this Way is an amazing non-fiction book that I highly reccomend!
Youtube Videos
I made a few youtube videos that I really enjoyed. Here are links so that you can check them out if you want!!
Thank you guys for reading my post!! If you have any post ideas that you like to see, please let me know, because I need inspiration, lol!! XD
I don’t know about you, but I Iove to think about and “plan” my dream home. I have a lot of ideas that I’d love to have in my future home someday. I realize that many or most of these things may not happen, and I’m fine with that, but a girl can dream!! I’ve spent lots of time planning out my dream house on Pinterest, so I’m going to divide this post by room, and show you guys my favorite photos for each one.
Exterior
The House
I would love a white or cream colored house with gables and a gray roof, and on the larger size. It doesn’t have to be huge, but decent sized. XD Lol.
Yard
For the yard, I want it to be pretty spacious for kids to play in. I want a garden, and TONS of flowers. Literally everywhere. I want a white picket fence (Yes, cliche, I know….) And a grassy lawn and a front porch with a porch swing.
Interior
The interior was the funnest to plan. Here is the color scheme I’m going for. Pretty neutral, mostly beige, brown, light pink, green…. 😀
Kitchen
I LOVE these kitchen ideas! I want plenty of counter space and cabinets, and I’d love a light, airy atmosphere like these.
Living Room
Couches, a couple of bookshelves and some plants.
Music Room
I play several instruments, so this room would be amazing. It would have all the instruments I play, plus space and equipment for recording music and vocals. I don’t play violin by the way, it’s just in the picture because it’s pretty and I want to learn. XD
Library
You know me – I have to have a library in my dream house! It’s not even an option not too. XD I’d love a color coordinated book shelf, and a cozy book nook.
Art/craft room
A place for me to do all my art and journaling stuff would be very handy!
Bedroom
Bathroom and Laundry Room
Random Stuff
Last but not least, here are a few more random photos. The first once is like an entry way, then a dining room, some plants and decor, and a coffee nook. 😀
That was SO much fun!!! I’ve had some much fun planning out what my dream home would look like, and even though I know I probably won’t get a house exactly like this, it helps my to know what I like and what elements I can incorporate and put to use in my own home someday. 😄
Hey friends! ❤️ It’s been a HOT MINUTE since I’ve posted, I know… I haven’t been feeling very motivated to blog lately, but hopefully I will get inspired again. For now, here is a long over-due life update, complete with pictures. 😁
It’s been a WILD ride these past couple months. January was pretty boring and not much happened, but in February we traveled a lot, which was awesome, and in March my brother had in accident, which was not so awesome. More on that in a bit. 😉
In February (Valentine’s Day to be exact) we traveled to my grandparent’s house, and had a great time with them!!
Me and my grandparents ❤️
Grandma reading to the kids
We had lots of fun with our aunt, Abigail! We definitely did not stay up talking until 3 on that last night. (The next morning we had to get up at 5:30 to leave…. LOL. It’s fine though, my motto is “Sleep LATER.”)
We had such a great time making fancy coffee drinks everyday, being silly, and having fun together. 😀
Me, Abigail, Lizzie ❤
My Uncle Benjamin was able to come for a day as well, and it was really good to get to see him!
My mom and her mom 😊
A few days later I went with Dad and a few of my siblings to the border to shop and pick up mail. 😀 Here is a collage of a bunch of the photos I took on the trip. XD It was raining for a while while were were driving, which was so nice!
A few days after that, I went with my dad, Lizzie and Andy to the mountains. We had a lot of fun visiting some friends of ours there!
Traveling was a lot of fun, but it was good to settle back down again, and get back into normal life. Normal life didn’t last for very long though….
A couple of weeks ago, my brother Andy was hit by a car while on his bike. Praise the Lord, he wasn’t killed. He went to the hospital and got an x-ray, and he had no broken bones and they sent him home. He was very sore, and instead of recovering he only seemed to be getting worse. So my parents took him back to the hospital, and it turned out that his spleen had ruptured from the impact, and he had major internal bleeding. They operated on him right away and removed his spleen. He stayed in the hospital for several more days, and then came home. He has been resting and recovering since then!
I’ve read a lot of good books so far this year. By 2023 reading goal is 260 books, and I’m on track so far.
And over a dozen more this month, but I’ll share those later. 😉 So like I said, SO many good books!!! Have you read any of these?
I haven’t been as active on Youtube as I would like, due to all the craziness, but here is a book haul I did the other day!
I’ve been very busy working on school, and getting ready to graduate. I only have a couple months of school left, and I’m very excited to finish! It’s been a lot of work though. 🙂 Speaking of though, I have math to do so I’m going to end this post here. 😉 Thank you so much fo reading!!!
The Meyer Briggs personality test fascinates me so much. I’ve known that I am an ESFP for years, but only recently have been doing a lot of research about it. It’s crazy how (mostly) accurate it is!! Anyway, I thought it would be fun to put together some memes about ESFPs. 😀 Who doesn’t love memes? If you’re an ESFP (or ENFP or ESFJ….) hopefully you will relate to some of these, and if you’re not I hope they will make you laugh anyway!!
Shout out to my sister, Lizzie, who is also an ESFP. 😁
First, here’s an image that explains what an ESFP personality is like real quick. 🙂 This way you get get the gist of the situation before moving on to the memes. 😂 😁
I do this all the time with recipes – I usually read through several recipes to get the gist of it, and then just make something up based on different things I read. It usually ends up ok…. Usually. 🤣
5. This. Definetely something I should work on…. XD
6. This one made me laugh, LOL! 🤣
7. Change friend to my mom. Oops. I promise this is not on purpose! 🤣
8. I actually come into a lot of social situations with this mindset. If I succeed, then it’s MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! 🤣
9. *just spent hours making Pinterest boards for my favorite books* But it was fun!!
10. This is what happens every single time I make a new friend. 😂
I hope you guys laughed as much as I did over these, and I hope some of y’all were able to relate to some of them!! I had lots of fun putting it together. 😀 I’m curious if I have any other ESFP followers, so if you are one, let me know!!!
Love, Rosy
Could you relate to any of these? What’s your mbti personality? (Or, if you don’t know, are you extraverted or introverted?)
Rosy's Writings 