books

bPride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

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 – Philip 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 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

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 Pweauaion- Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe- CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoris 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 Meany – 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

58 Brave New World- Aldous Huxley

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 – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

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

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-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

The Average American has only read 6 of these books how about you? I am surprised at how many of these books I haven’t read… any suggestions on which ones I should read next? I am a total book whore, I read everything and any thing. Example is I have read a lot of Lois Lamar books and then this summer I have read all the gossip girl books ( Please don’t judge me too hard) I have also read almost all of the Jane Austin books. I read almost everything I can get my hands on except sci fi I am not a fan at all!!!

Punk’d

Do you ever have one of those days where everything that happens is so awful you feel like you must be on a episode of Punk’d??? Today was my day! I was already having a bad day when Mike called me to inform me that the lady from CIS called to tell him that unfortunately the mail room had held on to our papers because there wasn’t a check in there! She asked him if he had sent a copy of the original check (which we did it took hours to get) she then informed him that she still had yet to receive our papers so she wouldn’t be able to get to them until Tuesday since she was out of the office on Friday and Monday is a holiday. Why Me??? I am trying so hard to be positive but I am so so so upset! So of course I instantly started crying and it wasn’t a pretty cry either. Thankfully I have these

Yes I am so crazy I bought a pair of sunglasses because they have a bulldog on them! It was my one and only splurge of the summer and today it came in handy! Hopefully I get my I-171 on Wednesday!!!

Losing

We are going to go to Rocky Point in October. When we went last year My mom and I decided to see who could lose the most weight, we both lost 10 pounds we tied. This year we decided to do it again and a couple more people decided to join in so for the next 6 and a half weeks I will be working out and dieting. 

I resent all of our paperwork in so hopefully our I-171 will arrive any day! It was so difficult to deal with the bank to get a copy of our money order we sent and when it was cashed it took 2 days.

I got my Vans on…

A totally normal conversation between me and Tana…

Me- Tana I have to go to the Van store to get a gift certificate do you want to go?

T- Yeah, my friend works there and they are having a party tomorrow.  They are going to have a graffiti artist who will decorate the shoes people buy.

M- Really I wonder if he does princesses?

T- What? Oh that sounds so hardcore, I am sure he graffiti’s princesses all the time!

M- What? Princesses could be hardcore, your don’t even know!

T- Oh yeah I am sure…

The next morning I call her

M- I am ready to go. Come pick me up, Mike took my car so I can’t drive.

T- I don’t have a car right now either…

M- Umm maybe dad will take us and drop us off?

T- Yeah lets take it back to junior high days!

I guess Tana was too embarrassed to have dad drop us off at the mall because she found a car to drive us in. We went to the party and got 30% off coupons, so of course I had to get something for the baby! And no I didn’t ask the artist if he could do princesses I got these instead!

They are so cute!!!

Lost

Well I finally heard back from CIS and our paper work is lost… They can’t find it! So I am going to have to resubmit the paperwork and wait some more for my I-171H. This sucks why does everything always have to go wrong.

I am done

  I am done being depressed I can’t control our Adoption and I think that is the part that bugs me the most. I have no control over when our I-171H comes, I have no control over when we get our referral, and I can’t control over when we get to travel to pick our baby up. Sometimes I let that get to me. I do realize there is a baby at the end of this, our baby. I know once she is in our arms the painfully 5 years it took to become parents will all be forgotten.

Thanks for all the kind words and suggestions… I needed that!

Did anyone watch Oprah last Thursday? I hardly ever watch O but I am glad I did they had families on the show that had adopted from Liberia. It all started with one family who chose to adopt 2 choir boys from an orphanage, then one by one people around them started to adopt. It was an amazing story. You should try to watch it. I hope some day some one will be inspired by our journey to adopt. My sister Tana always tells me imitation is the best flattery, I think she only says that though because I hate when she buys the same clothes as me.

Mike told me he had a feeling this was going to be a good week! Hopefully that means our I-171H is on its way to us!!!

Depressed

    I have been really down lately. I know I need to realize it will all come together but we have been at this for almost a year and I want a baby!!! I realize we have had our problems first we switched from Vietnam to Ethiopia, then we had to wait until I was 25 before we could even send our dossier in. So now as I wait for our I-171H to come I keep getting more and more anxious! I still have another 6-12 month wait how will I make it?

Tessa

   My baby sister Tessa has to be the most excited over our adoption. She talks about it all the time, no joke this kid tells everyone her hair lady, women who shop in our store, she tells random people she just meets out and about. Africa has been on her mind a lot lately especially Ethiopia.

   Tessa really wants to travel with us when we go to Ethiopia, Mike and I told her she could if she paid her own way. Tessa just opened up her first bank account with over $500 she is saving for our trip, I am amazed I could never save money when I was 17.

   I bough Tessa a Amharic phrasebook last week,  she came over the yesterday and she already know how to say like 5 or 6 phrases. I asked her how she knew she was saying the words properly and she informed me she found a website so she can hear exactly how they pronouce them. She is Amazing!!!

Tessa also wants to do some sort of a donation drive at her school for the orphanges in Ethiopia. She asked me one day what size of clothes the kids in the orphanges wear, I told her the kids vary from birth to 18 years old… Tessa’s eyes started to water she didn’t realize there were kids that old who lived in orphanges. 

  She has already informed me that she plans to adopt after she gets married, she truly has the biggest heart out of everyone I know.  Our baby will be so blessed to have her as a aunt!!!

Another great thing about Tessa is today she got her drivers licence!!!! Congrats cheech!!!!

Baby your baby

   Last week Mike and I had to take a baby care class, our agency requires it for first time parents. We had to take the class through the local hospital so of course we were the only non pregnant couple. When we walked in we had to grab a doll, blanket, bottle, and diaper. We got there kind of late so we got the ugliest doll, our baby had a swished face it was so funny! The class was a little ridiculous but I had fun watching mike feed, swaddle, and change a doll!!! It was cute!!!

We only have one more piece of paper work to do and then we will have our dossier all ready hopefully our I-171H comes in next week!!!

I am dog sitting

Meet Lola

She is a 4 month old English Bulldog. She is very sensitive, I have never met a timid bulldog before.

Meet Paco

He is 3 years old. He is super cuddly!!!

We are majorly out numbered its been quite the weekend!

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