Beccy: April & May reads

Hey girls!
It's as much fun reading your posts as it is to read the book of the month. I wish we had a week together on a deserted island to read books and gab. (I typed desserted island first, and decided that might be a good idea, too.)

Speaking of desserts, I would like to read 50 Ways to Take the Junk out of Food. You mommys might like Sugar-Free Toddlers. I am trying to teach my family (me included) to eat less refined sugar, among other yucky stuff. Troy's family history of diabetes is first and foremost in my mind, but in general, I'm just getting really sick of junky, sugary foods. Maybe that comes from having a long period of life when I ate them freely. Us moms have to teach our kids to do better than we did (well, at least better than I did ...) When you really start to look, it's scary how much our culture feeds sugar to kids. I have a friend whose daughter eats fruit snacks and drinks Kool-Aid all day long, and then she wonders why she can't get her to eat a normal meal. Empty calories and making our country sick and obese. But I won't get on a soapbox here . . .

I have the Fix It and Forget It cookbooks (Costco) and we have some family favorites from them (Hamburger Sausage Soup, only we leave out the hamburger, for one). I've never been so ambitious as to spend all day cooking/bagging up a weeks' worth of meals, but I do love to use a crock pot. I actually have two. One of them actually burns things because it cooks too fast. We call it the microwave crock pot. Kind of defeats the purpose. When Troy was little, his mom said he called it a "crotch pot." :) Eeeeeww!

I'm a bit late, but my April read was Peak by Roland Smith. It's about a 14-year-old New Yorker with famous mountaineer parents whose name is Peak ("It could have been worse," he says, My parents could have named me Glacier, or Abyss, or Crampon.") Stuck in the city, he gets in trouble for scaling buildings in the city like Spider Man. A judge orders him to leave the country (an attempt to prevent copy-cat climbers) and he ends up in Tibet with his father, about to become the youngest person to climb Everest. He goes to his father's Sherpa for training with a Nepalese boy and faces dangers and decisions that mature him. This book is great fun with loads of boy-appeal. It effectively immerses you in the "culture" of mountain climbing. I think the best things it has going for it are the original and unpredictable plot and the author's narrative voice--Peak is convincingly "teen" and sometimes very funny. Curt loved it and we're actively seeking out other books by this author (Curt's reading Elephant Run).