[My Favorite Things]

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Can I just say I love my laminator?  This is the one I bought. 

And rather than buying the more expensive Scotch laminating sheets, I've found that these work just as well and are much cheaper!

We got this pencil sharpener for Christmas.  It's da bomb.  :)

One of my favorite indulgencse is a good audiobook.  At present, I have over 120 audiobooks from Audible.com.  My all-time favorites are the entire Anne of Green Gables series, the Mitford series by Jan Karon, the O'Malley series by Dee Henderson, and lots of books by Lynn Austin.  I can listen to these over and over.

From its website:

JellyTelly is a unique online video and game network for families, developed by VeggieTales and What’s In the Bible? creator Phil Vischer. As a faith-based alternative to other chidren’s networks, JellyTelly provides families with a safe place to learn and play online. From catching the latest episodes of What’s in the Bible? and Theo Presents to testing your Bible verse memory skills in the game Memory Mountain, your kids will find shows and games to engage and strengthen their faith. We have gathered the largest and most diverse collection of Christian children’s programming in the world for kids and families, and JellyTelly is easily accessible via desktop, mobile apps and Roku.

We don't have Roku or an iPad, so our only options for watching are directly on the laptop or on the TV if we plug the laptop into the TV.   However, it's a piece of cake to plug an HDMI cable into the laptop and stream it onto the TV.  I was planning to buy the What's in the Bible series later this year.  This website has the entire series, plus many more series.  They offer a free one-month trial.  After that, it's a mere $5/month.  I am very excited about this!

If you want to see a quick guide to what they offer, click here.

LeadershipForKids.tv is a free website that has short videos that teach kids biblical stories and principals.  They have 25 series of videos that teach everything from lessons on kindness and sharing to the Christmas story through the eyes of Mary, Joseph, and Elizabeth, to the stories of the Bible.  When we studied the creation story, we watched the video called "God Is Creative, so I Can Be Creative."  It taught the creation story and then talked about God's immense creativity in creating such a variety.  I thought it was perfect for what we needed.  It was only about 7 minutes long.  Each video comes with an activity PDF that can be used for reviewing and reinforcing what was learned in each video.

I stumbled upon a website called All You Can Books.  You can sign up for a free trial and download all the audiobooks and ebooks you want.  If you cancel within 30 days, you pay nothing and keep all the books you downloaded.  I decided to give it a try.  It sounded too good to be true, which alarmed me not a little.  However, I promptly downloaded over 40 audiobooks and a bunch of ebooks.  Then I called the number on their website and cancelled.  They sent me an email confirming I had cancelled within the trial period and would not be charged.  The audiobooks are not nearly the quality of Audible audiobooks, and all the books are very old.  However, they were free.  And I got many of the classics, such as Little Women, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Emma, Heidi, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, and The Wind in the Willows.  As I said, you can get all of these in ebook edition to read from your tablet as well, so there's a stash for read-alouds!