For today’s Sunday Dinner, Lynn Owen has joined us again. Last week, we got to know more about her life on her family’s dairy farm, where she grew up. If you missed the post, you can read it here. Today, she’s planning to share some of the challenges of growing up on a farm as well as her favorite memories.
For today’s Sunday Dinner, I invited Lynn Owen, my mother-in-law. Lynn grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm and is here to tell us all about it. Dairy farms take center stage in A Strike to the Heart since it’s set during the Wisconsin dairy strikes of 1933.
Welcome to part two of our Sunday Dinner conversation with my mom. If you missed part one of our conversation, you can find it here. This week, my mom continues the stories of life growing up on her family’s dairy farm.
For this first Sunday Dinner, I invited my mom to join us. I grew up on some of the stories she’s about to tell you, so I’m excited for her tell you about life on a dairy farm. Especially since those stories helped inspire A Strike to the Heart, the story of a dairy farmer’s daughter who must decide whether to trust her family or the man who saves her life.
With it being a holiday weekend and one usually spent with family while enjoying the last days of summer, reviewing a children’s picture book seemed like the perfect book review post for today. Different Like Me is written by Xochitl Dixon and illustrated by Bonnie Lui.
You need to read A Mosaic of Wings by Kimberly Duffy. Yes, it’s fiction. Yes, it’s historical. Yes, it’s Christian. You should still read it. And here’s why….
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Or so the song claims. I tend to agree, but also know that such expectation can often leave us wanting more. The wonder and magic of the season can get lost amid the running around, the shopping, the parties, the traveling. Not to mention wrestling with emotional disappointments, family drama, and personal loss. With so much riding on this season it is easy to let it drag us down when it seems like it should pick us up.
I love Thanksgiving. One of my favorite parts about the holiday is hosting the big feast. There’s nothing better to me than a table full of food and surrounded by family (or those adopted as family for the day).
Despite my love of the holiday, I know Thanksgiving has a lot of pressure. It may be one day out of the year, but on it, we pack a momentous dinner, a myriad of family dynamics, and the start of the Christmas season. Perhaps that is why there is so much fuss to push Christmas off until we’ve given Thanksgiving its due. And yet, have we actually remembered what Thanksgiving is all about?
In a time when we are all encouraged to practice self-care, whether as mothers, fathers, single, married, older, or younger, we are simultaneously pressured to find that nebulous ‘thing’ that helps each of us capture what will restore our weary souls. Then, if we do discover it, we must find a way to incorporate it into our lives. This task becomes all the more difficult when what feeds us is an allusive concept as easy to grasp as the fog on a rainy day.
Curiosity killed the cat, the saying goes. Sylvia Miller’s curiosity might just destroy her family. When she peeks in her dad’s tinderbox, she unlocks a secret he has harbored for twenty years. The Tinderbox, by Beverly Lewis, returns readers to Lancaster county and the tightknit Amish community of Hickory Hollow.