Otherwise known as how I started a new series AND found a new author… Rose Pressey is the author of this fun and quirky novel with a paranormal aspect. We join Larue Donavan, bookstore owner and Ghost buster extraordinaire at her bookstore Book Nook. She is joined there by (seriously) the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. I honestly think he was about my favourite side character of the whole story! 

Now as you can probably figure out Larue can see dead people, in fact on the weekends she is traveling around helping them make it to the light. Thought she often ends up with spirits following her home (another way our cast of characters expands hilariously). I don’t want to give too much away but I can tell you there IS a love interest… a little mystery… some dead people (but no murders!) and so many entertaining moments and quirky dialogue. 

I absolutely love that Larue is an independent and (generally) self assured woman. She is doing what she loves (working at a bookstore she owns AS WELL AS ghost hunt) with her bestfriend in the know and her dead friends along for the ride. If you want a good giggle, a GREAT heroine and a taste of the paranormal this is the book for you!!! 

Me and My Ghoulfriends

October 21

Sometimes with being the parents of 5 the best gift we can be given is the one of TIME! Especially time without all of the kids. This is something we have been sorely lacking with our extensive sitter/family/friend base left up in Canada. Sunday was a terrific gift to Ken and myself as Nana and Baba decided it was THE DAY to take the 4 bigger kids out to the Minnesota zoo! So from rather early in the morning until supper time we were playing solo with just our baby girl! 

Miss Echo with her duckies

So what do the parents of 5 do when they do not have the bulk of the children… well… nap… duh! And after said nap we packed up our littlest minion and headed out to leisurely window shop and peruse the bits and bobs in a few different stores. Jo-Ann’s is much more enjoyable when there are two adults and only one set of little grasping fingers, though I think she touched ALL the yarn in the store at least once! We had Christmas present ideas to discuss and colours to look at and think about. With the crochet ideas and patterns I have gotten with my subscription to Crochet Spot I am constantly thinking of gift ideas to make. I absolutely love that Ken is willing to be involved in discussions about yarn and colour combinations! 

We stopped by the mall nearby to see the carousal horses in the main area and walk around the upper level so Echo could look down through the glass and talk away about the people and things on the ground floor. And really that was that for being out and about. We returned home and since it was a lovely and WARM fall day Echo and I headed outside… so that she could watch Pocoyo on the iPad in the front yard??? She is so her father’s daughter.

Silly baby

Out with Daddy

Of course our relaxing day was not to last as the rest of the family DID have to come home. Full of stories and with faces painted and some crafts to do during the week in hand. I think we ALL had a blast in our own way… and Echo was even slightly excited to see her brothers and sister again! Enjoy the zoo pictures!

Fish

Seriously a SEAHORSE!

Walking along

FACES

Painted faces

A magnificent scarecrow

Checking out the animals

Groundhog

BONES

Monkey

Critters

There seems to be a bit of a distinction with the Sauroposeidon… it is the TALLEST but NOT the Longest as is evidenced by the following YouTube video. I still say a long tail is NOT as cool as the extreme giraffe neck! 

This amazing dinosaur is actually VERY rare, they have only found the vertebrae from its neck to date. In fact, they were so BIG that they were mistaken for petrified tree trunks for YEARS! This giant could have eaten food from a 6th story window! It had (they propose) front legs longer than the back, again giraffe like. It ate vegetation of course, and probably HUGE amounts. But enough from me… here are the links!

We started with the Color2Learn page and their images of the World’s Largest Dinosaur HERE. I especially liked how they had the picture with the man and the dinosaur. EnchantedLearning had lots of information HERE with some links to other items of interest. KidsDinos.com has their usual awesome map and this time their chart of humans to dinosaur ratio shows how absolutely HUGE the Sauroposeidon was HERE. BBC has the original finding article they posted HERE from 1999. There is a great picture of the vertebrae found on dinosaurs wikia HERE. Age of dinosaurs has a great point by point on the stats for this massive creature HERE. The dinosaurs.about.com site is a good one, it also clued me into something that I found a fact sheet about later… our videos that we were looking at for previous dinos out of the Clash of the Dinosaurs (Discovery) has some BIG factual issues with this specific dinosaur… more about that later but HERE is the first article. ScienceKids has a great quick write up HERE. And as usual, the dry article by Wiki is right HERE. Lots of facts, little drama.

Talk about a LONG neck!

Ok, now that teaser about the Clash of the Dinosaurs fact hunt. Well, I will include below the video that holds the most of the considered factual points they got right. That is, the statements that the majority of other paleontologists felt were correct or could be inferred from the information that we have about the other dinosaurs of the same family. BUT it IS agreed that the Sauroposeidon was the last of this type when the body shape etc was simply becoming obsolete. OH and at the very end of the video they state the stomach acid could have melted iron… that is not agreed upon it seems. You can check out the issues with the series HERE.