Vacation
I really needed that vacation from blogging. Sorry to leave you with such a non-shiny-happy-people sort of poem for over a month. Just wasn't motivated to get online much.

The reading contest we started at church has been a great success so far, with 43 kids participating. Obviously, this means a hefty amount of paperwork for me. I have to read and log all of the book reports kids turn in. I set up several spreadsheets to track it all. Each sheet has an individual worksheet for each kid where I record book titles, plus a general tally for the group. It took a while to set up, but it's an easy system to maintain. I'm keeping the paper reports in file folders and will return the reports at the end of the contest. The homeschool kids could probably add these to their portfolios.

Joel set up a pretty nice website for the contest that we can use to post book reviews and stuff in the Fall. To start us off, I might need to solicit some reviews from you, our online friends. Here are some of the titles we added this summer:
On Being Black and Reformed by Anthony Carter
The Lord's Service by Jeffrey Meyers
Sermons that Shaped America by William Barker
The Faith of Jesus Christ by Richard Hays
The Lord's Supper by Jean-Jacques vonAllmen
Luther's Faith: The Cause of the Gospel in the Church by Daniel Olivier
The Victory According to Mark by Mark Horne
With Reverence and Awe: Returning to the Basics of Reformed Worship by D.G. Hart
The Binding of God by Peter Lillback
The Catholicity of the Reformation by Carl Braaten & Robert Jenson
Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible by Jay Adams

That's just a sampling. We had more than 50 books donated from our amazon wish list, largely from one very generous patron. If you have any interest in writing up a short review on any of these titles to be published online, please let me know.