The Water Wars by Cameron Stracher

The Water Wars by Cameron Stracher


Summary: Welcome to a future where water is more precious than oil or gold...

Hundreds of millions of people have already died, and millions more will soon fall-victims of disease, hunger, and dehydration. It is a time of drought and war. The rivers have dried up, the polar caps have melted, and drinkable water is now in the hands of the powerful few. There are fines for wasting it and prison sentences for exceeding the quotas.

But Kai didn't seem to care about any of this. He stood in the open road drinking water from a plastic cup, then spilled the remaining drops into the dirt. He didn't go to school, and he traveled with armed guards. Kai claimed he knew a secret-something the government is keeping from us...

And then he was gone. Vanished in the middle of the night. Was he kidnapped? Did he flee? Is he alive or dead? There are no clues, only questions. And no one can guess the lengths to which they will go to keep him silent. We have to find him-and the truth-before it is too late for all of us

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

My review: The quote on the front compared this book to The Hunger Games...that was it's first mistake. The only similarities these books share is that they take place in the future. I felt that this book was very jumpy. One chapter would end and another would begin with an entire scene missing, like the author got lazy and didn't feel like explaining exactly how it happened. It was mildly entertaining, which is why it got 2 stars, but it is one I don't plan on reading again and even if there was a sequel, I wouldn't be interested.

Home Improvements

We have lived in our house for almost 3 years now (whoa!) and have been slowly but surely making improvements. We have painted the entire interior of the house (since it was completely white when we moved in), landscaped the front yard (it was completely dirt and after only living here a month we got a citation from the city for it!), put in all new blinds, added crown moulding, had a concrete patio poured, built a patio cover, built a retaining wall and tiled the upstairs bathrooms and laundry room.

Around the holidays are always a slow time for my hubby for work, so he has taken advantage of the down times and worked on our house. Here is the picture of our front room after we rolled up the carpet...


and here is the front room, newly tiled! I forgot to get one before we moved the furniture back in, so the next picture is a closer one of the tile.
We plan on tiling the rest of the downstairs, but we have to take it one room at a time for now!

We have also been working on our backyard and over the weekend, my hubby enlisted the kids to "help" with putting dirt behind our retaining wall to make it a little more even (and not so sloped).








Cutest child laborers ever!

Sibling....rivalry?

I know their day will come, when they will fight like cats and dogs, but until then, I will just enjoy this stage:

Chapstick

What do you do when your child eats some of your chap stick? Well, if you're a first-time mom, you would probably call poison control and vow to never leave anything like that down where your child can get it. If you're a mom like me, you simply think, "Dang it! That was my favorite flavor!"

I remember being a new mom and freaking out about every little thing. I am a major control freak, but with kids, I have learned that there is so much that you can't control no matter how hard you try. It's been so good for me to have children and learn to let things go a little!

One thing I have a very hard time with are messes. I can't stand major messiness! Peyton was always a pretty un-messy eater but Damon has been a whole different story. So instead of stressing about it all the time, I have gotten a lot better at just letting it go.

In this video, we were at John's Incredible Pizza while my family was visiting just over a week ago. I had to share for a couple of reasons:

1. Damon, as much of a challenge as he is sometimes, is SO DANG CUTE. The first few seconds of the video are my favorite because he thought I was taking his picture and he was totally cheesing it up!

2. This was his first time being able to hold his own ice cream cone. He is HUGE into doing things himself (it's started so early with him!) and he was so happy to just be able to control it.

3. This is my blog and I share what I want!


4. Did I mention how stinkin' cute he is?




P.S. The chapstick incident was a true story that happened yesterday. It was my favorite mint chapstick alright? Don't judge me.

December Events

-Busy, busy month full of gift making and basically no picture-taking.
-Ultrasound showed us that baby #3 is a girl!
-Ward Christmas party



-Chris turns 28!
-Christmas




-New Year's Eve - walked to the park. Beautiful day! Spent the evening at the in-laws stuffing our faces.

November Happenings

-We took family pictures, but they won't let me post them for whatever reason so here is a link to them: http://jenolynchristensenphotography.blogspot.com/2011/11/horvath-family.html
-My hubby and I celebrated our 6th anniversary!
-Peyton turned 4!
-My sister came to visit for a week
-We went to the Breaking Dawn midnight showing
-Went to Utah to visit my family for Thanksgiving (pictures on that later since my SISTER needs to send them to me)

October Occurrences

This will be my attempt to update this blog from the past few months. I was very terrible at taking pictures for awhile, so they are pretty few, but that's ok. All I can do is do better now!

-Went to Lake Arrowhead for a day. Took one picture the entire day.


-Had a Halloween activity at church. Busted out my Thriller moves. We all dressed like pirates.






-Took Peyton trick-or-treating to the maybe 5 houses on our entire block that were passing out candy. It was cold anyways.

Slacker

Who's a slacker? Why, that would be me. No updates since October? Really, Amanda? Oy vey.

I blame part of it on the holidays. Everything seems to go by in the blink of an eye around that time. I blame the rest on being pregnant. In fact, that's something I don't even think I have posted on this blog yet. Yes, I am currently 24 1/2 weeks pregnant with baby bundle of joy #3.

I also turned the big 2-5 this past Wednesday. Other than that, we have just been living and loving and enjoying life. I am a horrible picture taker anymore, but I'm working on it.

I didn't make any crazy new years resolution to post everyday or anything, but I feel like I can't just abandon this thing completely! So I will just try to do better and pick up wherever I'm at when I do!

SO I will start with today. Today I played the part of the human pin cushion and seat filler at the doctor's office. Why, you ask? Because today I had to take the 3-hour glucose tolerance test. Yesterday I took the 1-hour and was told my blood sugar was a bit high. So today I got up nice and early (since I had to be fasting from food and water for around 8 hours beforehand, I figured that was the best time to try to do it) and got the sugar party started. 3 and 3/4 hours and 4 needle pokes later, I was free. I also got my lab results super quick and everything was normal. For that, I am definitely grateful (but my arms tell me otherwise).

All in all, life is good. Just trying to come to terms with the fact that I will soon have 3 children and apparently no sanity left.