Welcome to the ‘Our Favourite Things’ website
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If you are looking for more information about the book – please, read on…
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Firstly, I congratulate you for being an open minded individual who realizes the importance of reading to the young, not just as a way of developing language skills but also for introducing new life experiences and concepts.
You are perhaps a parent or a care-giver with a growing conscience looking for a way to interact with your children on a deeper level. Perhaps you are a loving Aunt or Uncle or Grandparent looking for a special gift with a special message?
Whatever your background, you are here for a reason, and that is because you value the importance of story telling.
Story telling has always been used as a means for adults to impart knowledge to minors. We need only look back through history to tribal leaders passing on important survival techniques; some are disguised as superstitions, some as fairy tales or nursery rhymes; but regardless of how it is “dressed up” story telling enables children to understand and learn important character building principles and values.
About the book…
The inspiration for this book came from a dream. Not a dream to be a best-selling author but an actual dream I had in the early hours one morning just after my husband had been made redundant.
In my dream I was entering a competition to win a “ute” and I had to express how I intended to use it in 25 words or less. I guess subconsciously I was trying to find solutions to our financial situation. When I awoke the cheesy rhyme from my dream was still very clear in my mind and so I wrote it down...
The writing of this book has helped me through a potentially difficult time by forcing me to focus on a few of lifes' simple pleasures. It is so easy to get caught up in the humdrum of our daily/weekly routines that we often forget what is really important; the connectedness that comes with sharing love.
Messages supporting consumerism and materialism are everywhere!
We are bombarded daily with advertisements and images that encourage us to believe that happiness is only the next purchase away and it is reinforced daily that our lives are unfulfilled if we don’t have the next latest, greatest, for the most part, useless commodity!
So the message is simple…
We all need to be reminded from time to time that there are lots of activities you can do to connect with your loved ones that have no price tag and here is a book to illustrate a few examples!
The future generation is in our hands…
We need to remember that children also learn through observation. What are your actions teaching your children?
Consider this…if the greatest influences in a childs life are continually chasing happiness through the pursuit of material possessions it stands to reason that they will inherit those characteristics also. (And sometimes todays society will place personal gain before ethics, integrity or love.) Our children will develop a self worth driven by fear; fear of judgement and fear of rejection.
How can you make a difference?
Universal laws…
It is true that we can choose the feeling we want to experience and if we continually focus on the negative then our lives generally become more stressful with more things going wrong. This was one of the biggest lessons for me in writing the book.
Yes, I could have chosen to focus on the redundancy as a financial catastrophe. Yes, we could have become paralyzed in fear that we might lose our family home, our transportation, our possessions. However, by focusing on what we loved doing and by doing our favourite things (that didn’t cost any money) we were able to move forward, have fun as a family and get through it.
So, in summary…
The aim of this book is to remind us as parents and caregivers of a few of lifes' basic pleasures and the importance of sharing ‘family time’ together. By doing so, we will build on a growing consciousness that there is more to life.