How to Render Beef Tallow (and make French Fries)

Welcome to my blog, where you get Princess bedtime stories and learn how to render suet into tallow like a homesteader. There's something for everyone!

Tallow (which is essentially lard except from a cow instead of a pig) is great for high-heat cooking (read: deep frying).

Tallow is an excellent source of niacin, vitamins B6, B12, K2, selenium, iron, phosphorus, potassium and riboflavin. Grassfed beef tallow contains high ratio of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) which is a cancer-resistant agent. Contrary to the popular conception, tallow is good for health as tallow fat is similar to the fat/muscles in the heart. Recent studies have shown that human beings need at least 50% of saturated fats like tallow and lard to keep the heart pumping hard and healthy. Tallow from pasture-raised cows also contains a small amount of Vitamin D, similar to lard.

Source: Beeftallow.com

Beef suet (fat) is cheap and can probably be found at the grocery store or butcher. We bought a bunch to grind into our venison and wound up using a fraction of it, so we decided to render it into tallow for cooking. We had saved some fat trimmings from steaks and added that in as well. Fat from grass-fed cows is preferable.

Some blogs say to run it through the food processor to grind it nice and fine but that sounded like it'd be nasty to clean up so I just chopped it into roughly 1/4" cubes. (The finer the chop the faster the render.) Cut off any meat or blood that's hanging around. I didn't fuss with it too much.

You can throw some water in to prevent burning, but it's not necessary. Just keep your crock pot on low.

Throw it in the slow cooker for 8-10 hours and that's basically it. If your chunks are bigger, you'll be more on the 10-hour side. Give it a stir two or three times throughout. You'll know it's done when the fat chunks have shriveled up into brown, almost-crispy bits. These, my friends, are called cracklings (because of the crackling sound they make when hot. It's a delightful, almost cheery sound, like a hundred tiny bits of fat are giving you a round of applause.)

Scoop out the big chunks first, then strain through a cheesecloth and store at room temp, in the fridge (will keep longer) or in the freezer (will keep even longer).

My 6 quart crockpot was full of 5 lbs of suet and rendered two 16 oz jars and one 32 oz jar of tallow.

How to Make French Fries

Melt tallow into a high-walled pot at medium-high to high heat. The smaller the base, the less tallow you'll need to use. Ensure there's at least 2" of pot above the tallow to cut down on splatter.

Peel and cut potatoes into matchsticks (the larger the sticks the longer the cook). Optional: soak in cold water for an hour. Why? I'm still not exactly sure but a lot of blogs said to do it. If you do this, be sure to pat them dry before adding them to the tallow. I skipped that step because I'm lazy and everything turned out just fine.

If you have a thermometer, check that your oil is up to 375-ish. When you carefully lay the fries in, it'll bring the temp down to a perfect 350. If you don't have a thermometer, dip in a wooden spoon. If it bubbles, you're hot enough. On my stove, the perfect burner heat is 6.

Lay small batches of fries in the pot, making sure they're all submerged. Fry for 3-5 minutes or until a nice golden brown. It depends on the thickness of your cuts and how many fries are in the batch.

My first batches got soggy once they cooled down, so I threw them back in for another 2-3 minutes and they turned out perfectly crispy and brown even after cooling. Double-frying is the key!

Sweet potato fries take less time to cook, about 3 minutes for the first fry and 2 for the second.

Sprinkle with salt and enjoy immediately; just let them cool enough so you don't burn your tongue!

Here are some more posts about tallow's benefits and other uses:
Oh Lardy
Happy Money Saver
The Prairie Homestead

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Harry Potter Font Happy Birthday Banner +Free Downloads

Babs just turned 4 years old. And she's suuuuuuper into Harry Potter. I can't tell you how many times a day she instructs me to pretend that I'm Ron Weasley taking a polyjuice potion then turning into Crabbe or Goyle or a cat then battling a basilisk.

I won't complain (too much), it could be way worse.

So anyway, I made her a Happy Birthday banner using Harry Potter font. There are a number of font generators that you can plug in whatever words you want and print them out, but to make the banner super special like I did, I saved each letter individually, printed them and cut them out to paste onto colored paper. Red and gold because Babs is a Gryffindor, obviously.

I had to cut the double letters out of black construction paper because I'm cheap and didn't want to use ink printing them again. The letters are so blown up the edges needed coloring with a black marker and I had to color over the construction paper with black marker too to make the blacks match but hey, I made it work.

Cut construction paper into quarters and glue the letters on. Print some Hogwarts House crests too. Tape onto a string and voila! Instant happy child.

Download the H, A, PY, BI, RT, D and Hogwarts House crests.

Taking a Toddler to Spain

Doing anything with a 3-year-old has its ups and downs. They always want something, but they bring new light and laughter to every situation. Getting the grumps in public (or worse, on an airplane) is a constant looming threat, but they break the ice with strangers in a foreign country.

Despite the valleys of the rollercoaster ride, I'd always rather have Babs with us. And with some forethought and planning, you can mitigate the valleys into gentle curves.

In November, Mr. Go and I toted Babs on a 2-week trip through France and Spain.

TIP: PREPARE THE KIDDO 

Be real with them. Set the expectation that this travel might be tough but it's going to be SO MUCH FUN when we get there (but only if they're good!). 

There can hardly be a more stressful travel event than taking a young child on a long airplane ride. The plane from Toronto, Canada to Reykjavic Iceland was Babs' very first. We opted to drive from Michigan to Toronto and take WOW Airlines, a budget line we were unfamiliar with.

TIP: MAKE SURE YOU'RE BOOKING ON THE U.S. SITE
Or whatever country you're from, obviously. Otherwise, depending on your credit card, you may be hit with a foreign transaction fee.

We were worried about a myriad of things so we got to the airport many hours early, which left us to entertain Babs and wear ourselves out before even boarding the first leg of our journey... But! She made friends with everyone in a 20 foot radius. Try to balance arriving at the airport early enough but not TOO early.

TIP: ALWAYS HAVE MORE SNACKS THAN YOU THINK YOU NEED 

Airport food is overpriced and so are the snacks on a budget airline (you must pre-order if you want an actual meal). Bring snacks from home for the journey to your destination, then go to a grocery store.

The 5-ish hour flight boarded at 6pm, so all of us were able to sleep to some extent. In Reykjavic, the airport is dinky. They like to stamp your passport and they have checkpoints between different areas of the terminal. On the way back we had to go from our incoming C gate to our outgoing D gate and had to go through a passport stamp terminal and had a real tight connection. Keep that in mind.

Also, there are no water fountains. If you want to fill up your water bottle (AND YOU SHOULD) you have to use the bathroom sinks. It's fine, everyone's doing it.

Once you find your gate at Keflavik airport, stay close. As our boarding time approached everyone stood up and started forming a line. The board changed from Waiting to Boarding without so much fanfare as an announcement, and boarding began. No one spoke a word to us. If you are not at your gate, you will not hear a boarding announcement.

We arrived in Paris at 11 a.m. We were all able to sleep on both planes on and off, so we weren't completely wrecked. It was a grey day in Paris and we took the RER B train from the Charles de Gaulle airport into Paris at the Chatelet Les Halles station.

The train system is really great in Paris. Going across as many zones as we did from the airport was almost 10 Euro for each adult (children are free but I never was clear as to the age cutoff), but if you're not going far it's more like 2 euro per ride.

We walked from the station right through downtown Paris, by the Louvre on a Saturday morning. It was terrible. The streets were packed with tourists. It was like New York City, just with older architecture.

We stopped for lunch at Mimosa and screwed up our very first foreign order. I just wanted an enormous coffee and the waiter brought two tiny cups of what I would come to realize are cafe solos, basically a shot of espresso, aka manna from heaven.

We walked a bit further, but were carrying all our luggage and got real tuckered out, so we stopped for another espresso and some desserts, then hopped in a taxi at a convenient Taxi Pickup Spot.

We had pre-booked tickets on a bus going to Beauvais airport and arrived at the station 1.5 hours early for the bus. It was raining so we hung out under their canopy. Babs fell asleep in Mr. Go's arms and we definitely looked like dirty American dirtbags at this point.

Babs fell asleep again on the bus (she loves napping in moving vehicles) before our adventure in the Beauvais airport, easily the worst of Paris' three airports. The tiny terminals are more like warehouses. You walk out onto the tarmac to board the plane.

Our flight to Alicante was short and we arrived just after midnight. I had booked us a room at Hostel Pensimar and we took a quick taxi there. Between the front desk man's passable English and my passable Spanish from a fatigued brain, we were checked in. Zack bought dos cervezas from our Spanish friend and we finally got our first real rest. It was almost 2 am by the time we got settled, yet we did not feel as tired as we should have, since it was only about 9 pm home time.

They served some food in the hostel cafeteria so we ate and chatted with the morning front desk lady, who gave us directions on how to take a bus to Alicante proper, then hop on a train that would take us to Calpe, our main destination. But she gave us the weekday bus schedule and it was a Sunday, so we waited an hour at the bus stop before figuring this out. So we had some lunch at a nearby restaurant, where our waitress spoke no English. We did a lot of miming and pointing. This is also where I realized liver is a regular thing on menus.

At the train station we were early for the train so we had a quick beer then got on the light rail. Babs napped again (glory glory hallelujah). She was such a champ about napping on the go. Also she was exhausted.

We walked from the station in Calpe to our villa we had rented with 4 friends. Babs was reunited with her dear friend C, whom she'd met on our Mexican adventure.

In Calpe we rock climbed, went to the beach and ate some fantastic food. Hands down the best paella (and indeed the best food of the trip) was at L'Era in Parcent, a tiny town 30 minutes or so from Calpe.

Calpe is obviously a tourist town and not many of the places were open in the off season. But the winding streets and dense, high-walled downtown with its terraced apartments above shops and restaurants was all I wanted from Spain.

One day Mr. Go and I walked with Babs to downtown and had a drink at a cafe and it was so chill and beautiful I wanted to do it every day.

But one week in Calpe was over, and we took an ill-advised bus 3 hours north to Valencia, the third largest city in Spain. The bus was hot and whipped around the tiny roundabouts that were made for golf-cart sized eurocars, not greyhound-sized buses. There's certainly no bathroom, either. We should have taken a bus back to Alicante, where the main train station is, and the nice smooth light rail would have taken us to Valencia but c'est la vie.

TL;DR DON'T TAKE A 3 HOUR BUS RIDE

We are not big city people. After a week in sleepy Calpe, Valencia was a bustling metropolis. But we found, after a LOT of walking (11 miles in one day), the charming, narrow cobblestone streets and high-walled terraced apartments in central Valencia. The architecture is beautiful, especially the churches.

We visited the Valencia Cathedral, purported to hold the Holy Grail. Unless you're a religious buff it's not worth the 7 euros to tour, though in the museum you can go down the stairs to the old graveyard under the church and see some old bones. Make sure you climb the 207 steps up the bell tower (another 2 euro but the view of the city from the top is amazing).

There's a cool park called Gulliver Park (Parc Gulliver) where there's a sculpture of Gulliver from Gulliver's Travels lying on the ground. He's got slides and cool stuff built into him. It's neat.

The old riverbed was turned into a big long park you can walk through, with intermittent playgrounds, that takes you by the cool modernist buildings. There's also an aquarium down there.

During our walking tour one evening we discovered a strip of Chinese grocery stores, pharmacies and restaurants so we returned the next night for Chinese dinner.

That was one important thing to us on this trip: to never have expectations. We figured out the night before one (1) thing we wanted to do the next day. Only ONE. And we'd try to do it. But if we didn't get to it we would not be upset. All we wanted to do was see these places, eat the food, see how these people lived and take it slow.

TIP: Pack Your Daypack For Success 

You do not want to be unprepared then have to go find a pharmacy and buy something overpriced that you're not going to be able to bring back to the states with you, ESPECIALLY when you already have a bottle at the apartment but you forgot to pack it. Ask me how I know. 

Sunscreen
Tons of snacks
Charging devices
Sweaters/rainjackets
Extra kid's clothes

After lots of eating great food and drinking wicked cheap wine, we took a train to the airport and jetted over to Paris for another two nights of fun. Our Airbnb was very close to the Louvre, which we never entered, though we did walk through the courtyard.

Paris is far larger than Valencia, more like New York City size, and the Go family feels no need to return to the city. It is beautiful, undoubtedly, but quite expensive and very busy. On our walking tour we discovered many beautiful parks, such as the St. Jacques Square, which houses a beautiful tower and some small playground equipment. These made great stops for Babs to get off Dad's shoulders and burn up some energy.

On a recommendation we had a fancy dinner at La Poule au Pot (Chicken in a Pot). The atmosphere is lovely but the food was underwhelming, except for the amazing creme broulee. After coming from Spain, where everything is hella cheap, I nearly passed out at the price of everything. But we'd had similarly priced dinners in Denver, it truly wasn't all that outrageous. I was just used to 1 euro bottles of Spanish wine and enormous 3-course 12 euro dinners.

Our Airbnb in Paris was right above a grocery store so we bought cheese and crackers and wine and had several meals in our apartment. We had some rainy days and we were tired of going out to eat so it suited us perfectly. Honestly, going to the grocery store in a foreign country is enough of an adventure sometimes. We even did Thanksgiving dinner from the grocery store. A pre-cooked chicken, a wheel of cheese and some wine. Making memories.

Traveling back was a little tough; we were tired and just wanted to get home. It wasn't a nighttime flight though our bodies said it should be and we were more thrown off than on the journey there.

TIP: To Combat Jet Lag Drink A Ton of Water

Also, going through customs in Canada is terrible. You wait in an enormous line to use one of the customs machines that scan your passport and take your picture, THEN go to an actual customs agent who looks at your passports AGAIN. Don't expect that to be a quick process, although perhaps we just hit the post-Thanksgiving traffic or something.

We drove for an hour then got a hotel room. It was 5pm but we went to bed because it was actually like 11pm for our bodies. So naturally we woke up at 3am and had to wake up the front desk lady sleeping in the lobby to ask for some breakfast.

For next time:
Make more stops at parks for the kiddo
We walked around a lot, which was super fun for Mr. Go and I but Babs was riding on shoulders and was less interested in architecture and people-watching. Her favorite part of the trip was probably Parc Gulliver where she could run around and say hola to Spanish kids.

Don't be afraid to talk to people. There's a universal language called miming. Even if you don't know the language, don't be afraid to sound like a dumb foreigner. Just try! It's fun, plus it gives you a human connection to this place you're visiting.

Pro Tip: on Google Fi, SMS messages were free with our plan, data is no more expensive than at home and free on wifi and voice calls were only .20 cents a minute. Our compatriots were all afraid to use their data or send text messages so if we had to take two cars they'd split Mr. Go and I so each car would have a phone to communicate with each other.

This little jaunt was pretty tame, but it has probably changed our lives, as you might argue everything does when we bounce like pinballs off one event, one hardship, one lucky break, in the course of our existence. Because now our feet are wet and we know we love Spain, and we know travelling with a 3-year-old is easy and is only going to be easier next time.




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Going Back/Going Home

Ten years ago, when Mr. Go and I left our hometown, a remote place in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, we never dreamed we would go back for anything longer than a vacation.

But we've Lived and Learned™ and our priorities have changed.

Were I a more spiteful person than I already am, I would have dug my heels in and refused to go back, knowing that some people will view it as a failure. As if our seven years in Colorado were for naught, just because we decided not to stay indefinitely.

But A) That is so untrue I almost can't even talk about it and B) I feel sad for the people who hold the narrow view that the destination is the point of the journey.

Colorado has felt like home. It's where my daughter was born. It's where I learned how to be me. I will always love Colorado, the people, the opportunities it offers and the experiences I've had here. There's nothing that says we won't move back in a year or two or 10. But right now, what's best for us is to relieve ourselves of the burden of a too-large home and put that equity to better use.

Mr. Go and I have talked about selling our home for many months, but I was not ready to leave CO. But the more I thought about the prospect of living near family the more appealing it became. Anyone who has raised a child without immediate family nearby knows: it's hard. Not only was having help appealing, but I missed my family too.

So we listed our house for sale with the aggressive timeline of leaving for Michigan two weeks later.

Rather than going the U-Haul route, we decided to downsize and only take what would fit in our cars. (It ended up being 3 car-fulls, as Mr. Go and I drove back labor day weekend for Phish @ Dicks.) We purged the house during the HOA's garage sale weekend and started selling off the large items that would not be making the trip back with us.

The house is now (finally) under contract. But here's the great part: buying a home in Michigan was not contingent on selling the home in Colorado. Houses in the U.P. are so cheap it's bananas.

It's been almost a month in our new home and the perks of a smaller-town living are pretty great. In no particular order:

1. Bike Everywhere
And less worry about being hit by a car!! We no longer live in the 'burbs, where everything is a 10-15 minute car ride across the highway and impossible by bike. We live in town, where I can bike on the quiet streets towing Babs in the Burley Minnow (which btw, is super awesome).

2. Family
I won't bother trying to express my full gratitude for having my family around me again, it'd only bore you and I'd wind up crying onto my keyboard. Suffice it to say, being able to drop Babs off with Grandma to go do something, or bike over to Mom's house for lunch is, at this moment, perfection.

3. Familiar Faces
This has the added benefit of actually making me feel safer. I no longer lock up my bike when I go into the store. My cousin teaches in Babs' pre-school building. I see an aunt at the grocery store at least once a week. This may become tiresome at some point, and of course there are some familiar faces that may not be so welcome but after living so long as a small fish in a big pond where you can go your whole day without making eye contact in public with anyone, let alone a meaningful connection, right now I find it pretty neat.

It takes a special mindset to go back to small-town living after living in a metropolis like the Front Range of Colorado. You have to want it. You have to be able to appreciate it or you'll probably hate it. Undoubtedly, there are downsides. (Fewer options for everything, everyone knows everyone, less to do to entertain yourself.)

But yesterday I dropped Babs with one grandma and spent the morning blackberry picking with the other. Never coulda done that before.

We haven't gone backward. I don't even consider it coming home. We've simply moved our mobile family again for another adventure, and wherever my family unit happens to be--that's home.

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On Downsizing

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by all the things in your living space? Have you ever tried to find something you knew you had but couldn't, no matter where you looked?

Some people hear the scary word Minimalism and think it means living with one metal folding chair and a spork. This is not true. If that's your thing, great, but minimalism can exist on a spectrum. The things you deem "necessary" are very personal and subjective.

Before embarking on a blog post regarding downsizing and organizing, I'll offer my opinion, since this is my blog and all. Purging your possessions is useless if you're going to snowball into accumulation again. Sure, you could purge twice a year and rotate out your possessions if buying things is that important to you but to me, the need to buy things is a form of addiction. And anything that has the potential to control my thoughts and actions is Not Cool.

The impulse to shop and to own more, better, bigger things is so ingrained in our culture it's hard to know where to even begin un-doing the habit of accumulation.

Our brains are wired to give us a little dopamine rush when we acquire something new. If we want to change this, we need to consciously rewire ourselves and switch the happiness signal onto other things, ideally things that don't require you spend money and give up space in your home to store objects. Like, say, accomplishments that come from within or enjoyment of simple, free pleasures, like quality time or the sunshine. The first step is, as you might guess, recognizing you might have a problem.

"That's all well and good," you say, "but we've already filled up all the drawers and cupboards of our home with stuff."

Don't worry, it's never too late to reclaim your life from your possessions!

Marie Kondo wrote the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. You need not read it. Her self-named KonMari Technique is basically this: Get rid of most of your stuff and you'll never lose track of anything again. She offers some practical tips, which I have condensed for you below.

1. Declutter First, Organize Second

Don't try to organize all your shit. It's just going to get cluttered up again in a week. You need to purge first.

Start with your off-season clothes, go through handbags, shoes, kitchen, miscellaneous crap, and end with sentimental items. Don't start with your keepsakes, it'll only distract you and then your whole day is wasted.

When you dive in to your closet, divide it up by shirts, dresses and pants if you need to, but get allllll of one type of clothing item in one place. Pull them off the hangars and throw them on the bed or the floor together. Make sure you check other closets and the laundry too. Get them all together.

2. Does it Spark Joy?

If you wouldn't buy it in a store now, put it in a bag and donate it to someone who will find joy in it.

Again, you must take out all of your items. Every item you own. You cannot do this just by scanning your closet. You must hold it in your hands and ask yourself, "Does this spark joy?"

If it's not a Hell Yes, for me then it's a No.

Marie advises doing the declutter/purge phase relatively quickly. Instead of doing a little here and a little there, which makes you feel like you're spinning your wheels and not getting anywhere, making it a marathon and doing it all at once (as much as you can) allows you to see results quickly and gain momentum for really making a dent in the clutter.

3. Absolve Yourself of Guilt

When we receive a gift or purchase something we don't end up using, it's simply the guilt of that unnecessary purchase or misplaced guilt toward the person who gave it to us that's holding us back from chucking it. That's not what the gift giver would have wanted for us. Let go of those things without guilt by thanking them for fulfilling a role in your life. They played their part, did their job and now they (and you) can move on.

The gift you received gave you (and probably mostly the gift-giver) pleasure in the gift exchange and opening. That is all the purpose it needs to serve.

That item you purchased and never used or wore, it served a purpose too. It gave you pleasure when you bought it, and it taught you that you don't use that type of thing or that you don't wear that type of clothing.

The purple dress I bought in college and never wore but hung onto for a decade for the simple reason that I hadn't worn it....I was able to let go of it by thanking it for teaching me a lesson. And now it's free to find a new home where it will actually see the light of day.

4. Store like items in the same place

Once you've gone through every single one of your possessions, then you're ready to organize and store. Marie has all kinds of storage tips, such as using a dresser rather than a closet and storing clothes on end rather than in stacks. Honestly I wasn't interested in applying most of it.

But I found this one piece of advice helpful: Store Like Items in One Place.

No more keeping a bottle of neosporin in every medicine cabinet. Gather all of one type of thing in one place. If it's first aid supplies, keep them in the hall closet. This way you can see all of that one certain type of thing and know how much you have. This prevents you from buying duplicates plus enables you to always know where to look when you need this type of thing.

This goes for clothing too. Resist the urge to put off-season clothes away or in another closet. They will eventually be forgotten. By keeping all your things together it ensures you see them all regularly, keep track of what you have, and only own the things that you truly love.

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Living light is the ultimate goal in the Go Household. We've made great progress both in reducing what we have and simply stopping the accumulation train, but there are still days when I look at all the junk lying around and want to sweep everything with both arms into a garbage bag and set it aflame.

We have a long way to go to reach our vaguely-defined "light" living but we've been paring down our possessions gradually to get used to the idea of eventually relieving ourselves of 75% of our things. We hope to arrive at a carload or two of only the things that are truly necessary, freeing us up for more mobile adventures.

I hope some of these tips may help with your clutter problems too!

-N

Beauty and the Beast Bedtime Story for Kids

We've branched out from Frozen thank goodness, and added some variety into our bedtime stories. We watched the live action Beauty and the Beast and now she's even more obsessed with Princess Belle. I grew up on this story, it's my favorite classic Disney movie but honestly, recounting it twice a day word for word is getting a wee bit tiresome. I know you understand my pain.

Anyway, moms and dads, give your brain a rest and mindlessly read the condensed story to your demanding little ones instead of having to make it all up every night!

PSA: this is not the French version. This is the animated version, as shown in the banner above, which includes a villain character named GASTON.

(PS: Here's Frozen, Moana, Cinderella, Little Mermaid, Mulan and Rapunzel too.)

Beauty & the Beast
aka "Mommy Why Did the Beast Take Belle Prisoner?" and Other Fun Questions

Once upon a time in a castle there lived a spoiled, selfish prince. One cold rainy night a haggard old woman knocked on the door, seeking shelter from the bitter cold in exchange for a single rose. Repulsed by her appearance, the Prince turned her away. She warned him not to be deceived by appearances, for true beauty lies far within. When he scorned her again, the woman's ugliness melted away to reveal a beautiful enchantress. The Prince tried to apologize but it was too late, she had seen there was no love in his heart.

She transformed him into a hideous beast and placed a powerful spell on the castle and all who lived there. The Beast concealed himself in his castle with a magic mirror as his only window to the outside world. The rose she had given him would bloom for many years. If he could learn to love and earn another's love in return by the time the last petal fell, the curse would be broken. If not, he would be doomed to remain a Beast for all time.

Nearby, a girl named Belle lived in a small French town with her father, Maurice, who was an inventor. Belle loved reading because the stories in her books took her on adventures she couldn't get in her small town.

Making a Mini Bibiliophile

Reading is a huge part of our lives in the Go Household. Helping Babs discover the joys of books was important to us, and a fun endeavor for all, as it simply entailed a lot of reading.

Reading on the side of a mountain in Mexico

Tips to Help Kids Learn to Love Reading

When kids love reading books (or being read to), they develop vocabulary and language skills that will grow and help them in school and all throughout their lives!

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you'll go." — Dr. Seuss

1. Start Reading Together Early

"I feel the need of reading. It is a loss to a man not to have grown up among books." —Abraham Lincoln

"Children are made readers on the laps of their parents." — Emilie Buchwald

We read to Babs when she was only weeks old. She had no idea what was going on, but she heard our voices and was exposed to seeing books in Mommy and Daddy's hands almost from birth. Make it the norm early on.

2. Set the Example

Show them that Mom and Dad love reading too! Kids want to do everything you do!

A little light reading from mom & dad's library

3. Keep Books Within Kids' Reach

"Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks." — Dr. Seuss

When they're wee ones, this works best with board books, as grabbing hands will inevitably tear paper pages.

When Babs got a little older, she loved pulling books down from her shelf and paging through them.

Reading on the pot from a young age.

4. Rotate Books

NEW and DIFFERENT books are always way more exciting than the books she's seen a million times already. Here's where the LIBRARY comes in. We go every two weeks and get a dozen new books. She pages through them on her own first before we even start reading. It keeps her interest and keeps me from losing my mind after reading Dinotrux a thousand and seventeen times.

Get different kinds of books too. Princess stories are fun, but there are so many different books available. Books that teach colors, counting and letter recognition -- in a fun way! Get science books and books that teach about different kinds of animals. They're never as popular in the house as the princesses, but every little bit of exposure helps her learn. They're little sponges, soaking up everything you show them.

So make sure you're showing them the good stuff.