I’m a major book junkie. I’ve loved reading ever since I learned how to read. I remember as early as first grade staying up regularly until 1am reading quietly in my bed. However, I’ve found that as a mother it’s much more difficult to justify snuggling up in a chair all day with a book – for some reason my kids seem to require a bit more attention than that. I missed the chance to expand my horizons without leaving my home, but couldn’t justify letting my house become a disaster and my kids run wild while I kept my nose stuck in a book.
Luckily, I found a wonderful compromise – Audible. With Audible I can enjoy fantastic audiobooks and still have my escape to other worlds while my hands and eyes can be busily occupied with laundry, dishes, cooking – or any of the other tasks of motherhood. My husband is a similiar bibliophile but also found his reading taking a backseat. However, with audiobooks he’s been able to turn a monotonous commute into a small escape. My kids have also really gotten into listening to books, especially at bedtime. We have Amazon Echo Dots in each of their rooms and they are able to enjoy many wonderful books this way – although it sometimes tends to keep them up later than I would like. I guess they must be like me after all 😉 To say that we are Audible fans in our household is an understatement – we LOVE Audible around here!
Anyways, over the years I’ve found lots of ways to get the most out of my Audible subscription. I’ve built up a library of 557 books so far and have done it for surprisingly cheap. I thought these tips and tricks might be useful to some of my readers, so here we go!
Spring for the Platinum Annual Membership. I know this suggestion might not make sense for everyone but hear me out. Audible has a subscription service – you pay a certain amount of money to get a certain number of audio books on a monthly or yearly basis. You can sign up to get one or two books a month and either pay for that many books for a year or per month. The plans range from $14.95/month (for one book credit each month) to $229.50/year. The platinum membership costs the most all at once, but it costs $5.39 less per book credit than the basic monthly plan. In 16 months you would have paid the same amount going with a monthly plan but you would have 8 more books with a platinum plan than with the gold plan. I think this is the hardest part to swallow is that large charge all at once, but I’ll give you some tricks for making that very worthwhile in my next few tips. Whatever you decide, a membership is definitely the key to getting the most out of Audible but I’d highly recommend the Platinum membership.
Share with a friend. This is the trickiest tip to do properly, but it can really make that Platinum account make sense. My husband and I actually have two separate audible accounts, even though we only have one membership. What we do is have the membership in my name and whenever Eric wants a book that he doesn’t think I’d be interested in having in my library he purchases it on my account as a gift for himself. He is then emailed a link that he can click on to add that book to his account. So there are a few ways you could use this. If you have a spouse, sibling or friend that you’re close enough with to share your Amazon password (and accompanying access to your credit card for purchases on Amazon/Audible) then you can split the cost and share that password. I’ve also purchased books as gifts for siblings and friends and then had them send me money for it in return. They get the book at the membership rate and I can more easily justify my Platinum membership 🙂
Never use a credit to get a book that’s less than $9.50. Ok, do I need to spell this one out for you? If you credits are only $9.56 each please don’t use a credit to buy a book that you can get for less than that! As a member you get discounts on the regular prices of books so make sure that you take advantage of those discounts! Just be careful at checkout to uncheck the box for using a credit because if you have credits that will be the default value! I’ll tell you later how I get those books for free a lot of the time 🙂
Sign up for Daily Deal emails. Every day Audible discounts a book to $4.95 or less and emails anyone on their list to let them know what the Deal of the Day is. I’ve gotten LOTS of great books this way! If you were to try to buy most of these books on CDs it would cost you $30+ so to get the books for less than $5 is pretty awesome. I probably only find a book that I’m interested in a couple times a month, but it’s well worth following for those couple times a month!
Take advantage of coupon deals. Frequently Audible will send their members “Buy 4 books get $10 credit” – this probably happens like twice a year. I *always* take advantage of this! If you have credits and a wish list it’s easy to pick out your next 4 reads and get a $10 credit. I then use that credit to buy a few books that are either priced low or on sale. It doesn’t get any better than free books!
Maintain a Wish List. One of the greatest features about Audible is that if you keep your wish list filled with all the titles that you would like to get if one of them goes on sale they will highlight those books in their emails to you. It also makes it easy when you’re looking for your next read to go to your wish list and find something queued up 🙂
Browse 3-for-2 sales, $4.95 sales, etc. Probably about once a month Audible will have a sale of “3 books for 2 credits” or “any of these books for $4.95”. I always browse these and have found some of my favorite books this way and stretch my credits even farther! There’s a strong possibility that last month I spent over $90 and bought 15 new books for my kids – but at $4 per title how could I pass it up?? I was able to justify it since I’ll submit the receipts to my kid’s homeschooling charter school 😉
Check for WhisperSync titles. Seriously, even without a membership this is one of the greatest deals ever. Sometimes the Kindle book will be free but because you “bought” it you’ll be able to get the audiobook for super cheap. I’d recommend checking out this post on SlickDeals where you’ll find a bunch of books that you can get the Kindle edition for free and then buy the Audible edition for a couple dollars! You can also check out this page on Amazon to find out what the audio upgrades cost for Kindle books you already own!
Prime Shipping Credits. To go along with the WhisperSync titles – if you have a Prime membership you will often be given the option at checkout to forego your 2 day shipping and instead be given a $1 credit that can be used on Kindle books. I almost always will take that offer, then I take those Kindle credits and buy WhisperSync books that I want for free! That makes the cheap audio addition an even better deal 😉
Holiday Gift Books and Audible Originals. Every month Audible has a selection of free books for members! You can pick up to two of them and I’ve gotten some really fun listens that way. Occasionally Audible will also give away books for free as gifts for different holidays. I’ve gotten new books for 4th of July, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and other holidays. They’re specific titles that might not be something that I would have chosen myself, but it’s been a great way to get me out of my comfort zone and reading something new – and you can’t beat free!
So there are my tips and tricks to get the most out of your Audible membership. If you’ve signed up now and need a good listen you should check out my book recommendations list – I made it specifically from my Audible listens that I’ve enjoyed. Happy listening!
My husband and I just returned from a 5 day 4 night trip to Hawaii and let me tell you – it was awesome. It was the first realvacation we’d taken since our honeymoon 8 1/2 years ago. We’d done overnight local getaways maybe 3 times and gone to family reunions/weddings/holidays and back to my parents’ house but not really a vacation where we’ve picked a place to go and activities and all that. I’m pretty cheap so I always seem to look and think “well, but that’s a lot of money and instead we could… pay off more of our mortgage, or put it towards finishing our basement, or put it away for savings.” Now that we’ve finally done it I can definitely say – it was well worth the money! We did our entire trip (airfare, lodging, rental car, dining, activities, souvenirs – everything) for under $2500! I think we scored some pretty awesome deals, so I thought I ought to pass along how I did it so that hopefully someone else can take advantage of the deals too! We also analyzed our trip and found some things we thought we could have done differently (without compromising the experience) to save even more. I think we could have kept our budget right around $2000 if we’d really needed to and still had a wonderful time! Anyways, let me break down for you our expenses and how we did it 🙂
Airfare – $773
We flew with Allegiant Airlines and the airfare started at $135/person each way. We were already at my parents house in California so we flew LAX-HNL. Allegiant is a bare bones kind of airline, but for the price we were ok with that. For the fare you get to take your own self and a personal item on the plane – no carry-on bags, no checked baggage. Obviously for a 5 day trip we’d be hard-pressed to stick to just our backpacks! If you were really desperate I’m sure you could layer your outfits and find a laundromat or something, but I don’t think that’s really worth it – at least not to me! Instead we shelled out another $35 each way to have one checked bag that we shared which worked out splendidly for us. We didn’t fork out any extra money to ensure that our seats were together (we checked in together so our seats were assigned together for both flights) or upgrade for extra leg room or add on any other bells and whistles 🙂 Our goal was for the flight to get our bodies and our very limited baggage to Hawaii. It ended up costing us $193/person each way once we averaged in the cost of our checked bag and all of the taxes and fees, which was still pretty awesome! I should note though – the legroom is pretty atrocious in the non-upgraded seats. I’m 5’2″ – so not exactly a giant. The picture below is of the space from my legs to the seat in front of me from the flight out –
No, I’m not kidding, and yes I really am only 5’2″. You can adjust the way you’re sitting so that you’re angled differently to make it work with longer legs – but if you have reasonably long legs I’d probably recommend shelling out for the extra leg room. The seats do not recline at all. Just don’t expect this to be an extraordinarily comfortable part of your trip. But, they did get me and my husband and our bags from LAX to HNL without us having to mortgage our home so I’m not complaining 🙂
To pass the time on board we brought our travel pillows and bluetooth headphones. I love my headphones, Eric gave them to me for Christmas and they’re amazing! They’re super lightweight and comfortable and the battery lasts for a long time. Plus they have really good noise cancelling, they were the perfect thing for the trip! We didn’t have a way to split the audio (I haven’t yet been able to find a bluetooth audio splitter) so Eric watched movies on his tablet and I listened to my book. Before our trip I decided to get the book Honolulu by Alan Brennert to get me in the mood for going to Hawaii. It turned out to be a fantastic choice! The book is about a Korean picture bride (mail-order bride) who comes to Hawaii and her life there. It gave me such an interesting perspective on the history of Oahu and how it became like it is today. It was fascinating. I wouldn’t recommend it for young readers as there are sexual references (nothing explicit, but things I wouldn’t be very comfortable with my teenager reading) , but I would definitely recommend it to any adult readers who want a great story while learning more about Hawaii. I also downloaded Moloka’i by Alan Brennert but I didn’t get to reading it during our trip, but I’ve read that it’s supposed to be even better than Honolulu. My dad recommended Hawaii by James Michner but I was looking specifically for an audiobook and Hawaii wasn’t available on Audible. If you want a really cheap trip to Hawaii I’d recommend downloading one of these books and letting yourself escape winter for less than $10 😉
Lodging – $410
So we cheated a little bit on our hotel. A few years back Eric was travelling a decent amount and racked up some Marriott Rewards points. We cashed those in for half of our stay at the Marriott Courtyard in Waikiki and we paid for the other half. The rooms were tiny. There was enough room for a bed with some nightstands, a TV on top of the dresser/desk and a super tiny bathroom with a small shower and zero counter space. Which was fine, it gave us what we needed. There are hotel deals that would get you a room in Hawaii for a similar price to what we paid even without the rewards points. If you wanted to try a different experience there were some interesting listings on AirBNB that were really cheap too 🙂
Transportation – $387
This is where I think a lot of our budget could have been significantly reduced. We got a rental car with our flight tickets. Combining what we paid online with what we paid when we picked up the car (all the fun taxes and fees) it cost us $241 for our 5 day rental – or a little over $48/day. That part wasn’t too bad. Neither was the $25 we paid in gas for the week. What was killer was the parking fees! It cost us $35/night to park at our hotel in Waikiki! That would have cost us $140 in parking alone!!! We ended up using the parking at our hotel for two nights and then finding another parking lot that was about a half mile away that let us park for $20/night that we used for the other two nights. But even at $20/night that still would have been $80 extra just for parking! Even the $110 that we ended up paying in parking was well beyond what we really wanted to be paying. There’s two different ways that we could have really reduced our costs on this front –
If you’re staying in Waikiki it’s easy to get free or very cheap shuttles to pretty much anywhere that you want to go (especially with the Go Oahu card that I’ll talk about later). We definitely could have skipped getting a rental car and just used the shuttles to get everywhere. That would have reduced this whole budget to less than $50, or even $0 depending on how much you were willing to walk and what shuttles you chose. However, we did like having a car just to be able to have the freedom to go where we wanted to go and the cost was worth it to us. What we would have probably done is…
Book our hotel away from Waikiki. When we were booking our room we thought it was important to be down in Waikiki so that we’d have access to all of the things – it seemed closer to all of the attractions and just generally where we thought we wanted to be. Looking at the North Shore seemed like it would be SO far away. What we didn’t take into account is that the island is *really* small. Even in traffic to go as far as you’d want to go from end to end of the island would take maybe an hour and a half. If you’re not going to Waikiki for the night life and shopping and super commercial side of things (which we definitely were not) I’d highly recommend staying somewhere else on the island. We stayed that the Marriott Courtyard in Waikiki – if instead we’d stayed at the Courtyard in Laie our parking would have been $10/night or in other words it would have saved us $100! It’s more peaceful on the North Shore too, and it was closer to our favorite attraction (more on that later). This was by far the most important change that we would have made in our trip.
All things considered though, we were happy with how we did our transportation. Especially since when we arrived at the rental car pick up they upgraded us from an economy car to a full size car for free! So instead of having a little Kia Rio type car, we were driving around in a Dodge Charger. While I’m still happy with the Toyota Corolla we drive at home, it was definitely fun to have a powerful car with some bells and whistles for the week 🙂
Activities – $475
This is my biggest awesome find (other than the airfare). From Costco I got a 4 Day Go Oahu card for my husband and myself. You can book other lengths for the card directly from the Smart Destinations website (the provider of the Go Oahu card), or save a little money and get a 3 Day Go Oahu card from Groupon. At the time the Costco deal was the cheapest, but as of this writing I think the Groupon deal is probably best. Ok, so here’s the deal with the Go Oahu card – for the duration of your card you can get into all 34 of their attractions for free! Plus, when you get a card that is at least 3 days in length you can go on one day to one of their premium attractions.
So here’s what that means in layman terms, at least as far as our trip. So as we were planning our trip we knew there were two places we really wanted to visit – the Polynesian Cultural Center & Pearl Harbor. Without our Go Oahu card it was going to cost us $177/person for those attractions. Our Go Oahu card only cost us $167 through Costco. Basically it saved us $10 and then allowed us to go to 32 other places for FREE!
If we had planned out our trip better we really would have taken advantage of that card much more and gone to do the Dole plantation tour, and the tour of Iolani palace, and used it to get free snorkeling gear, and gone out on a catamaran ride, and rented paddle boards or kayaks, and done the guided Diamondhead tour… but we didn’t, so we really just saved the $10. But hey! We saved $10!
Our absolute favorite thing from the trip was, hands down, the Polynesian Cultural Center. We were so glad that we used the Go Oahu card to get the Ali’i Luau package, which got us into a really great luau and the show in the evening. When we were planning we’d looked at the package and saw that we could get in at 12:30pm and that we wouldn’t get done with the show until 9:30pm and thought that would be WAY too long to be there. So we decided that we’d make our way over to the PCC slowly and ended up starting our day there around 2:30pm. This was the biggest mistake of our trip! We so wished that we’d had those extra couple hours to look around and have time to go to all of the different stations. We didn’t want a lot more time than that, but those extra couple hours would have really let us see all that the PCC had to offer. All of the people there were so friendly and helpful to show us around and give us suggestions of where to go. The presentations were informative and entertaining. The luau had delicious food and great entertainment. The evening show was absolutely spectacular and touching and just phenomenal. I can’t say enough how much we enjoyed it. We did this on the first full day of our trip and it really got us into the island culture and feel right off the bat. It was so wonderful and we’re so glad that we went.
Pearl Harbor was wonderful too, but in a totally different way. Whereas we wished we’d had more time at the PCC we sort of wish we’d split our time at Pearl Harbor up. We got there around 11:30 and by the time we left at 5pm we were over the whole thing. We started with the audio tour of the Arizona Memorial and the site itself. This was awesome. I felt like I learned so much and really got into what we were doing. The audio tour really helped us to go through the site in a meaningful way and feel like we got a real flavor for the events of that day. After that we went over to the USS Bowfin – a retired WWII submarine and took that audio tour. Following that we went into the submarine museum with yet another audio tour… at this point we were getting a little bit audio toured out and we just skipped around the museum and looked at a few things that were most interesting to us. Finally we went over to the aviation museum where we skipped the audio tour entirely and just walked around and looked at the airplanes. We think that if we’d instead done a little bit of Pearl Harbor over a few different days we could have enjoyed all of the audio tours and really gotten a great educational experience, but at the end of the day we were mostly just dazed and ready to do anything else except listen to another audio tour!
Aside from our Go Oahu card we also bought a LivingSocial deal for Parasailing for $66 for a tandem parasail. This was really fun, and gave us a different perspective of the island and was a fun experience overall! We shelled out another $30 for the boat operators to take pictures for us, plus left them with a tip, so in all it ended up costing us $106. It was fun, but I think if we’d found the Go Oahu card first we would have skipped this in favor of going to some of the other attractions on our Go Oahu card instead. We definitely would have just brought our cell phones and asked someone on the boat to snap a few pictures instead of paying for the “professional” pictures since most of them ended up being out of focus anyways 🙁 But it was still a really cool experience and a pretty reasonable price. We enjoyed our time out on the boat as well as in the air.
We also hiked to the top of Diamondhead one of the mornings while we were there. That was a fun experience and gave us some good exercise! Definitely make sure that you are well hydrated beforehand! When we arrived there were rescue crews bringing a man off the trail who had passed out on the hike. The hike isn’t very technical and not terribly long, but it’s pretty steep in some places and it definitely left me pretty winded! But it was totally worth the view from the top.
Food – $250
I’m sure we could have eaten for cheaper, but we ate *really* well while we were in Hawaii so we were ok with the cost. Feel free to skip the rest of this section if you don’t want the play-by-play of our meals in Hawaii, but if you’re looking for recommendations of great places to eat – read on 🙂
The first thing we did on our trip though was a rookie mistake – we forgot to pack ourselves a lunch for the plane at home. When we got to the airport we got a couple of sandwiches, 2 lemonades and a bag of chips… for $36!! When we got on the plane we found out that we could have gotten a reasonable snack pack for $5 each. Lesson learned: Even if you forget to pack a lunch, it’s cheaper to eat on the plane than to pay airport “convenience” premiums!
When we got to the island we repented of our mistakes. To save a little bit we started our trip by going to the ABC Store (kind of a high end 7-11) and picked up some blueberry bread, cut pineapple and mango juice for our first breakfast. It might not have ended up saving us that much over just going to a restaurant, but since we were able to take that breakfast to the beach and watch the sunrise the first morning – totally worth it. We then went to Walmart and picked up some breakfast foods for the rest of our stay (sweet rolls, bananas) and some snacks (granola bars, chex mix, beef jerky, gum) and a flat of 30 water bottles with some crystal light. Those were great purchases that really helped us keep some of our costs down on our trip. Especially the water bottles – they cost us $5 and meant that we had water to take into all of our attractions, we used them in restaurants and just generally to keep ourselves hydrated – for $0.17 per bottle! We had quite a few left in the end that we left in our rental car – hopefully they got redistributed and not just thrown away!
Aside from our provisions we ate at some really awesome places. Our first night we went to a place called Aloha Table. I got a really delicious fried fish dish and Eric had a steak. We also got an appetizer of edamame that we could have skipped, but we were so hungry by the time we got there that we didn’t think we wanted to wait for our main dishes – they came out only a couple minutes after we got our appetizer 😛 It cost us nearly $60, but it was an awesome first meal on the island. SO delicious! The presentation was good too 🙂
The next day we went out in search of the famous Giovanni’s Shrimp Truck. Don’t be fooled by the fact that it’s a food truck – it stays in the same place all the time. It was $12/plate – cash only! It was really good, although I personally enjoyed the rice more than the shrimp. Eric and I both got the shrimp scampi. The weird thing is that they cook the shrimp with the shell still on. Removing the shell was a messy process, but the sad part was once you did… you’d removed the garlic and olive oil that they’d cooked the shrimp in too. It was good shrimp, but it seemed kind of silly to go to the effort of making a scampi just to remove the flavored parts before eating it.
That night we ate at the PCC Luau which was awesome as I’d already said. All the more awesome because we wrapped that cost up in our Go Oahu card 😉 The next day after our Diamondhead hike we went to Pioneer Saloon at the recommendation of the Zomato app (this is where we got most of our food recommendations for the rest of the trip). It was Eric’s very favorite meal of the whole trip! When we went in the menu was massive and a little overwhelming! We decided to go with the recommendations from the reviews on Zomato and we both got a ramen burger with everything (we were hungry after hiking Diamondhead!) They cost us $9/each but they were well worth it! The burgers were made with ramen noodles that had been cooked and then fried together to form a patty. Then on top they had a fried egg, avocado, sprouts, sauteed onions and mushrooms, lettuce and tomato. Oh, and the teriyaki patty too 🙂 It was SO delicious, and it really hit the spot after our hike. There were certainly cheaper things on the menu but we were very happy with that experience.
That night after our parasailing adventure we used Zomato again to find a Japanese noodle shop called Goma Tei Ramen. I got the Chicken Tan Tan Noodles and Eric got the Curry Noodles and we got some gyoza (potstickers) to split. We definitely did NOT need the potstickers to round out the meal – although they were very delicious. The bowls that they brought were huge! Eric definitely made the better choice in getting the curry noodles – his soup was really delicious. Mine was a little lackluster. I don’t think they flavored the chicken before putting it in the soup so it wasn’t great chicken. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. Eric mentioned afterwards that I probably should have added some soy sauce to it which hadn’t occurred to me at the time. It was a fun culinary experience and it ran us another $40.
Before going to Pearl Harbor on Thursday we stopped at Liliha Bakery at the recommendation of a local friend. We got an onion pastry (sort of a savory croissant-ish thing?), a pizza roll and a malasada. The pastries were good, nothing to write home about but good. The malasada was unique but really sweet – we each ate a little bit and saved the rest for later. We were told that the better malasadas are at Leonard’s Bakery, but we didn’t get a chance to track those down. We probably should have brought a little more food because we were really hungry at the end of going to Pearl Harbor, but our timing was weird – we stopped at the bakery at about 10:45 after already eating breakfast. We weren’t quite hungry for lunch but we wanted to be ready for Pearl Harbor. I think we could have bought a decent lunch there and then kept it in our car to eat after doing the tour and we would have probably been more happy overall.
After Pearl Harbor we went back to our trusty Zomato app and headed over to Dirty Lickin’s Chicken for some chicken wings. We each got some breaded chicken strips and rice – and once again the rice was my favorite part 🙂 We got their combo meal which boasted corn and a salad – the corn was literally just cold canned corn and the salad was lettuce and ranch dressing. The chicken itself was good, but kind of dry. Our meal cost another $24.50, and while it was filling… it wasn’t necessarily our favorite spot.
One thing I’d been told we absolutely had to do was go and get Hawaiian shaved ice. We’d been given a recommended location but by the time we got there on Thursday it was closed. So on Friday morning we searched out the nearby Waiola Shave Ice and for $4.50 we got this yummy treat. It was really good, although we were eating it at a weird time of day for ice cream. Before hopping on our flight back home we stopped at L&L Hawaiian. Eric got the chicken katsu and I got the fried shrimp plate. We got the regular sized plates and holy cow! It was a TON of food! We thought we’d get a reasonable amount but it was WAY more than we’d anticipated. We each ate about half of our meal, and then we went over to the Walgreens and bought some sandwich baggies that we packaged the rest of the meal into for our flight home. It wasn’t what we were planning on eating on our flight home but it worked out surprisingly well. We even bagged up our rice and we were able to eat it straight out of the bag on the plane pretty easily, and the chicken and shrimp were surprisingly good. Since we had been struggling to find a place to pick up a sandwich or something similar for our flight home, this was a super happy mistake to have had that leftover food and that it packed up so much better than we’d hoped!
Ok, I promise, that’s the end of my food travelogue 🙂
Souvenirs – $143.48
This is obviously is another place where we could have saved a decent amount of money. I’m being a little generous in the term “souvenirs”. In this case “souvenirs” also means – hairspray, hair gel, hair clips and sunscreen that we could have brought from home but forgot. It also includes that I brought just one pair of shorts for Eric which he got dirty in the first hour of our first morning and we couldn’t wash them out in the sink. Rather than being stuck in jeans for the whole trip we bought him a new pair of shorts, as well as a belt since we left his at my parents’ house. We found leis for our kids at the ABC store for $1 and shell leis there for $1.50 each – so we bought one of each for each of our 3 kids. We bought a little hair clip for Maeli with a hawaiian flower and some shark tooth necklaces for the boys. We also bought some pineapple crunch chocolate for my brother and his girlfriend since they helped us plan the trip (she’s native Hawaiian, so she gave us some good recommendations 😉 ). Finally for my parents we got them some chocolate covered macadamia nuts and a puzzle – we got the Maui one even though that’s not where we went because it looked more fun than the Waikiki puzzle or the Polynesian Cultural Center puzzle. We also sent postcards to our kids, which they got a real kick out of. Our actual souvenirs really cost closer to $50, but I didn’t know where else to categorize our other sundry purchases and since they mostly came home with us, they get to be souvenirs.
Conclusion
So that’s it! That’s how we had a wonderful vacation for 5 days in Hawaii for under $2500. When we got back the fitness tracker on my Pebble gave me a notification that said, “Do you feel really good? You’ve been sleeping really well this week. Keep up the good work!” I thought, “No kidding I’ve been sleeping well this week – I’ve spent a week without my kids! Don’t get used to this!” It was a wonderful week, but it was really good to get back home to our kids 🙂 I hope that someone is able to use this information to plan their own affordable trip to Hawaii – or at least give you some good ideas of places to go! Let me know in the comments if you go and what places and deals you liked! Aloha!
A couple years back a friend of mine posted a link to a blog post about modesty, particularly the author’s experience in the Middle East and wearing a hijab. I was so impressed with the author’s perspective that I decided to poke around the blog a little more. I read another post on spiritual promises and infertility which I immediately had to share with a friend struggling with that particular trial. I read this post about the significance of wearing veils which blew my mind and gave me a lot to think about over my following trips to the temple. I quickly became hooked and Eric got used to coming home to me being totally excited about some new insight that I’d gleaned from her blog.
So, what is this blog? It’s called Women in the Scriptures and the premise is this – how many women would you guess are mentioned in scriptures? Go ahead and take your guess, I’ll wait. My original guess had been maybe as many as 50, if you looked really hard. I’ve long been of the camp that women are not mentioned frequently enough in the scriptures, was that what you’d thought too? Turns out, we were wrong. Heather (the author of Women in the Scriptures) went through her scriptures and marked every time that a woman was mentioned in the scriptures. The real answer? 556. I was amazed when I read that, how did I not know that there were that many women in the scriptures?? I’ve been reading the scriptures my whole life and I’d never noticed many, could there be that many?
It opened my eyes to a whole new perspective on the scriptures. Instead of reading the scriptures with a chip on my shoulder that there weren’t any women in them, I started looking for the women. Suddenly the women were popping out of everywhere. None of the scriptures were written by women, but they factor into the stories more often than you might realize. All at once I saw mothers, sisters, aunts, maids, queens, prophetesses – how had I not seen them before?
A couple weeks ago Heather released a new book called – Walking With the Women in the New Testament, a book which focuses in depth on the stories of each of the women who are mentioned in the New Testament. When she sent out a request for people to participate in a blog tour I jumped at the chance! I knew this would be a book that I would need to share with all of you.
I was so excited when I received my copy in the mail. After reading all the great insights in her blog I knew it was going to be great. But something about the book surprised me. I brought the book with me one Friday afternoon to the church while I waited for Sam to go through his primary program practice. I figured it would be a good time to sit and read through some of the book. As I sat in the foyer with my book, my three-year old son came over and asked me to read it to him. At first I sort of put him off, this wasn’t really a “kids” book, but he insisted. So he plopped down on my lap and I let him point to a name in the table of contents. I figured he would sit with me for a few sentences and then run off to go play in the nursery.
He chose “The Widow Who Gave Two Mites”. We turned to that story and I gave him a simplified version of the story first and then started reading to him what was in the book. I hadn’t wanted the book for the pictures (as you may have gathered from the wordiness of most of my posts – I’m a words person more than a pictures person) but the beautiful artwork convinced Danny that this book was for him too. Instead of a “kids” book that might have given him a very superficial understanding of this story, he sat and listened to some pretty meaty insights about how Jesus brought his message to both men and women, and how we should give up all to serve Him, and that He sees and knows our needs even when we feel insignificant. Wow. I’ve read this story many times before and I’d always thought it was meaningful, but I had never gotten all of that out of it! I sat in the foyer with tears in my eyes from just the experience of that one story. But more importantly, Danny sat there and listened to it, and was eating it all up. I expected that this book would give me some good insights but I hadn’t imagined that at such a young age it would be influencing my young son. This truly isn’t a book about women just for women, it is a message about some of the sometimes overlooked players within the scriptures with a message for everyone.
I haven’t yet read all of the stories, but I have been thoroughly enjoying reading them one at a time and really savoring the deeper messages of stories that I’d never thought much of, or hadn’t even noticed. I used to think that there should be more women in the scriptures so that I could learn from their stories as they would be more relatable to myself as a woman. Now I’m thinking maybe there aren’t more because I haven’t learned what those that are there have to teach me!
So, if you’re getting ready for your Christmas shopping and not sure what to get for your mom, sister, daughter, grandma, aunt, wife, girlfriend… or your dad, brother, son, grandpa, uncle, husband or boyfriend, this would be a great gift for anyone. What better gift at Christmas than the opportunity to delve deeper into the scriptures and learn lessons that will draw you closer to the Savior?
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book in exchange for reviewing it, but all opinions are my own.
I just finished listening to The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. If you haven’t read it before and you’re someone who enjoys reading I highly recommend it. It’s an interesting story about a young man who grew up in Afghanistan when the Soviet Union invaded and took control of the country. He flees with his father to America and returns later during the Taliban rule. I don’t want to give too many details because I think the fun of reading a book is experiencing it for yourself (ironically this is discussed in the book as a very American attitude).
Coincidentally I also recently challenged myself to read through the entire Old Testament as it is the one book of scripture that I can’t say I’ve read cover-to-cover. I’m pretty sure I’ve read almost all of it at one point or another, but I can’t actually say I’ve read every page so I’m working towards that. I haven’t made it very far and I just read last night most of the story of Abraham (Genesis 15-21). Reading that story while listening to a book about the unrest in the Middle East and the Muslims there led to some interesting thoughts which I figured I’d write about here.
One of the first things that struck me is that if Sarah hadn’t given Hagar to Abraham to wife, none of the problems in the Middle East for the past thousands of years would have ever taken place. Which makes me wonder if the world would have been better off if Sarah hadn’t done that. The whole feud between Muslims and Jews wouldn’t have existed because there wouldn’t have been any Muslims to begin with. I’m not trying to say that the world would be better off without Muslims, just that the way that Sarah and Hagar dealt with each other afterwards has created an animosity between those two peoples that has endured through many centuries. Perhaps under different circumstances Hagar would have married another man within Abraham’s camp, raised those children peacefully alongside Issac and everyone would have lived happily ever after. I know that’s a big what if and it doesn’t even do any good to speculate on that issue, but I had a different insight that I thought *was* worthwhile to think about. What if Sarah had kept her faith in God that He would keep His promise to Abraham and herself rather than doubting and giving her handmaiden instead? Perhaps all of the turmoil that has happened ever since that point could have been avoided by exercising greater faith.
I’m not necessarily saying that what Sarah did was wrong, perhaps she was even commanded to by the Lord (which was what I had thought originally, but in reading through last night I didn’t see indication of that, please let me know if I just missed it). I definitely think that it was a HUGE sacrifice on her part to give another woman to her husband to wife. I’m probably too jealous of a woman to do that myself. However, it was just a reminder to me to have even greater faith in what the Lord is capable of and allow him to do great things through us. I think a great example of the converse is Nephi. When the Lord asked him to build a boat he didn’t ask where he could find a boatmaker, he asked where to find ore to make tools and then let the Lord make him into the boatmaker. It made me wonder in what ways I’m limiting the Lord’s power to make me into an even better person by accepting things as they are.
By the way if you’re interested in another book about Abraham and Sarah one of my very favorite books that I’ve read recently is Sarah: Women of Genesis by Orson Scott Card, it was excellent and I recommend it even more so than Kite Runner, but obviously they’re totally different books so it depends on what you enjoy reading 🙂
The other thought that I had was how much we are all really the same. If you look at Christians, Muslims and Jews we think of those religions as being SO different. However, we each branch off at tiny intersections. Muslims and Jews came from the same spiritual heritage, are both the offspring of Abraham. They just branch a little bit when Ishmael and Hagar are sent away from Abraham’s camp, but still at the roots and essence of Islam, they believe in basically the same things, and they’re worshiping the same God although by different names and in different ways. Again Christians and Jews come from the same spiritual heritage all the way up until the birth of Jesus. Then we differ in that we believe Jesus is the Christ and that He has already come, whereas the Jews are still waiting for the Christ to come. But again we’re still the same at our roots and worshiping the same God, just in different ways. I think we can often focus too much on our differences than on our similarities.
Now, that isn’t to say that the differences that we have aren’t important. I think one of the things I see most frequently are people who say that we’re all good so don’t worry about how we’re different. I strongly believe that it is very significant that Jesus is the Christ, that He suffered for our sins and was resurrected and that because of Him we can be forgiven of our sins and live again. Eric was told by many people on his mission that there are “many roads that lead to the top of the mountain”, meaning it doesn’t matter what you believe we’re all going to end up in the same place. I do believe that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the only church on the face of the earth today that has the complete truth. It’s why we believe in doing missionary work and that it’s so important to spread the truth to others. What we have *does* matter, and we should be doing all that we can to share it with others. However, that doesn’t exclude any other religion from having any truth. Nor does it give Latter-day Saints a monopoly on God, I believe God loves all of His children regardless of race or religion and He will answer the prayers of a Muslim or a Jew or anyone else as readily as a Christian, so long as they’re asking in faith and with righteous desires. Most importantly I don’t believe that people are simply damned for not accepting the fullness of the gospel in this life.
What I believe is best expressed in C.S. Lewis’ book The Last Battle (I know, lots of different book references today, what can I say, I love reading ;). In that book there is a young man who is a Calormene (i.e. not a Narnian or the equivalent of Christian) and he fights vehemently throughout the book for Tash (the Calormenian god) against Aslan and the Narnians. At the end of the book **SPOILER ALERT** everyone dies and they have “judgement day”. When they get to judgement day the Calormenian young man steps aside with Aslan for a little bit and they have a conversation where Aslan basically says – you missed it by a little bit and were fighting for the wrong side, but your intentions were correct, you are a noble and just person and if you will accept this path you still get to come and live in Aslan’s kingdom.
That’s the best explanation I can think of for how I believe things are going to be on the other side. Yes, I think it’s absolutely important that Christ is the Savior of mankind and that the pathway to eternal life and exaltation means that we need to accept His atonement in our lives and do those things that will help us return to and become like Heavenly Father. But if you were a faithful and good person in this life I fully believe that in the next life you’ll be told – you’re awesome, way to be faithful, here are the steps that you need now to gain eternal life and exaltation. It’s why we do work for the dead in temples. It’s not to force our faith upon people who have passed on or to tell those people that they were evil. Quite the contrary, it’s simply to give them the opportunity to accept those things they might not have known before and have the chance to progress onward.
Which isn’t to say that it isn’t important to accept the gospel in this life if given the chance. I think one of the most important things to realize about what happens on the other side is that we will still be the same people we are now – just dead. We won’t suddenly be a completely different person with different desires or abilities. If you weren’t going to accept the gospel in this life and feel inclined to do those things that the gospel requires, you aren’t likely to do so in the next life. (See Alma 41 for a more eloquent explanation of this)
Anyways, I know a lot of this is fairly off topic from the book itself but they’re things that I’ve thought about in the past and have meant to write down and post, this just provided a good jumping off point 🙂 As always, you can feel free to add in your two cents below.
A couple years back a friend of mine posted a link to a 
. If you haven’t read it before and you’re someone who enjoys reading I highly recommend it. It’s an interesting story about a young man who grew up in Afghanistan when the Soviet Union invaded and took control of the country. He flees with his father to America and returns later during the Taliban rule. I don’t want to give too many details because I think the fun of reading a book is experiencing it for yourself (ironically this is discussed in the book as a very American attitude).
(I know, lots of different book references today, what can I say, I love reading ;). In that book there is a young man who is a Calormene (i.e. not a Narnian or the equivalent of Christian) and he fights vehemently throughout the book for Tash (the Calormenian god) against Aslan and the Narnians. At the end of the book **SPOILER ALERT** everyone dies and they have “judgement day”. When they get to judgement day the Calormenian young man steps aside with Aslan for a little bit and they have a conversation where Aslan basically says – you missed it by a little bit and were fighting for the wrong side, but your intentions were correct, you are a noble and just person and if you will accept this path you still get to come and live in Aslan’s kingdom.