Olive’s Top 5 Reads of 2022

Here we are at the end of 2022. It’s been a good reading year for me – finished 52 books and found many gems along the way. It’s a difficult task to boil it down to 5 top reads, but I will try! (In case you missed it, here’s my list from 2021). I’ll also include a list of honourable mentions at the bottom of this post. I’ve linked the books to Amazon here, purely for convenience of reference. If you’re able to support your local bookstore or get these from your local library, please do so.

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Blue Day Conversation Guide

Early on in our marriage, we realized that most of our everyday conversations were superficial in nature but we didn’t often get around to talking about the deeper things that mattered most to us. We decided to address this by booking off a day to discuss these topics. After all, businesses and organizations have annual planning retreats, why couldn’t we? That’s how Blue Days were invented. Over the 13 years we have been doing Blue Days, many people have asked us what we talk about. We put this post together to outline the topics we cover.

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10 Things Learned in 10 Years of Marriage

Ten years of marriage feels like both a long and a short time. As we prepared to celebrate our first decade of marriage today, we sat down to reflect on some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way. While this isn’t an exhaustive list, it summarizes some of the main things we have learned.

We realize that our readers come from various places in life – some are married, some unmarried, some are struggling with their marriages, some are divorced or separated. Our intention for sharing is to give a glimpse into our relationship and hopefully bring encouragement or invite pondering. We recognize that the marriage we have can only be described as an unmerited gift – an act of grace in our lives. We are fortunate to have supportive family and friends around us and are grateful for their roles in shaping us as individuals so that we could have the marriage that we do.

Three years ago, we wrote 7 Things Learned in 7 Years of Marriage. This year, we’ve created a new list with 10 Things Learned in 10 Years of Marriage:
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How I Fought With My In-Laws (and Won)

How I Fought With My In-Laws (and Won)

[This is an excerpt of our book, “Then Came The Baby“, about the time I fought with my in-laws shortly after Allie was born.]

Before Allie was one week old, I had a big fight with Olive’s parents. They were so angry they wanted to cancel Christmas.

Well, technically no one could cancel Christmas. But they wanted to cancel Christmas with us by changing their plane tickets to fly back to Toronto early.
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