Two Book Recommendations

I recently finished two books that I’d like to recommend to you:

Calm My Anxious Heart by Linda Dillow: I expected this book to be more about anxiety, but it is actually an excellent and challenging study on contentment. I had just finished writing an article on contentment before I began reading this book (to be posted here and on SharperIron on Monday, Lord willing), and as I delved into the book, I started to feel silly for even attempting to tackle the topic, because this book is so much more thorough than I could be in an 800-word essay. Most of us struggle with contentment in some way or other, and I recommend this book to you.

Don’t Make Me Count to Three! by Ginger Plowman: If you like Ted Tripp’s Shepherding a Child’s Heart, you’ll like this book too. Plowman is somewhat of a disciple of Tripp and borrows from him, as well as Lou Priolo’s Heart of Anger, often. But she’s a woman, and she writes like a woman, complete with humor and helpful illustrations. The most helpful advice for me from this book was that we need to not only tell our children what not to do, but we also need to guide them in what they ought to do instead. For instance, when we tell our kids not to fight over a toy, we need to explain to them what they need to do instead, and then make them practice doing it right then. It’s the put off/ put on principle. This book was just the encouragement I needed as I’m trying to be the right kind of mommy for my two toddlers.

Happy reading!