I came by it honestly.

It has come to my attention that I — I! — am the proud winner in The Crescat’s final year of her deliberately unpresitgious Cannonball Awards.  Here are the winners:

Best Blog by a Religious: Fr. Longenecker’s Standing on My Head

Best Political Blog: Adrienne’s Catholic Corner

More Catholic Than the Pope: Real Catholic TV

Best Armchair Theologian:Little Catholic Bubble

Best Visual Treat: Betty Beguiles

Most Church Militant: It’s a tie! Defend Us in Battle, and Cleansing Fire

Best New Kid on the Block: Heart For God

Best Blog by a Heretic: Bad Vestments

Best Under Appreciated Blog: Barefoot & Pregnant

Best Spiritual Treat: Blessed is the Kingdom

Bat Shit Crazy: I Have to Sit Down

Best Potpourri of Popery: Shoved to Them

Snarkiest Catholic Blog: Acts of the Apostasy

Most Hifreakinlarious: another tie! Acts of the Apostasy and The Ironic Catholic

Blog that Needs to be Updated More Often: Recovering Dissident Catholic

Yes, that’s right, I came in first, with a disturbingly wide lead, in the “Bat Shit Crazy” category.

I’m not going to argue.  All I can say is that if you knew my family, you’d know where it came from.  Case in point: a recent Facebook conversation, for which I laboriously learned how to take a screen shot (you press the “screen shot” button).

Click on the image to enlarge and behold . . . the bat shit craziness.

Anyway, many thanks to the fabulous Crescat, who could have won a fair number of these awards herself, if she weren’t too cool, and too busy moving to her new headquarters.  Don’t forget to check out her new art blog, too.

Ten Good Books (and then some) Featuring Big Families

Today I talked about ten of my favorite “big family” books, but so many more didn’t make it onto the list.  Here are the ones I included.

(I know they ought to have authors’ names, but if that’s the worst of the problems with this list, (a) it’s a frickin miracle and (b) I almost bit through my own fist in a rage, trying to get the stupid, stupid thing to stupid do what I stupid wanted it to do, and between Amazon’s clonkiness and WordPress’s persnickety proprietary nonsense, and me being in the “all irate all the time” trimester, this is how it turned out. Think of it like an adventure!)

All-Of-A-Kind Family  (the series)

Cheaper by the Dozen

The Story of the Trapp Family Singers

The Father Who Had 10 Children

Heckedy Peg 

It Could Always Be Worse: A Yiddish Folk Tale

Mr & Mrs Pig’s Bulk Buy and the rest of the Mrs. Pig books

Nanny McPhee (Widescreen Edition) (the movie, which is not a book, but a movie)

The Weasley family in the Harry Potter Paperback Box Set (Books 1-7)

Half Magic

and the ones I wish I had had room for:

The Five Chinese Brothers

The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes

Five Children and It  and other E. Nesbit books

The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy and the rest of the series

The Saturdays (Melendy Quartet)

and the ones I am not familiar with, but which others recommended(thanks for your help! If I weren’t such a lazy swine, I’d link back to you all, not that you need it):

Classic Starts: Five Little Peppers and How They Grew 

The Relatives Came 

A Christmas Like Helen’s

The Bear That Heard Crying 

So Many Bunnies: A Bedtime ABC and Counting Book

Ten Kids, No Pets 

The Seven Silly Eaters

McBroom’s Wonderful One-Acre Farm: Three Tall Tales

It’s Too Noisy!

Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch

I Remember Mama: Play in Two Acts

Savvy

Spencer’s Mountain

Dinosaur Bob and His Adventures with the Family Lazardo

The Happy Hollisters series

The Wouldbegoods 

Happy Little Family (Fairchild Family Story)

The Family Minus

Come join us at the Register and add your favorites to the list!

Oh, and if perchance you are inclined to buy any of these books, my Christmas present savings fund, which we keep raiding for frivolous flights of fancy like dryer parts and, um, extra bone marrow for my poor sick grandmother, would love it if you would click through from my blog here, because I get a small percentage of each sale.  I forget if I’m supposed to mention that or not.  If you’re from the Amazon Associates program, please practice the following remark, “Aw, that dizzy broad don’t know what she’s talking about.  Nothing to see here, legal department — let’s move along.”

Yay, books!  Yay, small percentage!  Yay, big families!

And shall not loveliness be loved forever?

For show and tell yesterday, my daughter brought in these pictures:

Our dear little Shrimpy at 28 weeks, due December 9!