Still kickin’

Merry Christmas! Just a quick hello to tell y’all that we’re still alive here – just having a diet from the Internet. I am checking email occasionally and very little else.

I had a birthday the day before Christmas. Can anyone guess my middle name, or have I already told you? A lot of people think it’s a bad time of year to have a birthday, but I have to disagree. I spent the first 5 years of my life believing that the whole town was decorated in honor of my birthday!

We had a wonderful Christmas. We were given lots of chocolate and coffee by very special people who obviously know me well.
Our children received some very special gifts this year, but only one each from us. I am most gratified at Deanna’s and Kaitlyn’s excitement about the Bibles we bought them. Isn’t it great to know that they genuinely see true value in God’s Word? I glowed every time I heard them gush about the footnotes and cross references and how badly they needed a new Bible after wearing out their old ones this year.
Our 2 middle girls are very sweetly sharing a set of books that we gave them, knowing full well that all of their sisters would enjoy the gift as well.
The 5 and 6yo are loving their new bucket of 656 lego pieces (was I insane???) and sharing very nicely with the others. I’m guessing that there are still over 500 in the bucket.
2yo Rachael immediately grasped my ulterior motive in giving her a step stool for Christmas. Before I was aware that she had opened it, she trotted past me casually announcing to anyone who was listening, “Thank you for my step stool. I go potty now.”
I am now wireless, and free to roam outside my bedroom. I feel like the puppet in the old commercial, visualizing a whole new life w/o strings!

Our gift to most of my (very large) extended family was calendars. For each month, we put together a collage of all the people who had birthdays or anniversaries, and put the dates & years for each event on the calendar itself, then had 15 copies printed.
I had fun digging up photos of everyone, including old photos when I had them as well as new ones. There were about 70 or 80 birthdays, 15 anniversaries, and 2 unborn babies with uncertain duedates.
It was a lot of work, but everyone else seemed just as excited to receive their calendars as I was to have one of my own!

The Boy turned 6 months this week, as did a certain reader’s boy born the very same day. Thanks for the Happy Half-birthday email! We strongly suspect that he is calling Daddy by name. He seems to say, “da-da” with a big grin far too often when he’s looking right at him. He doesn’t seem to call me yet, but he will look at me when somebody asks him where is Mom.

We missed the chance to MIRL with a reader this week due to coughs, fevers, and swollen tonsils (trust me Charlsie – you didn’t want to meet Little Red this week!). Maybe soon?

A big thank you to those of you who used my CBD links to order lately, and especially to whoever ordered this – our family will have a nice post-Christmas commission check, and I hope one of my coupons saved the buyer some money as well!
Current CBD coupons:

• Enter promotion code 252935NY as you enter the checkout process to save 10% on your order! Use as many times as you like between now and 1/1/07
• Get free shipping on any order over $35 between now and the first of the year. Code: 238041KE

It wasn’t exactly a Christmas gift, but a co-worker blessed my husband with a spectacular price on a very nice and much-needed replacement for his work car. You know who you are: the entire family thanks you! We’ll be thrilling the children today with rides in the new car.

We have another birthday coming up very soon – our little millenium baby turns 7 on Monday.

There’s a quick summary of the last 10 days from a brain that’s been pickled in chocolate, caffeine and all things delicious.
What’s happening in your corner of the world?

Susie Bluebird makeovers

Guess who’s getting a blog makeover? Not me – I was just checking my stats and got a sneak preview of a reader’s new blog template!
I wonder if she knows who she is? Don’t worry – I won’t tell!

I see Susie’s work all over the web and am constantly surprised by how her work can be so diverse, yet have her unmistakeable touch. I guess it’s the mark of a true artist. Every new template she designs seems to reflect the blogger’s own unique personality, but I know her work the instant the blog comes up on my screen.

How many here have had their template designed by Susie? How many were thrilled beyond words with what she did?

Me! Me!

Homeschooling: Am I Doing Enough?

Another keeper from Carolyn at Guilt-Free Homeschooling:

Am I Doing Enough?

Carolyn admonishes us to avoid fruitless worry, but rather to carefully evaluate the amount of learning that is happening in our home.
Not one to leave readers hanging, she then provides a list of 20 questions and a scoring system to help us do just that.
In spite of rather sparse structured schooling during this busy season (and we’re not just out Christmas shopping), I am reminded that healthy minds in an appropriate environment are always learning.
I like Carolyn’s view of education, and I like the way our children measure up on Carolyn’s scale. Oh, and I like our children too. A lot.

WFMW: skirt hangers

OK, this is a silly tip, but it works for me, and I’m so glad my kids figured it out.
When hanging skirts in my closet, I used to do one of 3 things:

1. Hang it over a regular clothes hanger, which often results in a crease right across the middle of the skirt (and actually damaged 2 of my favorite velvety skirts!)
2. Confiscate hubby’s slacks hangers, or
3. Buy special skirt hangers. I haven’t found a style I like, and these are rather pricey if you have to buy them new. Even if I did, the downside to having a special skirt hanger is that I have a lot of skirts – that’s all I wear these days.

So here’s what my girls figured out:
A small or medium sized skirt hangs perfectly on a regular hanger: just slip the waist up over the “shoulders” of the hanger, and let the skirt hang straight down. Duh! No creases or wrinkles, no rummaging for the right type of hanger.
This works best if you use plastic hangers. As with shirts, wire hangers can sometimes leave a mark at the “shoulders.”
It seems so simple now, but I didn’t figure it out in 33 years. Maybe my girls’ idea works for you too?

Bah, humbug!

Did you ever wonder why A Christmas Carol is such a classic? My Honey has shared some of his thoughts on the matter – along with some great images and links.

Yawn…

Too much do to, and not enough sleep. That sums up the last 10 days for me, but I hesitate to complain after hubby stayed up for nearly 48 hours straight last week.
Let’s just say my brain is even fuzzier than usual (is that possible?) and we’ve got a lot of laundry to catch up.
Since I have no brain cells to share today, why don’t you check out the Carnival of Kid Comedy that was guest hosted last week by Mom of 5 Blessings? I was too swamped to tell her, but I think she did a great job on her first ever carnival!
This week’s edition is at The Adventures of Super-Mommy and Spitup Boy, posted bright-and-earlier than I ever get ’round to it.
And Dana has posted the One Week Shy of a Year edition of the Homeschooling Carnival, always good for plenty of food for thought (for those who are not too foggy to do so).
Maybe I’m just giddy from lack of sleep, but I keep giggling at the typos my fingers are creating. I’m very tempted to leave them in just because they are so many and so bad and it makes me laugh, but I can’t bear to publish anything written and spelled quite so badly as all that.
So if you see any typos at all you can laugh at me, knowing that even though I corrected my mistakes as I went, and typed extra-slowly today, and I went over this post very slowly, twice, and still missed that.

This is probably not a good day for me to be driving. I think we’ll stay home and do laundry, and maybe walk to my parents’ house for a visit. The kids can wheel me home in the wagon.
The rest of y’all have fun doing the Christmas rush. We’ll be resting. Maybe we’ll celebrate that holiday, Nude Fasting TV Day.

He can be your hero too

My husband was already my hero, but I don’t mind if he’s yours too. I’m not the jealous sort.
Wanna know why he might be your hero?
If you ordered from Vision Forum and are hoping to receive your package by Christmas, I want you to know that my man came home last night after being gone for 14 hours. He had dinner, a shower and a haircut, then he cheerfully went back to work. They were planning to start the day a little early: he didn’t intend to leave for work until 2 AM (can you read that without your jaw hitting the floor?) but he decided to get a jump on things and started before midnight. I’m assuming the rest of the daytime crew showed up around 3 AM.
And he’s still there with his faithful crew, picking, pulling and packing orders, racing against the clock and the UPS pickup for the last day of standard shipping before Christmas.
After that, we’ll all be at the company year-end party, where I suspect we will find several of the warehouse crew asleep with their faces in the soup long before the end of the evening.
Merry Christmas!

Congratulations, Yofed!

I woke up to find this comment from Yofed under a recent post:

Hi!

Just a little baby update… I finally had my baby girl at home yesterday morning… it’s a good thing that we planned to have her at home with a midwife, because it took 2 hours from the first contraction to the baby being born.. I would never have made it to the hospital on time… and to make things worse, she is 9lbs 14oz, so she got stucked and things could have turned nasty if we would not have been in good hands… That was quite an adventure!

Congratulations on your new blessing! So glad it went well for you and your new little daughter. A 2 hour labor with time for a nearly 10 lb. baby to get stuck does sound like an adventure, and I’ll bet you’re glad to be on this side looking back at it.
Y’all go tell Yofed hi, and please share some ideas for her recent question about how a toddler can help with a brand new baby. I think she’ll be needing those ideas now!

That’s a lie!

Recently, Natalie was listening for the first time to George Sarris’s dramatic reading of the story of Joseph.
First she heard the pleas of Potipher’s wife, and wrinkled her nose in scorn. “She’s an immodest woman,” she muttered.
But when Potipher’s wife told her husband what had happened, Natalie was outraged.
“That’s a lie!” she yelled. “She wanted him to lie down with her!

WFMW: affiliate programs

Affiliate or referral programs can be a nice way to make money, but I also use them to get a discount on my own purchases.
If I’m planning on making a significant purchase, or if I’m buying something that I’m already pretty sure I’ll love, I usually check first for an affiliate program. With a little planning ahead, I can often receive 10-25% of my purchase back as a commission, then I can tell others about it and possibly earn back more than I spent!
As an added bonus, by asking ahead of time I can sometimes do a friend a favor by earning them a referral bonus that they may not have known about.
Examples:

• Christian Book Distributors (10%)
• Bookcloseouts.com (13-20%, depending on whether you take your commission in cash or merchandise)
• Amazon (only ~4%, but it adds up if you make a lot of purchases)
• Blogads (5%)
• Wild Blue internet satellite service ($75)
• Samaritan Ministries ($150!)
• Covenant Eyes internet accountability (not sure how much; I saw a link once and couldn’t find it again)

And (ahem) our very own Geneva Bible Pages also has a very generous affiliate program…just in case you’re interested…

That’s what Works For Me. See what Works for everyone else at Shannon’s blog, and then go vote for her in the 2006 Weblog Awards. Every day, remember?