What are your Blogger categories?

I knew the day would come: Blogger finally forced me to switch to the New and Improved Blogger a few days back, so now I have a question.
What are your Blogger categories? I don’t want mine to be too specific, lest readers (and I) be forced to scroll through a list of 117 categories, wondering exactly how to describe or find a particular post.
But I also don’t want them to be excessively general, leaving myself and others to scroll through 150 posts under a single category.
How did you divide your posts and decide on categories? What do you think is an ideal number of categories? Do you wish you had done anything differently?
Re-inventing the wheel while sifting through over 700 old posts doesn’t sound like much fun. I’d much rather have a look at your wheels first.

Are you a fun mom?

I am sometimes a moody, cranky mom. These are the times when a child will cautiously bring me a big glass of water and pour out a small heap of chocolate chips onto the table next to me. Then she might back away silently with a saucy glint in her eye. I often wonder if they draw straws before they do this.
But I love it when they remind me that I’m a fun mom too.
I let them make whole batches of cookie dough to eat right from the bowl.
I let them drink an occasional homemade coffee froo-froo drink.
I taught them to make double-decker peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
I let them take off their seatbelts for the bumpy bridge near our house, and they laugh and squeal and compete to see who will bounce the highest. Extra points for anyone who hits her head on the roof of the van. BTW, if you ever come to our house, you should know that the best speed for the bridge is exactly 42 mph. Any slower and you don’t use the bumps to their full potential. If you go faster, your shock absorbers will take all the fun out of the ride. So 42 mph, OK? And remember to put your seatbelt back on when you get to the other side.
I pretend to be a blind, helpless driver on the quiet curvy gravel road near our house, following their directions to “go a little to the left. Now to the right! Not that much! Wait, more! Quick, Mom! Noooooooo…”
I have been known to take a detour to the creek on the way home, and let them all jump in fully dressed for 10 minutes.
I let them play on the trampoline. In the rain. Or use the hose to make their own rain. If this worries you, let me assure you that we do have an enclosure around it. If this still worries you, sorry.
Did I mention the cookie dough? mmmmm…cookie dough…

What fun and unexpected things do you do with your children or allow them to do?

Cinnamon pull-apart bread

edited to fix the link to Crystal’s rolls.

If you’re wondering what to do with the monstrous amount of dough that Crystal’s 30 Minute Rolls produces, here’s an idea.
We mixed up the dough and decided that half of the dough shaped into 2 round loaves was plenty for our dinner. With the remaining dough, we created our own recipe:

CINNAMON PULL-APART

1/2 recipe of Crystal’s 30 Minute Rolls
1 stick of butter, melted
1 1/2 cups sugar mixed with 2 Tbs. cinnamon
1 helpful 5yo
1 helpful 10yo

Lightly grease a couple of pans. We used a 9×13 and a pie pan.
Set up a production line:
Mom breaks off small chunks of dough and rolls them into something roughly spherical.
Have the 5yo dip them in melted butter.
The 10yo rolls them in cinnamon sugar and drops them into the pans.
Sprinkle leftover butter and cinnamon sugar on top.
Let rise 30 minutes, then bake ~25 minutes at 350 degrees.

Spiky post-partum hair: a scientific explanation

Obviously I’m not the only one with a crew cut at 7 months post-partum:
Mama K said,

JUST YESTERDAY I was looking in the mirror saying, “What in the WORLD is going on – what are all of those spiky hairs?!?!” I thought maybe I’d pulled a scrunchie too tight (in the front???) and ripped it out and broke off a bunch of hair…but have no memory of any such thing!

But Abbie is 9 months old! I have never noticed this before with any of my other kiddos…I will have to pay attention in the future, that’s for sure!

As for now, I feel a bit ridiculous. I mean, it’s BIZARRE. Like a really bad bangs-cut-job!!!

Well, thanks for shedding some light on that. If anyone has an explanation for the phenomenon, please do tell!

Here’s my understanding. Feel free to speak up and correct me if you’ve heard or read something different.
Normally, your ovaries produce the normal and necessary amounts of progesterone for your body.
Normally you would be losing 75-100 strands/day and the follicles would remain dormant for a while before a new strand grows. At any given time, most people have about 10% of their hair follicles in a dormant state.
During pregnancy, very little is normal in your body.
During pregnancy, the placenta takes over the production of progesterone and the levels skyrocket since this is primarily a “pregnancy” hormone. You are happy. Progesterone has that effect.
Your ovaries, sensing that they are no longer needed, go dormant.
For some reason, extra high levels of progesterone prevent normal hair loss. Your hair does *not* fall out at the rate of 75-100 strands/day, and your follicles do *not* go dormant. It all grows. Quickly. And keeps growing. Your hair is running at 100% instead of 90% and growing faster than ever.
You’re gorgeous.
Then you have the baby. The placenta is gone. Nobody is making progesterone because your ovaries are still sulking over having been snubbed for 9 months.
You have plenty of progesterone left over, so you can coast for a bit – 3 months, maybe more, maybe less. But finally, you run low.
You get moody. You get weepy. Your hair falls out. BTW, this would be a good time to find a tube of progesterone cream at the local health food store. It’s not cheap, but your husband will thank you. He might even use it on you when you’re sleeping.
I mentioned that your hair is falling out. But it’s not at the rate of 75-100 strands/day. Your body abruptly realizes that it forgot to shed for the last year, and it goes to work on catching up. You lose everything that you would have lost over the last year. You feel like you’re going bald. If this doesn’t stop soon, you will.
But wait – your ovaries look around and see how badly you need them. They quit sulking and step up to bat. They whip up some badly needed progesterone.
Hair loss stops, and your world looks brighter. Your husband’s world looks brighter too.
Hair growth starts. Lots of hair growth, all at once. All those resting follicles have received a kick in the pants, and you’ll have a nice crew cut going in a month or two.
C’est la vie.

Random happenings

Last night for dinner, we immensely enjoyed 3 racks of ribs from the boars shot by friends of our this week at Covenant Ranch. Pop over to Kaitlyn’s blog for a brief description of our first family trip to a hunting ranch.

5yo Becca finished her kindergarten math book today – hurrah!

My mom cut my hair for Locks of Love yesterday. 11″ gone and still comfortably below my shoulders. My hair feels thick and swing-y.
Speaking of hair, does anyone else (everyone else?) get a whole batch of new hair 6 months after the birth of each child? I know why it happens, but I can’t wait for my new-growth crew cut to get long enough to lie down with all the rest of my hair. All over my head I have spiky 1-inch hair coming in. I guess I’ll have naturally layered hair in a few more months.

Lydia found a few splashes of water on the floor around the sink yesterday, and without even being told she grabbed a cleaning towel to dry the floor. I was happy to see her do the job without prompting. So was 2yo Rachael, who was just coming to clean it up too. “Thank you, Lydia, for cleaning up my pee!”

True to my fallen nature, I have broken every one of my new habits for the year – except one. I have read my Bible every day before laying a finger upon the keyboard. I’m so thankful to be able to set that particular priority in order! Maybe it will help me with the others…

And we have a very nice review of our Geneva Bible Pages on Evangelical Outpost, so I’m busy with the Geneva website. There is now an FAQ page to answer everyone’s burning question, and we’re working on adding other features as well.

Win a free apron

I’m not an apron wearer, but I sure need to start and I would be if I had an apron this practical and adorable!
Check out Connie’s Smockity Frocks and tell me if you love the strawberries as much as I do.
It probably helps that hubby thought about buying flowers and brought me fresh strawberries instead last night. They taste better than flowers; have less fat and calories than chocolate. Am I blessed or what?

Sober thoughts today

Just a few sobering statistics to mull over today:

On September 11 of 2001, our country was thrown into turmoil on the day that over 6,500 citizens were killed in acts of terrorism. We mourned the senseless loss of so many lives and resolved as a nation to do whatever we could to keep it from happening again.
Regardless of how you feel about the measures taken by our civil government, the FAA and others, the loss of 6,500 lives that day was regarded as a tragedy by nearly every citizen of the globe.
Oh, wait.

Less than 3,000 of those deaths were almost universally mourned.
Thanks to the Roe v. Wade decision on this day 34 years ago, the other 3,500 were legal and voluntary – from the perspective of the murderers.
In 2001, there were an average of 3,570 abortions in our country each day.

To put a sharper point on the matter:
In the year of 2001 in New York City, there were 86,466 confirmed deaths due to abortion. This works out to an average of about 240 per day, 365 days a year. This means there were nearly 3,000 abortions in the first 11 days of September in New York City. – approximately the number that would die that day in the attack on the Twin Towers.

In ancient times, the children of Israel sacrificed their children to the gods of the land and reaped God’s judgment.
We scorn and mourn their foolish, wicked, primitive practices, but our nation sacrifices its young to the god of convenience. May God have mercy on us.

Save at CVS and WalGreens

My friend-of-a-real-life-friend Rachael (did you know that, Rachael?) has a great post on how to save beaucoups bucks at WalGreens and CVS. It takes a little work, but it looks well worth the effort!

E-sword

I’m adding this one to my sidebar – I’ve used E-sword for years and don’t know why I haven’t told you about it before!

E-sword is a free full featured Bible program that lets you download many additional free components, including:

• the Bible in an astounding number of versions and languages
  
• commentaries
• Bible dictionaries
• devotions
• add’l books, graphics, and study guides

One of my favorite features: Strong’s Concordance is keyed into the included King James download! If you’ve already heard enough you can just trust me download the software, or go the to the home page and check it out for yourself.

Yes, there are many wonderful Bibles online, but this one works without the delay of waiting for pages to load and still works on the days when your Internet doesn’t.

It even has the complete Geneva translation with the original spelling! Is that cool or what???

Greenhouse baby?!

Stephanie live-blogged several posts, then headed to the hospital in the wee hours of the morning. Inquiring minds want to know: have they met their new baby yet???
And who will be first to see a photo of the baby when they post it?