as the dust settles.....

sheweeeeee! What a week.


we partied,...and partied....and partied!

we glued and stamped and signed and stitched!

we snuggled and laughed and ate and ate and ate!


And here come the first of December and the beginning of Advent.

Let the decorating begin!

by the by....seems everywhere I go folks are saying Advent is a time to "clean your spiritual house to get ready for the Lord".....

this does not sit well with me!

If the Lord's coming to my house....yes, I'll clean it up....but don't you think a few streamers, some garland, flashing lights, balloons, tinsel and a great big WELCOME sign are in order too??

I mean REALLY!!

a clean house is for everyday guests...and should not be forgotten....but let's break out the fine china and set a gorgeous table while we're at it!

So, once again, as a means of spiritual decoration, I am going to spend this month looking for examples of Acts of Generosity and I invite you to join me!

If you commit or witness an Act of Generosity please post it on your blog...then leave me a comment and I'll link to your post. I'll post them as often as I see them. How beautiful would it be to find an Act of Generosity EVERY day till Christmas?

So, who's with me? Let the decorating begin!!

the parrot

A young man named John received a parrot as a gift. The parrot had a bad attitude and an even worse vocabulary.

Every word out of the bird's mouth was rude, obnoxious and laced with profanity. John tried and tried to change the bird's attitude by consistently saying only polite words, playing soft music and anything else he could think of to 'clean up' the bird's vocabulary.

Finally, John was fed up and he yelled at the parrot. The parrot yelled back. John shook the parrot and the parrot got angrier and even more rude.

John, in desperation, threw up his hand, grabbed the bird and put him in the freezer. For a few minutes the parrot squawked and kicked and screamed. Then suddenly there was total quiet. Not a peep was heard for over a minute.

Fearing that he'd hurt the parrot, John quickly opened the door to the freezer. The parrot calmly stepped out onto John's outstretched arms and said "I believe I may have offended you with my rude language and actions. I'm sincerely remorseful for my inappropriate transgressions and I fully intend to do everything I can to correct my rude and unforgivable behavior."

John was stunned at the change in the bird's attitude. As he was about to ask the
parrot what had made such a dramatic change in his behavior, the bird spoke-up, very softly, "May I ask what the turkey did?"

Fairfarren Friends

Today is, as he has said about 1,000 times so far this morning...

Sonshine's "Thanksgiving Birthday Feast" !!!

We're busy with party preparations....for the 3 parties we have this weekend (today, Sunday, and Mon at school) for the SEVEN year old!

We are also very busy making our Christmas gifts for this year as we're way behind.

Therefore I won't be online for a few days.

Y'all all have a blessed and wonderful Thanksgiving weekend and please say a prayer for all the families who will have an empty chair at their table this year. Holidays are hard when you're missing someone!

Love you all.
See you next week.

just what I needed to hear!

A friend put this quote up on facebook. And it happens to be just perfect for me today!

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

How about you? Do you fret over things after they're said and done??

C. Diff potty trained my son!!

Honestly! it did!

Clostridium difficile (Greek kloster (κλωστήρ), spindle, and Latin difficile,[1] difficult), also known as "CDF/cdf", or "C. diff", is a species of Gram-positive bacteria of the genus Clostridium that causes diarrhea and other intestinal disease when competing bacteria are wiped out by antibiotics. Wikipedia

Not that I'm endorsing exposing your kids to C Diff out of potty training frustrations or anything!!

However, Gatorboy, ~~~Mr I'm 5 1/2 and in Kindergarten and STILL couldn't care less about underwear~~~ discovered that bending over and watching green stinky watery poop go shooting out his butt at warp speed and splashing in the toilet bowl was FUN.

I mean it's FUN OF THE HIGHEST DEGREE!!!!

Therefore he wanted to go poop in the potty....every time. For fear of missing a chance at watching the show he could create!

Now that the antibiotics have kicked in I think he's a little disappointed .....those ploply turds just aren't as exciting. After all, just like in CSI, it's all about the splatter pattern you know!



~~Now that he's caught it from Gatorboy, I don't think Subvet is quite as excited to have C Diff....but then again...he was already potty trained!!

Yeah!

I have FINALLY finished listening to Moby Dick by Herman Melville!!!

ugh.

The first 3/4 of this book dragged slower than molasses going up an iceburg!! The last 1/4 was pretty cool and almost exciting.

This brings my total of classics "read" via the audiobooks iPhone app to 8!!

The Canterbury Tales I found I was missing over half of what was going on, and so have bought the book and started READING it! oooooooo, very very fun! Mine is a copy of a recent translation to modern English and it's very easy to read. I must say, it is NOT G-rated!!

After I finish with Chaucer, my next adventure will be with Lewis Carroll. Having seen both the animated Alice in Wonderland and the Burton/Depp version numerous times, I can't wait to see what treasures are to be found in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Lookinglass.

Will you ever imagine The Mad Hatter as different from this?

How about you, read anything good lately?

Saturday!

Ahhh, Saturday. A day without work, a day of sleeping late, a day of peace.........

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!


Now, here's what REALLY happened today.

The kids and I got up at 6ish....our normal time.

Then the kids and hubby went horse back riding....

While they were gone I Zumba'd.........which led me straight to a hot bath to soak!
wow, do my thighs hurt! :-) looking forward to Monday when I'll be able to Zumba again.

After they came home and we ate lunch I took Miss Priss to get her hair cut. She H.A.T.E.S. getting her hair cut. Don't ask me why.

And since I'm a sucker (with a headache)....I grabbed one of the overpriced beanie baby things the kids' salon was selling and promised it to her if she behaved.

And other than a bit of yelling, she did behave....
So, here's her new haircut and new best pal, "Scooby Doodoodle"
Sorry it's the best pic I could get, today was a smile AFTER the flash day....



On our drive to and from the haircut I got to see some of our beautiful turning trees up against a huge bright blue sky and perfect 55-60 degree temps.

I never have understood people who move down here and say "I miss having four seasons"....
as though Texas doesn't have Fall.....

Sorry about the bad pics, I didn't have my camera with me and these were taken with the iphone.

And then tonight I was treated to a sight that always makes me smile......and hungry!
I do this too, sit with a pile of cookbooks and peruse recipes looking for something new to make.

Do any of y'all love to just sit and thumb through cookbooks?

My goals for next week are to exercise 3 times, get headway made on the Christmas gifts, finish Moby Dick. What are your plans for the week?

yes ma'am

Zumba...

Hey! I found the video of my cousin, the Zumba instructor, being interviewed by her local news.

Check it out!



Way to go Jess, you're a one woman party!!

in the mail today...

Hubby walks in from the mailbox and says...

Here's the yin and yang of your life



I call this a good mail day!!

YeeHaw!

thoughts from work

Will my beeper feel rejected if I abandon it? Who will be responsible for it's therapy? me or work?


Wonder how much I could sell the beeper for on ebay.....of course the buyer takes over responsibility of answering all the call-lights!


If a beeper goes off in an empty breakroom....does it make a sound?

Does a beeper that doesn't get assigned due to lack of nurses carry a sign that reads "will beep for batteries"?? (yea, read that aloud 5 times fast!)


Do beepers float?


Beeper unions need to hold a strike! After all, if the nurses that carry them get a 30 minute break for lunch then the beeper should be able to STOP BEEPING for 30 minutes too!!!


which side of the beeper is it's belly? If you don't know then how can you tell when it's gone belly-up?

I think my beeper is mysteriously linked to the microwave! Every time my food is 10 seconds from being the PERFECT temperature my beeper goes off!

"What's in a ringtone? That which we call a beeper By any other name would sound as alarming." (good thing Shakespear's dead)

AHA! the beeper floats....the batteries sink..... uh, oops.

BEEP BEEP!!!

a look ahead

Well, I found out that I didn't get the NICU job I'd interviewed for.

So now I'm just waiting for the private duty job to come through. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

Now that Halloween is done it's on to Christmas! Which means I need to really get in gear and get some gifts made! Since I got put oncall tonight I've spent the last several hours getting all the pieces ready for the kids to assemble our ornaments this weekend.

For those of you who don't know, I usually start making our gifts in August, and my deadline is to have them all done by Thanksgiving.

Well, I didn't start till late Sept, (then had to stop and make these costumes) and it is now only THREE WEEKS till Thanksgiving!!!!
yikes!


and has anyone else experienced their hits going up but comments down this week??? it feels so weird!!

my only goal this week is the Christmas gifts, well that and a new job.....so wish me luck!

what's your goal for the week??

Happy Halloween!!

For the record. I don't care for Halloween much. You can read why and how we make it more fun here.

That said and explained, we looked quite cute Sunday night!



First up our two cats.

To make the cats I bought a grey hoodie and pants and a black hoodie and pants. All of these can be worn for the rest of the winter.

To the grey sweats and hoodie I loosely hand sewed felt "stripes". I had an old grey sweatshirt I'd cut a sleeve off of years ago, and used the other sleeve to make the tail and ears. The ears are 2 tall triangles of grey sweatshirt (and black felt) sewn together, with a triangle of pink sateen from my grandmother's stuff in the front then hand sewn on the hood. The tails are stuffed with a left over bag of stuffing I had lying around.

To the black hoodie I added a white tummy, made out of scraps from a pair of my grandmother's double knit pants. (yes, the woman [and I] saved everything!). The tail is made from black felt that I had left over from previous years' costumes. with more white knit at the tip. As the night wore on the knit frayed quite a bit making it look very "furry"

each tail had a felt strip sewn almost to the end that they could hang on their wrist to keep from tripping over it.

I added some of my all white socks over their hands and shoes to complete the outfit. I would've painted whiskers but these two won't have their faces painted.

Next we have our "Spooooky tree!" which, after the first two little kids were too scared to come and get candy from him (we had to send Mr Cat down the driveway to give them some!) He changed his name to "The SCARY tree!" ;-)

must've been pretty scary, none of the little ones would take candy from this guy!
the older kids loved him though!

To make his costume I bought him a pair of brown pants and a brown hoodie that will again be worn throughout the winter. I then bought a men's large brown tshirt ($5) and a package of men's brown dress socks. I turned a large Goldfish box inside out, cut it jaggedly at the top, and colored it with markers and crayons. If you ever want cardboard to look like wood: take a brown crayon and peel all the paper off of it, lay it flat and color across the cardboard. The texture in the cardboard will show the crayon and give it a LOT of texture! Add some brown marker here and there for a variegated look, then with a black sharpie draw your knots and texture lines. HINT! after you've drawn with the sharpie, take your crayon and color hard OVER the sharpie. It will blur the edges and make the whole thing look a bit more woody.

Then I took my sharpie and drew knots and texture lines on the t-shirt.

brown socks (that later were given to Dad) over the hands and shoes, painted face, and voila! a scary tree!

The brown hoodie has a big design on it that's covered by the tshirt, and the black one is a girl's hoodie with a sparkly heart design on the front that's covered by the white tummy, the inside of the hood is also a bright pink and purple striped that I covered with a piece of black cloth. So don't be afraid if you can't find exactly what you're looking for in making costumes. Many times things will work anyway, and they don't have to know what section of the store you found it!!

Because I mostly used either things that could be worn again, or things I already had lying around the house, the total I spent on this year's 3 Halloween costumes is the $5 for the brown tshirt!! And the sewing I did was MINIMAL.

here we are.....waiting for the kids to come! once it got dark we went and sat on the porch.
it was so much fun for the boys and I, Sugars decided she wasn't interested in the kids and spent the evening indoors with Dad.

And we have 3 bags of our favorite candy left over, so fear not, we're not deprived by not going house to house!!

How was your Halloween??

don't know if the preceeding post will show up on your readers as it's a repost....but please take a minute and go read it.

Perspective.

The following is an article I first wrote for my church newsletter for the December 2006 issue.


Over the last month I've been working my way through The Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes, I've finished Vol. I and I can now tell you the plot to every Sherlock Holmes story ever written. Here you go... Someone comes to good old 221-B Baker Street with a set of events/facts. These all add up to person A being guilty of something, ol’ Sherl sees the facts from some off the wall viewpoint and puts them together to show that in actuality person B is really the guilty party. He then employs various ways of proving himself right.



I'm not a big fan of Halloween, it's seemed to me that it just encourages greed and gluttony...things we try to teach our kids to avoid. However, wanting to allow my 3 year old some fun and not be known as "that mother" -- you know, the mean one who doesn't allow anything "unwholesome" (read enjoyable) in the house -- I tried to find some way to celebrate this non-holiday with a good message. So, instead of going out and collecting a bunch of candy (no I wouldn't let him eat it anyway) we stayed on our front porch and gave candy away. He had a blast!! He loved seeing all the costumes and got a big kick out of putting candy in the various containers....or throwing it at the folks when too excited. Since we had approx 100 folks come through our neighborhood in the 2 hours we were out there he saw many fun costumes and had many folks exclaim over him. He actually looked a LOT happier than the kids (and adults) that were busy filling up their pillowcases. As we sat there refilling our bowl to be sure we didn't run out of candy ("Need more candy for kids mom!!") It went through my head that it truly is better to give than to receive. Sonshine learned all about giving and I enjoyed a very nice greed and gluttony free Halloween.



OK, we've all heard the glass half full or half empty bit before. But, truly, something as simple as a change in the perspective you're viewing a set of facts/events from could change the way the whole picture looks. My Grandma used to say that we decide each morning if we're going to be happy that day. Also known as "You can get glad in the same shoes you got mad in." As we spend the end of this year reviewing the events that have passed, let's try to look at them from a different perspective. Maybe it isn't so much the event itself that is bothersome as much as how we are viewing it.

I challenge each of us to start the new year off deciding to be happy with whatever comes our way. And keep looking for just how to make lemonade out of that great big lemon you've been handed.



Love you

Sarah



"When someone gives you free fertilizer for your garden, you don't complain about the smell." Earlene Fowler