Saturday....Success!

It is our last summer Saturday and it is chock full of fun, but I am going to take a few minutes to share this week’s successes with you.

1. Cute as can be Number Banners for my photographer friend. She did some Back to School shoots this week.
2. Did the filing! This was a huge undertaking. I thought I had filed recently, but alas its was all of the filing for the last 8 months.  Hubby and I also purged all the old filing from the cabinet that we no longer needed! It was the last thing on my summer’s end to do list, which leads to number 3…
3. Finished the Summer’s End To- Do list!
4. Sorted through Grace’s little toys – you know all the teeny tiny junky toys…I thought I had found a smaller container that would lead to some toy donating, but alas it held it all! We did move a few things to the jewelry box and found some missing pieces of other toys.
5. Followed the house cleaning schedule – mostly – but the house is clean for two weeks in a row!
6. Posted to the blog every day. Wasn’t quite so good about posting to ETSY, but did some work in the shop.
7. Number 7 is huge for me…Two weeks in a row made some time to get together with grown up friends for grown up time. Thank you to Janine over at the Whimsical Peanut and Ruth at Just the Girls, Real Beauty Project!
8. Read the first ten pages of my accounting homework…this a small piece of this week’s homework, but it is a huge step forward.
9. Made a super fun little boy a super fun reversible cape for his birthday! Check out the pattern here…My applique technique could use some work, but the finished product will be enjoyed, I hope, despite my lack of skill!

I think that is it for this week…some big, some small, but all successes none the less!

What were your successes this week? I would love to hear about them….

Free Advice Friday

So ladies, what is weighing on your hearts and minds today?

This morning I went to get Grace up at about 7:20 and she rather cheerily said, “Mommy, is it my first day of school?”  “No,” I said, “Not until Monday!” “Then I am going back to sleep!”

All this from the little girl who has been bright eyed and bushy tailed by quarter after six all summer!

With the impending start of school, I know Grace will be fine, I know my husband will be fine (he has been itching to be back since, oh, the last day of his internship!), but me I am not so sure about.

 My sweet baby boy will enjoy the quite of the house with everyone else occupied…and he is liable to get some extra mom time when I give up and quit trying to get it all done.

I logged into Blackboard to see if my course is posted. Indeed, it was. I have never been so scared by a syllabus! I am only taking one class these eight weeks, but between the text book – whose pages look like the internet on crack- and the syllabus with two 56 page problem sets a week I can already feel myself checking out.

That is NOT a good place to start, now is it?

We have finished the whole summer’s end To Do List, which is a good feeling, but I still have many projects on my plate and school LOOMING on the horizon. I find myself at a loss. I can’t seem to pin down where to start or what to do.  There is so much to tackle and a feeling that I will never accomplish it all…or even enough of it…

Where do you start? How do you overcome those feeling? Or avoid them in the first place?

Ladies, please do tell!

There is a great giveaway going on over at Naptime Diaries that includes some goodies from the TIAMO shop. Including a hair tutu of choice from the list of Hair Tutus of the month, and a set of Glad Text cards similar to those found here. I hope you will go enter for a chance to win!

Thursday…Can you believe that it is Thursday already?

Our two week summer reprieve is quickly coming to an end. It really was more like a crazy blend of mad dash to get life back in order and a lazy laid back family decompress.  The kids have really blossomed under their daddy’s influence. 

But today is the end…We have Grace’s pre-school open house and just like that a switch is flipped and the semester begins. Back to School picnics, back to school events, prepping assignments and books, checking calendars, and this year the addition of Grace going to school and on-line classes for me, as well as the commitment to make TIAMO a go and my husband will be working part-time not at school.

As much as that sounds like a heavy sigh, bordering on a complaint…this year it feels like a challenge, a challenge I might be able to live up to.

Regardless it is full of blessings! Like fellowship that is treasured respite from the hustle and bustle. Like a home that is sacred space for our family.

The greatest blessing though is my husband (as much as we might drive each other crazy, as much as I know there is HUGE post-law school adjustment a head of us!).  As he starts his third and final year of law school there is so much happy, fulfilling future in front of him.

He has always been a hard worker, though he sometimes does his best not to look like it. He is thriving on the rigorous law school schedule.  If it is possible, He is more excited about the start of classes now than he was two years ago, and not just because it is the final first day. He loves law, he loves analyzing, he loves “putting bad guys in jail”, and he loves seeing God’s law in our law, and is going to love being a lawyer.

There isn't any greater blessing to a wife than a happy husband. The kids thrive off of that happiness. It makes home life agreeable.

Sometimes it is hard to compete with law school and all that comes with it, but I know he is happy and I know some day (very soon) he will be done and the pace and focus of our lives will change. I am trying not to wish it away, trying to let him have room to savor his successes and prepare for the next challenge (finding a big lawyer job to pay all these big law school bills!).

I couldn’t be prouder…So let the games begin!

Wrong Word Wednesday

On Thursday I went to school, it was shut down, it was closed down, so I broke through it,

I went home on Tuesday to a big pond
On Monday I broke my knee                                                              Grace, 4

It is wrong word Wednesday and I have no song...oh in my mind there is a running list, but I cannot thing of one. Maybe it is because someone this morning filled my head with “My Name is Luka”, but either way, I have no song of my own.

But I do have a blog post!

My little Grace is loves music – she loves singing, dancing, listening to music, rhyming.  She sings everything. She is learning new songs every day, but sometimes she gets them not quite right. For example, this week she has been singing about “The B- I – Lee – L – Lee” (the B-I-B-L-E) and she loves to sing about marching in the “calorie” (the cavalry).

She loves to make up her own songs, too. The lyrics above are from this morning. And as nonsense as they sounded to me, she repeated them to me several times. It makes me wonder what the nonsense in my heart sounds like to God.

I love to listen to her sing. She doesn’t hold back, she doesn’t know to worry about how she sounds, she just sings with her WHOLE heart.

Whatever the words are... I want to sing with my whole heart...

Tuesday Treasures - Numbers Found

I had this big plan about this Tuesday's Treasures and then....(isn't that how the best stories start?)

We went for a walk in the neighborhood Sunday morning. Neither of the kids have been feeling very well and the weather was nice. So instead of infecting every kid at church with whatever it was they were fighting, we got some fresh air and family time.

We were headed back towards the house when I noticed these cool numbers in the road. At first, I thought someone might have dropped a set of magnetic numbers for a sign,  but the kids were fussy at this point and we were moving quickly. I wasn't going to take the time to explore.

I said sort of off-handedly to my husband," Those numbers were really cool!" He wanted to know what numbers, where, all the good details...and then he insisted I go back and look at them closer...(Isn't he a good husband?) And what I thought was maybe a handful of numbers was hundreds - and not just numbers, either!

There were two sets of words - "To Riser" and "Pedestal". "To Riser" isn't the coolest...but I can think of at least a dozen different ways to use "Pedestal" on a card!

I am pretty sure these number tags are remnants of the construction going on in the neighborhood, maybe from the pre-fab trusses and rafters they are using. No matter where they are from they are interesting and inspiring.

When my husband insisted that I pick them up and bring them home (not all of the hundreds, but some!) I knew it was a Tuesday Treasures find, and that an Etsy Treasury was a must, too!

Let me tell you, there are A LOT of numbers on Etsy. I tried to find ones that would stretch my creativity. Sometimes the best finds aren't the ones that meet an existing need, but that inspire and send your creative process down an unexpected path.

So today's treasure is numbers, specifically numbers found.

Think of those posters where they show the numbers and letters in butterfly wings.
Or the collages that "find" letters and numbers in every day objects.

My find wasn't quite like that, but it goes to show you just never know what you are going to come across on a walk....even in your own neighborhood!

Made of Monday: Rules

About a week ago, I overheard my mom on the phone saying, “No, Danielle’s not like that, everything for her is black and white. There isn’t much gray. She has always been like that.”It is pretty true.  I am a rule follower. I can’t help it. I like structure, I like order and I like to know what to expect. New things scare me. I like to know exactly what is going to happen.

We were at the neighborhood pool yesterday when a younger couple walked up, the guy looked around and then hopped up at the gate to reach over and hit the exit button. He didn’t have a pass. It made me bananas!!!! I could not relax and enjoy my time with my family because he had broken the rule – more than that he was stealing from me, from my family. This is a little crazy, right? But is how it felt. He was holding himself to be above the rules that the rest of us where following. He was telling us that we should pay his way, or that he was unwilling to even try to pay his own way.

Oh, I believe in sharing, and being sympathetic and empathetic, but I also believe that rules are helpful and good. Yes, the government has gotten a little carried away with this, but in general rules are good. They help us know which side of the road to drive on. They help us know what is ours and what belongs to someone else.  They help us get through the day. And I like rules.

The good rules in life usually boil down to one of say ten or so basic rules (wink, wink). And even those boil down into what I think are three simpler rules – honor God, honor yourself and honor your fellow man.
 
When someone breaks a rule their actions say to me that they don’t care about anything or anyone. It is selfish. It shows weakness and selfishness. When I meet rebellious types, the kind who break rules just to break rules, I wonder if they expect others to follow the rules. The young guy at the pool, for example, what if I just came to his house and let myself in to let the kids run wild. I don’t think he would like us just barging in.  So, I guess the freedom to break the rules is only reserved to him?

In The Well-Trained Mind, one of the authors talks about how a child – given a strong vocabulary, social skills and practice in speaking and writing – will never have to resort to getting her tongue pierced to make a statement about who she is. Rule breaking to me is comparable to tongue piercing in this case. Breaking rules to get a rise out of others is hardly a good sport or good use of energy or resources – and it has long term consequences.

Sometimes, there are bad rules, but there are good rules that give us a system to fix them. I can admire those who disagree with rules and then take civil, thoughtful steps to redress those issues.

Except for speed limits...55 is just a suggestion, right?