Tuesday's Tip

I love Woman's World Magazine!  I read the thing cover to cover (although not necessarily front to back) every week.  Sometimes I do start at the front, but usually I do the puzzle and sudoku and then flip back and forth according to what strikes my fancy at the time.

At $1.79, it is not only inexpensive entertainment, it also offers a wealth of information!

For instance, on page 12 of the July 30, 2012, issue, there is an article entitled "Need more cash: Try this!"  Well, I don't know about you, but a little extra cash is ALWAYS welcome at my house, so I looked more thoroughly at the ideas.

The first one showed an art student who sold postcard-sized paintings of pets for $5 at Fiverr.com.  People post products or services they can offer to others at the price of $5.00.  I signed up yesterday (it's free) and posted a "gig" about a guaranteed number of relevant comments on blog posts and blabbing to Facebook and Twitter.  Check it out here and tell me what you think?  I came up with this idea because I do a lot of blog hops and sometimes the hoppers' comments leave you wondering if they actually read your post.  Luckily, THE MAJORITY DO!

Anyway, it was an idea to get a gig posted.  If you read yesterday's post, I am trying to post 5 gigs this week at Fiverr.  A lot of my gigs will be craft-related, but I need to make up some samples of those first so I can post pictures.

I also like WW's at-home remedies and have used several of them to make potions and lotions to use and to give as gifts.  (Hubby can testify that the chocolate-sugar body scrub and rose milk foot bath last Valentine's Day were WONDERFUL! *lol*)

Just so you know, I did not receive compensation for this post and my opinions are my own ... I just really love the Woman's World Magazine!

Do you have a favorite source of entertainment and/or inspiration?  Care to share?

The Week Ahead

Some days I don't feel like I've accomplished very much.  And that bothers me.  I know every day doesn't have to be a "10", but when there seem to be more "below average" days than not...it's time for a change, right?  One thing I am doing differently now is posting on Mondays a list of several things I hope to accomplish during the week.  Then on Fridays I will post an update of how I did.  So here goes:

1.  I will post each day to my blogs: (this one and A Daughter in the Kingdom), post them to my Facebook and Twitter.

2.  I will conquer Mt. Laundry.

3.  I will create 5 Fiverr gigs, and post them to this blog, my Facebook and Twitter.  (Here is my first one. Check it out! :O) )

4.  I will create a friendship bracelet.

5.  I will organize my crafting supplies.

This list is by no means exhaustive, nor will it be all that I do.  I'm just looking to be able to cross a few things off my "to do" list.

Sacred Six

I want to post daily in my blogs.  I rarely do.  In fact, this is the first time in months that I have sat down to write.  For the last several weeks, I have stared at my list of weekly topics for this blog, hoping for motivation and inspiration, but it hasn't come until now.  My last little "if not now, when" kick-in-the-pants came from this blog post by Annie Seaton, a fabulous writer who posted her link on SheWrites.

While I was thinking about the definition of "sacred" and wondering what other people considered sacred, a memory came to me of an experience I had as a child.  I hadn't thought about this particular incident in years.  I was walking home from a friend's house one year in mid-December.  The streets were snow-packed and light flurries were falling.  The beauty of one a neighbor's pine trees, decorated with the old-style large outdoor colored bulbs and dusted with snow struck me.  I stopped, sang "O Tannenbaum" ("Oh Christmas Tree"), smiled and went home.  Sacred can be simple.

Another sacred moment in my life came when a nurse pushed my oldest child's bassinet into my hospital room and closed the door so we could have some bonding time.  He had needed a little oxygen and I was not allowed out of bed for the first 24 hours, so this was the first time I had really "seen" him.  I peered over the edge of the bassinet and wondered, "OK, NOW WHAT?"

My second child brought into my world with him a double sacred moment.  My father had passed away in 1979, almost 20 years before I started having children and I had thought how sad it was that he never got to see his grandchildren.  In the delivery room, though, I got the strongest feeling that he knew them and that he and his father (my "Pappap") were there.  Secondly, after the baby had been cleaned and swaddled, a nurse put him ... in ... my ... arms.  Big deal, you might thing.  Well, to me it was; he was the only one of my three children I got to hold immediately after they were born.

Frankly, four years later, we thought we were done with kids.  But apparently kids were not done with us, as a little girl soon came a-callin'.  The ob/gyn said she was coming early, they just didn't know how early.  At 31 weeks, I was given two shots of steroids, to help the baby's lungs develop.  This was a good thing, because at 32 weeks, DD (dear daughter) made her debut, weighing 3 lbs .4 oz and measuring 13.5" long.  I asked 2 gentlemen from my church to give her a blessing, which they did.  The doctors had told us to expect her to be in the NICU until her original due date.  After the blessing, she was able to go home at 22 days of age.  Although she did not yet weigh 4 lbs, the doctors said that she was "just too healthy, and they needed the space".

While the mountains are my home, I always get a feeling of beginning to grasp the eternal or the infinite when I am at the ocean.  Eyes scan the horizon and see the first (or last) few rays of light, ears hear the crash of the waves and calls of birds, the salty tang of sea air affect both smell and taste and breezes and water caress our extremeties.  For a few seconds we are taken out of the everyday and connect with the great unknown.

For my last sacred moment today, I have to give a shout out to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the Patriot Guard Riders (PGR).  Members of both these fine organization recently stood/rode in honor of my husband's late great-uncle at his funeral service and burial.  My husband went to the services (I was unable to attend) and showed me a video he took of the arrival at the cemetery.  I saw the riders of the PGR first...and there were quite a number of them, and until the sound of motorcycles drowned out the bagpiper, "Amazing Grace" could be heard.  This confluence of factors brought tears to my eyes as I watched the video.  Members of more than one generation, some in dress uniforms, some in biker leathers, paid tribute to a brother who had passed away.  Many came from miles away and did not necessarily know the man personally.  Some bonds are sacred; neither time, nor distance, nor even death can sever them.

I challenge you to seek and find the sacred in your own life.  If you would care to leave a comment (with or without the story of such an experience), I would be honored.  And if you blog, please leave me a link so I can come visit you too!

NaBloPoMo - Child's Play

Using the above button will bring you to many wonderful posts by bloggers following NaBloPoMo's May 2012 theme of "Play".  Today's prompt is:

Who did you play with as a child?

I had a great small-town childhood in Cumberland, MD.  Everybody knew about half the rest of the town.  I can't think of a single kid in the neighborhood with whom I did not play as a child.

Our next-door neighbors to the right (looking out our front door) had two boys, one older and one younger than me.  The older boy was into GI Joe...I guess you would call them "action figures" today.  His mother came up with the idea for him to get money to buy more outfits and gear by forming a GI Joe club amongst the neighborhood kids and having them pay her son dues.  Yeah.

The next-door neighbor on the other side had three boys.  One was about my age and he and I got teased a lot about being "boyfriend and girlfriend" ... when we were FIVE YEARS OLD!  Trouble was, his family was Catholic and we were of a Protestant denomination.  And at that time (early to mid 60's) and in that place...that was one barrier that did not get crossed very often.  I got one of the biggest shocks of my young life when we walked up a ramp to the clubhouse of a private swimming pool and there was a sign "No Catholics Allowed".  Even then, I knew there was something 'not quite right' (my words) about that.

Of course, the neighborhood was not all boys.  There was a family with three girls, the youngest being my age.  We would play tag in their back yard, skip rope with other friends, and chase 'lightning bugs' on summer evenings.  There was a divorced (?) woman from Germany with one son and one daughter.  We did quite a bit with them, as my mother was born in Switzerland and they could speak German together.

Wow.  I haven't thought of some of these people in A.G.E.S.  We moved from Maryland to Utah shortly after my 10th birthday and I only saw some of them once more, on a vacation (for me) and business trip (for my Dad) the next summer.  I kept in touch with a couple of the girls for several years by mail (what they called 'snail mail' in my day), but even that stopped by the time high school rolled around.  How sad.

Blog Dare - Mama Bear on the Prowl

So many good prompts and groups and hops to follow this month, the first of which is the Blog Dare group prompt on the Bloggy Moms site.  Tiffany Noth, top banana at Bloggy Moms is doing 366 days of prompts for the group this year, and that is ONE TALL ORDER.  So her prompt for May 1st, 2012 is:

That is when I turned into Mama Bear on the prowl.

Well....I had an experience a week or two ago that ... just made those little MamaBear hairs on the back of my neck stand up.  I had recently volunteered to pick up an older woman who lives near me for church on Sundays.  She is in a wheelchair and next time we will try the Ford Escort, because getting her in and out of the GMC Suburban is just not happening.   I stopped by her senior apartment the day before Sunday a week ago and her nephew and his fiancee had moved out, while her own fiance had moved in, and he would be going to church as well.  They are both in their 60's or 70's I would say.


I mentioned that it was lucky only my daughter was going with us as if my boys were going as well, there would not be enough room for the four of us and the two of them in the Escort (it only has two doors).  The man then said, "Well, one of your kids could sit on my lap."  Ok, I'll put myself out quite a bit to help the less fortunate, but that is where I draw the line...letting one of my children sit on the lap of a man I've only met twice?  I think NOT.  It might have been a perfectly innocent comment, I don't know...I just felt really uncomfortable with it.


What do y'all think?

Who Would I Bring?

Gads it's been a long time since I did one of these.  But I'm trying to change. :O)

The Blog Dare (on Bloggy Moms) group has a prompt for each day and the prompt for Wednesday, 18 April, 2012 is:

"Who would you love to bring to Bloggy Conference?"

My daughter and I went to a friend's house yesterday.  I went to learn how to make a "pillowcase dress", and my girl went to play in their new sandbox with six of her dinosaur toys and our friend's children.  Carrie (the friend) is also a homeschooling mom.  A mutual friend came along, also to make a dress and brought her two kids.  She also brought a pizza fundraiser kit she had purchased, so there was quite a bit of activity.

The fabric I used had pictures of the different states on it, along with each state's state bird and state flower, which I had purchased on my family's trip to Texas last year in May.  One of these days I'll get around to posting a picture of it...but don't hold your breath because it might be a while.

Anyway, at one point, Carrie brought out letters she had written to her daughter (who is now something over a year old) from the beginning of the pregnancy.  There was at least a REAM of paper in her hands.  I was so thoroughly impressed.  I had started something like that for my oldest child (now 15), but lost track of it through the years...very sad.

That woman has some stories in her that need to come out, and that's why I think she would be a good addition to the Bloggy Conference!

Leave a link below so I can see who YOU would bring, ok? :O)

Let's Hear it for my Boy

This post is to link up with the M.O.B. Society's "Let's Here it for the Boys" series.

Today I will brag on my oldest child, Brian. I almost said "oldest boy", but at 15 years of age, he is more of a young man.

As my twenties came and went and there was no man in my life, my dream of children seemed to be fading. I told myself that if there was no one on the horizon by the time I was 35, I would investigate artificial insemination. (Sorry if that's TMI.) So, imagine my happiness when I looked at the little stick at 34 years and dwindling months that we were expecting!

The first thing my husband did was to call his mother. When she answered the phone, he greeted her, "Hi, Grandma!" She 'fell out' on the other end of the phone, 1900 miles away. I could hear her.

I remember when I first saw my son in person, the day after he was born and they wheeled his little bassinet into my hospital room. Here was this little baby, for whom I had waited some 35 years, and for whom I had spent the previous 9 months in intense preparation. I approached cautiously, peered over the side of the bassinet and thought to myself, "What do I do now?"

He has always been "advanced". At seven months of age, he crawled across the phone on the floor. We hung the phone up and several moments later, the phone rang. My husband answered and it was the 911 Emergency Services, calling to see if everything was ok! "We heard an infant..." Brian had somehow not only knocked the phone off the hook, but managed to dial 9-1-1 in the process!

At some point within the next 6 months or so, after he was standing, but before he had a firm grasp on walking, Brian batted at a computer keyboard on a shelf above his line of sight. Danged if he didn't DELETE WINDOWS from the computer! (Luckily hubs is a computer whiz, so no major damage was done.)

Fast forward 6 years, to the birth of his little sister, who was born 2 months early, weighing a smidge over 3 pounds. At the time, if Brian was still for 5 minutes at a time, it was cause for celebration in our household. After seeing us hold his sister, Brian also wanted to hold her. DH came up with the idea to prop him up with pillows on one of the couches in NICU and lay little sis in his arms. He was absolutely still, save for gently stroking her head and cooing at her like a pro.

Through the years, he's had the usual exasperation with his younger siblings' actions at times, but Brian is intensely loyal to his brother and sister.

And, as a bonus, at 15 years old, he will still hug his Mom in public!