As we grow closer and closer to the celebration of the miracle of Christmas, we are looking for miracles in the world around us. We have the joy of lengthening days after the solstice, and the celebration of the miracle of Hannukah.

If you’ve told the story of the miracle of Hannukah and are looking for a new-to-you story, definitely check out The Flying Latke. The latke goes airborne and is classified as a UFO, which is a fun twist. I have a love of miracles, and there are several miracles in the book.

We are celebrating our own little miracles – friends and family are wanting to help right when help is needed. The dvd/vhs player that wouldn’t play dvds of the box was brought back to Target (hereby referred to as The Place of Bad Customer Service), and TPoBCS refused to exchange it for a working model without a receipt. When we got home with it, though, it played a dvd right away.

Tomorrow we are swapping a download of Firefox for some scotch tape. Bartering is great! I wonder if I can barter with a neighbor, fudge for shoveling…

We had an up and down weekend this weekend. It was cold when we ran out of oil, but we snuggled together and then it got really warm & toasty when the oil man came! Not having the van on Friday to go swimming & run errands was sad. But The snow was fun! Mommy burning the first 2 batches of fudge sucked Playing in the snow with the puppy was awesome! Church closed wasn’t good, we missed our friends. Getting the van on Sunday afternoon was good, but the weather and driving sucked. But hot cocoa with a snowball in it is yummy.

I attempted to do something “educational” and teach the girls a magic trick with a teabag to make sure they have a good memory at the end of today. Sadly, the video is really dark, we’ll have to remake it during daylight. But if you are patient and like fire (or screaming girls or barking dogs), check it out on youtube.

Little things make me happy…

Receiving picture Christmas cards of friends and family, and hearing from friends with whom we had lost touch.

Finding a cable for the printer … when the puppy chewed up the original…

The 25 days of free mp3s at Amazon. Our favorite so far is Elf’s Lament from the (really cheap!) BareNaked Ladies Christmas CD Barenaked For The Holidays. Our other favorite new Christmas CD is The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection. Yay for fun new music, though we still love John Denver & the Muppets A Christmas Together. We’ve got a great mix of music now!

Receiving boxes with presents in them. I’ve never been so excited to wrap things!

My friend dropped by 2 jars of Fluff so I could make Peanut Butter Fudge and Chocolate fudge. I decided to do the easy stuff first, and made a quick batch of brownies, which makes the house smell nummy!

My father and stepmother stopped by today, and took the girls out to spend a few dollars, and also pick up some meds for me. It’s great, and having a few minutes of quiet helped me make a few phone calls!

Tonight the girls were so grateful for our wonderful day. They loved it so much, i thought I’d share our recipe – perhaps someone else’s family will also benefit from our plan for joy.

Take 3 parts girls, 1 part puppy, and 1 part Mama. Add to a van and mix for 3 hours.

Blend in a few hours worth of time with great-grandmother and great-grandfather (plus a chili & cornbread lunch!) and a visit with a K-friend (6/7 weeks with K-friends). Beat with extra vigor intermittently (aka run with Ra up and down the yard).

Mix in a surprise ingredient for extra fun (a wonderful box of treats from JadenKale). Ignore the “Best By” date, Halloween treats are still tasty in December.

Add a pinch of a visit with another great-grandmother, then let rest in the van for an hour.

Receive a blessing on the recipe by meeting some friends for a visit to a church activity, complete with Christmas music and over 150 nativities!

Add one more surprise ingredient (a trip to the golden arches for dinner), then bake in the van for 3 more hours.

End result will be delicious and sleep-inducing.

twas a fun jaunt. I love little adventures and side trips, and I’m so glad we were able to do this one – we had the van, gas prices are lower, and I am feeling better.

My wonderful blogging friends have helped me so much this past year.  I feel so blessed, and wish many many blessings for all of you! May you have a day filled with friends, family, good food, and joy. May you also get great Black Friday Deals from the comfort of your own home.

We will be well fortified by our meal, and spiritually fortified by our guests at dessert. I will have a few recipes to post soon, too! This is our first Thanksgiving as a family of 4 rather than 5*, so I wanted to be special and still have our favorite foods.

We might have dietary restrictions with allergies and celiac disease, but we don’t let that stop us from eating well!

Dinner:

• Ginger Butternut Squash Soup
• Bread
• Stuffing
• Candied Yams
• Cranberry sauce
• Mashed Potatoes
• Roasted Brussels Sprouts
• Gravy
• oh, and Turkey!

Desserts:

• Apple Crisp
• Chocolate Chip Pecan Pie
• Pumpkin Bars
• Pumpkin Pie
• Peach Pie Cake Cobbler

I hope all of you have a wonderful feast!

Read the rest of this entry »

I have been so grateful to many, many friends in the time I’ve been mothering, and have both helped and been helped by those friends. I love opportunities to show support, because everyone needs a bit of help along the way!

There is a raffle happening now to support the family of a woman named Colleen, who passed away recently. Suzanne of And They Lived Happily Ever After wrote a bit about Colleen and the raffle. If you knit, know someone who knits, or have a baby in cloth diapers, you want to check it out – there’s some amazing stuff there!

My friend Suzanne donated this gorgeous set, which makes me yearn for a little baby to dote over! All the little wool sets!

The raffle runs Oct 28 – Nov 4, and is definitely worth a look. If you would be buying yarn or baby stuff anyway, it’s always lovely to support a person rather than a conglomerate.

My girls are amazingly creative. I am always astounded with what they come up with! Their ingenuity and imagination consistently surprises me – the have such amazing minds!

Our school work is revolving around the ancient people and the nomads and first cities. We’re also reading some Old Testament Bible stories to go along with it. They love it and are pretending to be hunter/gatherers, or making “stew” out of random foods they’ve found.

Meanwhile, MG is our entrepreneur, and so of course she has to invent something something new and different to sell. This time she is creating fake chocolate bars. They are cardboard fake chocolate wrapped in a white label and then they have the description and the price on them. Our friend who is teaching in Japan will probably get a few mailed to her in her care package. Cardboard is lighter than real candy!

A little more creativity from our wonderful friend JadenKale, who has a new design up for voting now at Threadless! Hot Night Out is a lot of fun, and it’s easy to vote: just create an account, click on “I’d buy this as a Tshirt”, and then click on the number 5. No need to buy anything, even. JadenKale has sent a couple care packages here, including one with an autographed shirt for BG. She’s lovely, and always makes such fun designs!

Two of our other friends have shirts up for voting at Threadless for one more day – check out those details, too!

I’m busy with my book (eeep! first chapter submitted!), deep thoughts about religion and life, taking care of the dogs, playing Scramble on Facebook, and homeschooling the (active! excited! fun-loving!) girls. We’re studying ancient people – reading about nomads, first farmers, etc, and also the Old Testament stories from that time period. Our coop has started up again, too, with some great activities and friends. There are stumbling blocks and some of the balls drop when I’m juggling, but overall life is good.

2 of my friends have shirt designs up for voting at Threadless. If you click “Buy this as a T” and then click 5, it’ll register as a vote. Ok, you can also click for lower scores, but Sokowa and Patch are cool people with fun designs. As a bonus, with Threadless you can just create an account to vote – you don’t need to buy anything (unlike the Shirt.Woot Derby where you need to have bought something from one of the woot sites to vote). However, there is a nice 12 dollar shirt sale for women at Threadless, and they make great quality shirts!

Current status:

• 41 pages of recipes

• 11 pages of writing
• Outline – 8 pages

So, as distractions, I’m playing scramble on Facebook, learning Skype, finding a Sarah Palin doll, and playing with the Sarah Palin name generator.

No matter what else is happening around here, I still need to make meals. Last night I made Chicken and Broccoli Alfredo, and it was a big hit. I will be emailing people about recipe testing in the next week or so (I’m listing folks as vegetarian or not, too).

Currently the girls are making baked donuts in their Easy Bake Ovens.. they smell divine.

As another note, I’m traveling again to CT this week, and the girls are coming down with me. Visiting both Nanas, one of whom will be 91 a week from Monday! Life keeps chugging along!

This is the first political post on this blog this year, and it’s pretty long. If you aren’t interested in reading more, feel free to skip. Please remember to keep comments polite.

A woman on the ballot for VP??? My first thought was that it sounded too good to be true! I remember as a kid when we named our cat for Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984. I wasn’t expecting a female VP this election cycle, so I was really surprised when a friend told me about John McCain naming Sarah Palin as his VP choice. The choice made sense, though, choosing a woman could pander to the upset Hillary Clinton supporters, and possibly swing female voters to McCain.

When I first started reading about Sarah Palin, I was impressed: she’s an active and involved mom of 5, she calls herself a hockey mom (I think that’s the Alaskan version of a soccer mom), she enjoys outdoor winter sports such as ice fishing and snowmobiling, she’s well-loved in the community (85% approval rating!), she’s been an active partner in her husband’s fishing business, and she became involved in government – city council, mayor, and then governor partly to clear out the corruption and excessive spending in the Alaskan government. She’s type of woman that mothers of daughters want to point at – you can do whatever you set your mind to do! Sarah Palin sounds like someone I’d like to have coffee or lunch with – definitely a strong, unique, and fascinating woman. (Even if her office has a the skin of a grizzly bear her father shot on the sofa)

After I got over my initial “oh wow! a woman!” excitement, I looked at her stand on issues that are key for me. Any remote possibility of me supporting her politically disappeared completely at that point. Read the rest of this entry »