There are so many little things that bring great joy, amazement, sorrow, and wonder. As we have been going through so many trials and tribulations lately, I’ve tried to appreciate the little things.

• Little purpley-blue flowers pop through the dry leaves in the early spring

• Giving flowers to someone in the hospital or nursing home really brightens the room up. But bringing the first flowers of spring from their garden brightens up the person
• 1,250,000 ng = 1.25 mg = 50,000 iu
• There is no greater joy than to see someone awake and alert when you didn’t expect to see them alive again
• You can become vitamin D deficient even when taking 1,000 iu/day supplement
• Watching your kids read the funny pages in the paper brings you back to the time you did that as a kid
• Living with your kids’ grandparents means that there are 3 people to share bedtime stories
• Sometimes prayers work for little things, like traffic jams, not just for big things, like helping someone be comforted and stay strong
• Even the feistiest person looks weak when they are in the hospital with tubes
• No one wants to be inside when you can see the buds on the forsythia
• Adding 1 or 2 kids to the 3 you have ends up being less work (but more food!)
• It’s not healthy to subsist on soda and snacks, but one or two days of it due to a family emergency won’t kill anyone.
• Trader Joe’s has delicious crunchy dried green beans and freeze dried mango. Healthy snacks!
• Sometimes you remember great things just after you need them. Like there’s pizza place with gluten-free pizza available in the town where my grandmothers live
• Brownies and chocolates heal.
• When you toss many things into a pot and it turns out delicious, make sure you write down what you did!
• Sometimes you get blessed with friends who go above and beyond the call of duty. And sometimes that is balanced with family who don’t want to help.
• Prayer and meditation can help calm adults and children under stress
• If you want to get kids’ attention, science projects with fire are awesome!
• Paying it forward or karma is good. If one person watches your kids for a couple days, watching other friends’ kids (for 4 days) is a good thing.
• Quiet schedules can become very busy unexpectedly!
• Life is good

What little things have you been noticing?

So, it’s the day after U2’s new CD has been released. What are you doing? I’m sharing my love of a band with my kids, and you?

It’s been described as “the most thoroughly Christian thing they’ve done yet.”, but whether or not you are Christian, you’ll enjoy it. Heck, I never realized U2 had any religious overtones, and I’ve loved their music since the dark ages, when I was a teenager. I may be a smidge oblivious, though.

Because I’m cheap frugal, I downloaded No Line On The Horizon for $3.99. But there are a ton of other ways to buy U2’s new CD. I love a band that has options for an album that range in price from $4 to $65!

Admittedly, I also love No Line On The Horizon simply because I no longer have to hear the words while the girls are watching Space Buddies. As a bonus, I can also listen to it without headphones, unlike Lily Allen’s fun (but R-rated) new release, It’s Not Me, It’s You.

OK, that’s my rambling for the day completed. Anyone have any other great suggestions for new-release music? I’ve been reclaiming my love of music lately. And yes, that means some eclectic choices along with Lily Allen and U2, I’m also listening to Brad Paisley and Taylor Swift.

I have had a bit of a problem with my camera cable (yay for the people on eBay selling them for $1!), so you’ll have to wait a bit for more Christmas pics.

I’ve decided to stop thinking until the New Year, as well. I may decide to buy a couple of Amazon’s 50 $5 cd mp3 downloads from the top CDs of 2008. But otherwise my brain has thought enough for a while.

Tomorrow we’ll be playing with Nanny Ogg and a few kids and a puppy. 8 kids and 2 puppies = a whole lot of cuteness! Plus we get to indoctrinate her into the joys of Target & Trader Joe’s.

We’ll be playing games on New Year’s Eve, and then anyone who is awake will watch the ball drop with some Trader Joe’s fizzy juice. It’s a fun little tradition, and much calmer than trying to go to a big, busy, party and traffic. My husband and I stayed with an uncle & aunt for New Year’s once, and we continued their tradition of making silly hats, which I highly recommend!

Anyone have a fun little tradition to pass on?

I tell “Uncle A…” stories. These are all stories of things my younger brother has done (fallen over a waterfall, jumped off a train, shot a bb gun…), all things which the girls can learn from his mistakes rather than making he mistakes themselves.

A good lesson! Well, unfortunately I hadn’t told a particular story in a while…

When I was around 9 and my brother around 5, he ran one of his little motorized cars over my head. As background, we had been making different obstacle courses for the Rough Rider 4×4, and the next logical step was, of course, to run it over my head.

At that time I had very long hair, probably down to the middle of my back. What my brother and I didn’t think about was what the result would be of combining long hair and battery-operated wheels.

It was a Bad Thing. The wheels pulled my hair into the axle. because the on/off switch was on the bottom of the truck, once it spun against my head we couldn’t turn it off. I remember that pain vividly. My mom ended up having to cut it out of my hair.

Yesterday, my A child (LG) put her sister’s motorized hamster against her head so it would climb over her. It was like repeating history, I had to cut the hamster out of her hair. Thankfully the hamster only had 2 wheels, not 4, and that she has shorter hair than I did! It was good to have less hair snipped from her head.

Let this be a lesson for you:
Don’t let children whose name begins with the letter A play with motorized toys with wheels!
(or, don’t play with battery-powered wheeled toys near hair)

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!

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!

This is clearly a week for food in our family! I signed the contract for my dairy-free book with a bunch of recipes, and now MG is featured in a Hack College entry about cooking in dorm rooms.

Whatever will come next? BG being interviewed by the newspaper for her mad cooking skillz? LG’s “recipe” of ham wrapped around grape jelly featured in a cookbook?

I’ve been hanging out with the designers from shirt.woot for the past few months. It’s been fun to see how tshirts are created, how the community works, and how designers improve their skills over time. They have also helped me to laugh, smile, and just be goofy while I was stressed about my grandmother’s health, family issues, my own health, the book, etc etc etc. They’re Good People, and I’m thrilled to see their designs being printed at other places, like Tee Fury and Designs By Humans. Most of these friends are also more than happy to test out my recipes for The Book, too (assuming they can cook). It’s great to also get opinions about the taste of the recipes from folks who don’t have to cook “special” foods.

If you’ve ever bought anything at Threadless, I have another favor for you. If you haven’t before – go pick up one of their shirts that are on sale for $9 or $12 until Monday If you don’t want to buy a shirt, you can still go there and register (but then I don’t get any “points” for referring you), and then vote for my friend Sharp. I was brainstorming with her when she came up with this design months ago, and I’m thrilled to see how it has evolved into this design! It’s now up for voting at Threadless – just click on the “I’d buy it as a T” and then “5″
PS – while you’re at Threadless, check out the awesome vampire shirt that glows in the dark AND reacts to sunlight!

Every week there is a Derby at shirt.woot, where people vote for their favorite designs. Voting starts midday Friday, and ends midday Thursday. The top 3 vote-getters are printed Fri, Sat, Sun. Right now there are a few great designs by some of these wonderful friends, so please check them out! Clicking on the design thumbnail will take you to the full design, where you can vote if you have bought anything from any of the woot.com sites. If you haven’t bought anything, may I suggest BG’s favorite, Oh Burned!!! by JadenKale, which she recently modeled at the beach.

This week’s theme is “At the Luau”, so if you’re interested in any Hawaiian themed shirts, this is a good time to vote for a few you’d like a chance to buy! (You can vote for as many or as few designs as you would like) Some of our faves this week, in alphabetical order by designer’s name:

Ansharp’s Sometimes I explode, and I don’t know why
Chris Risse’s Tiki Gods Bless This Limbo Pole
• EyesLikeSugar’s Monsters like luaus, too
• Geekfactor12’s Fine Young Cannibals
• JadenKale’s Tiki Treat
• Patchitect’s Oh! The Cocanity!
• Sokowa’s Luau Fire

A couple other fun designs are the always-unique- Edgar’s (Title eaten by giant fruit.); Tgentry’s Tiki Beast from 50 Fathoms and Luau Beast from 90 Fathoms; rglee’s How Baby Islands are Made and Maiself-tai; and SkekTek’s Let’s All Go To The Luau!!!. Happy voting!

Hope everyone has a great (if rainy on the East coast) weekend!

There are days when I get annoyed about where we live. In the winter, when we’re isolated due to snow. Or when the rain and tides threaten to wash out our causeway, I get nervous.

But then there are hot days when living a few minutes from the beach is fabulous. And then there are days like the 4th. There’s a beautiful beach that we can see from our beach, and it’s well known in the area. Unlike our beach, though, you need to ay to get in, and while it’s almost free for residents, it’s still a bit of a drive to get there. They also have a 4th party with music, face painting, etc and fireworks. This costs money, and we’re cheap frugal.

So the girls camped out with blankets on the lawn, and I had one of the lawn chairs. We watched the neighbors’ fireworks for about 45 minutes, and then the “real” fireworks lasted for about the same length of time. It was beautiful!

We could see a ton of legal and illegal fireworks, all without leaving our yard. It was great, and our 5th year doing this. We had friends over 2 years ago, and should really invite people next time. The wind was just right this year, so we could hear the music from the other beach.

Now we’re relaxing and enjoying the weekend. B took Monday off, so we have some nice quiet time before everything gets hectic again! 2 more weeks of kids here before camp starts, so lots of memories to collect and store in their heads!

Yesterday started off rather meh, but then there were several surprises. The first surprise was getting the mail – no bills and 3 packages, a shirt.woot tshirt trade (a design by this guy, whose phoenix I also love), a book by Jane Porter, and a great new tote-bag from my recipes site sponsor, FoodBuzz. The tote bag has a Rachel’s Recipe Box pin on it, too.

Then we went to the beach for a bit, only to come home early when a thunderstorm started. And yes, we had walked to the beach. 10 minutes in a thunderstorm will get you plenty wet, fyi.

Then I got home, and had an amazing surprise – two designs I had created for the shirt.woot Derby had risen, 1 was in the top 20, the other still in the top 40. Now one has dropped, but they are both still in the top 40 as of this writing. yippeeee!

If you’ve ever bought something from any of the woot websites, you can log in and vote for great designs. Like mine.

But then there was the big downer of the day. During the t-storm, lightning hit close to us, and BG & MG were opening a door and got shocked, but they’re fine. Unfortunately, our FIOS service got a worse shock, no tv, phone, or internet at our house now. Our DVD/VCR seems to have perished, too. Maybe our TV, too. I’m waiting to see what else. It’s very exciting. B is lucky that it didn’t whack out his computer, my laptop wasn’t plugged in and wasn’t downstairs where the shocking happened. Thank goodness the microwave is ok.

I’ve been through this before at my mom’s house, and I’m glad it wasn’t as big a hit as what we dealt with then. Now let’s see how the rest of the weekend goes.

I’m spending Sunday through Tuesday at my grandmother’s house again, so internet will be spotty until I get home. Hope everyone has a lovely weekend.