Table for Eight

My neigbor, Rebecca, just wrote me an email (well, at least I just read it--she wrote it late last night), and I honestly don't know if I can stop laughing long enough to type this and share, but I must.   I'm so sorry my blog music scared you last night ! You see . . . apparently Rebecca was online late, in the dark, when my blog page loaded . . . without her realizing where the spooky music was coming from (I had Blue October's "This Is Halloween" playing.) Suddenly she had a spooky soundtrack to her late night. Eeek! Poor Rebecca! It's not funny, but it did make me kind of laugh --because I know people have mixed-feelings in the blogosphere about having music on blogs. Some think it's annoying; others love it. And up until last night, I'd been in the "just let the music play" camp (Chaka Khan). But after reading how this music scared Rebecca last night, I'm no longer certain about music on the blog. What do YOU ALL thin...

Thanksgiving 2009. And it truly is my favorite photo of him--love the smile, love the eyes, love the apron . . . love everything!

Life is easy now that the Tooth Fairy is using the indoor mailbox for pick-up and deliveries. It's so fun! Here's how it works: 1. Said-child looses tooth and places that tooth in the Tooth Fairy's Mailbox. 2. Said-child goes to sleep. 3. In the middle of the night, the Tooth Fairy flits and floats over to the mailbox, makes the pick-up, and leaves cold hard cash in its place. (PS: my cash is never cold and never hard. Please explain the idiom.) 4. Morning comes; everyone's excited to check the mail for the overnight delivery. 5. Woo hoo! It's a win-win. The Tooth Fairy gets her tooth. Said-child pads their bank account. AND THE BEST PART: the Tooth Fairy never wakes a sleeping child. ZuZu--missing tooth on bottom left.

Photographer Sally Davies has this project posted on her Twitter and Facebook pages: a Happy Meal photographed on the day of purchase . . . and then again 180 days later. Is that crazy? Doesn't it make you hungry? LOL! PS: Why are we still eating here? Ever ?

This company encourages people to take a mid-career break to travel. There are seriously companies for everything under the sun. Now, don't be surprised if you go to find me in my cubicle (PS: I don't have one--LOL!) and I'm not there . . . but in Paris! Woo hoo! Click the logo to see the website and idea. (Oh, and no, I'm not sponsoring them. Don't have an ad, etc. I just read about this on the NY Times website and thought it was cool.) PS: Dave's company offers a paid sabbatical once you have worked there X number of years. How COOL is that? (I'll tell you: WAY COOL.)

I love having a camera again! I realize now that having a camera MAKES me want to do things . . . because I'm thinking "oh, that would be a fun photo." (Is that hilarious? It takes a photoshoot to make me show up to my own life? LOL!) Not really. Well, kinda. Anyhow, here's the day in review (in no particular order). I didn't take this photo, but I did make this soup today. Fall in a bowl: butternut squash soup. Probably not for everyone, but I love it. (And yes, I'm going to marry it.) ZuZu at the park. I like how the date on the camera is wrong. Ugh. LuLu at said-park. Papaya. LuLu, ZuZu, and Jr.--love that Jr. is the step-stool. Talk about a good sport. "We love having big brothers!" The Spiderman Park. (Not sure of "real" name.) Perfect fall day. Still warm outside. Woo hoo! LuLu. LuLu and ZuZu at the shortline for the lake. We're not supposed to go in the lake. Something about roundw...

It's not exact, but this week marks 90 days until J turns 16. How can that be? Where did the time go? La, ya with me here? J, please stop growing up. Can't you be Peter Pan? Sorry I had to post the apron photo again, J and Jr. I lost my last hard drive and this was one of the only photos I'd backed up (outside of the blog, phew!).

I realized this morning that I write WAY faster than I think. And while I'm way excited about the pie-venture-idea, I'm not going to rush to map out the idea as quickly as I wrote on the blog. Still love baking and the idea, just not pushing like a sprint. (Though I will say that I occassionally do sprint through life/ideas/projects--so it's not unlike me to jump right into something. LOL!) 8)

Happy Birthday Mary! I can't believe how quickly you have grown up. LOL! I hope you have a beautiful day--because heaven knows you are beautiful friend, mom, wife, neighbor and teacher. And now, a Bday Acrostic in your honor (on 10/10/10 no less!): M y, oh my! You're an amazing friend, mother, neighbor and teacher. A lways thinking of others. R eally generous (I have definitely used your last chocolate chips, marmalade, and butter.). Y ou make smile every time I see you. It's a real gift/talent.

 We are MORE than ready for the weekend here. I'm telling you, I feel like this week has been 17 days long! Here are some of the highs and lows from this VERY long week: 1. The weather has taken a turn for the crisp. Not freezing, but crisp. I think that's made last weekend seem like a distant memory. 2. I have a cold. 3. I've slept an average of three hours--yes, three hours--a night for the last 4 nights. (See #2.) 4. Dave has logged at least 12 hours doing homework with the kids. (He loves his new job, and so do we--because he helps with schoolwork now. Woo hoo! The kids may actually pass math now . . .  heaven knows I don't speak "geometry or algebra.") 4. I broke down and got KFC for dinner last night. HOLY COW junk food can be yummy! (And salty. My fingers look like sausages as I write this. Not even kidding.) 5. My university students had their first major papers due this week--which meant I graded a lot! Nothing like 75+ essays (5-10 ...

When I was a kid, I remember my mom moving furniture around . . . a lot . Like, I think our family room had more than 25 configurations during my teenage years. At the time, I never really understood why my mom liked to move the furniture so much. I just knew that if dad wasn't home when mom got the idea to move it--my brother and I were going to be gaining some serious resume experience as future "Starving Student Movers." Now flash-forward 30+ years, and I realize why my mom moved the furniture so much. (At least I think I know.) She likes things moving, growing . . . not stagnant and predictable. So, moving the furniture was one of my mom's ways of making that kind of visible movement/growth/space/change in our lives. I like that idea. The idea of change and movement. Growth. And I like how something simple, like moving furniture  can create energy and enthusiasm in other areas of our lives. It's pretty amazing. So with that in mind...

In one of the books I'm reading the author suggests keeping a grocery receipt as part of a journal entry--so your family/posterity has some unique insight into the ABCs of you. I guess there's really a lot more to a receipt than I realized. You see, with a receipt you can see what time of day people shop, where they shop, how they pay for their purchase, what items they purchase, whether the items were name brand or "plain wrap" . . . and so much more! Well, I like the receipt/journal entry idea. But I'm not sure I want my posterity to have to make assumptions about my motivation for buying "Juicy-Juice Apple Juice" or "purple spider webs" at Target at ten minutes to 10:00pm on a Saturday night. I'd rather just say, "I liked to buy juice on sale. And remember . . . I don't drink juice, our kids did. So don't go thinking I was a juice fan. I was no juice fan, ya hear me great-great-great-great grandkids." But m...

I broke down and bought a camera this weekend. I know, I said I was going to wait . . . but then we went to the Pumpkin Patch. THE Pumpkin Patch! My favorite family tradition. Well, actually it's tied with having Thanksgiving Dinner together, but my point! I had NO WAY TO RECORD our Pumpkin Patch memories. I was dying. We may as well not have gone. Really. That's how I felt. I just kept thinking, "Normally, we'd have a photo on this haystack. Normally, I'd take a photo of ZuZu and LuLu in the corn maze. And NORMALLY, I'd have a photo of Jonah wheeling 200lbs of pumpkins around the patch." But NOT this year. No! I had to go and sit on my camera! I want my mommy! (Yes, that's The Pioneer Woman's line, but I love it.) Anyhow, I was dying! So I came home, ripped out my Costco coupons, and low and behold: they had a coupon for a camera! (PS: The coupon thing annoys me--why do I need a coupon to get a deal? Give me the dam# deal, people. Save...

If you ever find yourself being critical, read or listen to this talk. Wow--words to live by. I think I will probably wear this talk out. Oh, and you can read the full text or listen to it here: http://new.lds.org/general-conference/2010/10/charity-never-faileth?lang=eng&media=audio Random, but I have to post this photo I just found  of Jonah at age 1. I'm dying! (Taken with our friends' daughter, Heidi.)

Hate to see you go, September, but SEE YA! I've been SO excited to turn the calendar to this month! October is my favorite month. I love the weather, the fall colors, all of the yummy treats, the spooky decorations, Charlie Brown's Great Pumpkin, and all of the trick-or-treating (plus pumpkins, apples, carmel, cinnamon . . . hello!). And this year we have an extra reason to love October--we're taking our first family vacation with the new crew (all 8 of us). I'm so dang happy, I could cry! (Aside from the fact that we have to rent a car--because we don't all fit in the mini-van.)

Just when I restore my faith in humanity, I get a second virus on my computer. Only this one killed it. (Services will be held today at 1pm.) Fortunately there's a warranty on the little guy. He's on his way back to Dell today to see about a possible reincarnation. In the meantime, I'm tethered to the upstairs computer, using the family community computer. . . which is hilarious for me because last week Dave installed a second monitor for this computer in our kitchen. You see, he wanted us to be able to SEE what sites the kids are on as they work on the computer. So this second monitor is set up on our kitchen counter and it displays everything from the community computer. So now when the kids say, "I'm working on keyboarding," we can really see that they are, in fact, working on keyboarding. It's awesome, but kind of funny too. You'd be surprised how easy it is to forget you're being supervised. Like just now Kaya came upstairs...

Mattel's new "hottest toy": a Stealth Ride (I'm thinking a take-off of Transformer, kind of?) Paper Jamz. Sing-a-ma-jigs. (I'm sorry, but these are in the CLOWN category for me. This would scare the crap out of me to see my toddler carrying this around with a binky and a ba-ba. Hello . . . Children of the Corn.) I really think there's value in planning ahead/preparing for life. But I also really think there's something nutty about our society's constant need to be somewhere OTHER than where we are at the present moment. For example, this morning I woke up and was hoping to just read some good news and post a recipe on my blog. But no . . .  it's not enough for me to be enjoying the final days of September, fall, the Indian Summer, etc. You see, what I should be doing today--according to MSN, is be thinking about Christmas. Because as of September 29, the Hottest Holiday Toy List is OUT! For real.  ...

My deep thought for the day ( for real ), taken from the book "In Pursuit of Peace" by J. Meyer: No matter what upsetting circumstances are going on in life, if we get them off of our minds, they no longer upset us--it is as if they do not exist for us. When we recall them, they once again become part of our reality. No wonder Satan [AKA "Senor Cranky Pants"  or fill-in-the-blank for any other negative influence in your life--EGO, THE NEWS, etc. ] continually brings up things that steal our peace. If we want to enjoy peace, we need to be willing to tell people that we don't want to talk about certain things. . . . Don't let Satan use other people to steal your peace through giving you upsetting information you don't really need, and make sure that the enemy [aka Senor Cranky Pants] doesn't use you to upset other people the same way. The mind is an absolutely amazing organ. Thoughts affect our emotions, our health, our futures, our attitudes...

Since I am on a Bento Bender--and WAY into how to make the kids' lunches more appealing, healthy, and fun--I was WAY excited to find these Sara Lee "slider" or "mini hamburger buns." Aren't they CUTE? LuLu and I were cracking up when we saw them at the store last week. Don't they seem perfect for lunch boxes?  We're going to make regular sandwiches with them, but I bet your kids would love having tiny burgers with them too. (PS: Has Sara Lee suddenly taken over the bread "market"? I feel like she used to just do pound cake? What's up with that?) (PPS: The bread isn't super healthy, I know. Not 9 or 12 grain, but it is that whole grain white--whatever that means?)

I came across this quote in my reading last week--and I think it may very well change my life. (I know, I'm dramatic:  everything changes my life. Bear with me.) But for real--this quote/idea may change the way I view life: Make your problems your teachers,  not your punishment. Is that THE most beautiful idea ever? Imagine how different our lives would be if we would just change the way we view life's problems. What if we saw them [our problems] as TEACHERS? So here's my tiny example/application. Last night I was uploading a recipe on my blog and somehow I lost EVERY recipe I've ever saved on Blogger. With just one keystroke everything was gone.  No back, back, back arrow.  No history.  No refresh.  No cached pages to recall. Now, before reading the above quote, I would have looked at that problem and said: "SEE what happens when I try and preserve my recipe file, I get punished. I always try and do good and what do I get in return?"   ...