Lisa R. Howeler's Blog, page 67
May 16, 2023
A Photo A Day in May
Back at the end of April I had decided I would take a photo a day in May. That would have been a great idea, if I had remembered I had challenged myself to do that. Sigh.
As I mentioned on my Saturday Afternoon Chat post, I didn’t do very well to begin with, but I am back on track. I also plan to stretch the challenge into June to make up for the lost days.
I thought I’d share the photos I took when I remembered to do so. I also have a couple of photos I took on a day, but didn’t take for the project. It was simply a photo I took for one reason or another.
I added a couple of extra photographs from each day as well.
May 1
No photo. Oops.
May 2
May 3
May 4
May 5
May 6
May 7
No Photo
May 8
No Photo
May 9
May 10
May 11
May 12
May 13
May 14
My breakfast for Mother’s Day from Little Miss.
May 15
No photo. Oops.
May 14, 2023
Sunday Bookends: Greenhouses, same books/same story, favorite blog posts, and happy Mother’s Day!
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, what the rest of the family and I have been reading and watching, and what I’ve been writing, and some weeks I share what I am listening to.
First, happy Mother’s Day to all you mother’s out there!
What I/we’ve been Reading
Still reading slow.
Yes.
Me.
I’m reading slow.
So I am still on Flowers and Foul Play by Amanda Flower
I am also still reading Fellowship of the Ring.
I hope to have both done in the next week because now that I am done with the revisions of Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing I’ll have a little more time for reading.
I am enjoying both books.
Little Miss is reading to me at night now until her eyes start to cross, and I love it because now she knows how I feel when I’m just too tired to read to her.
This week she read to me from Charlie the Ranch Dog, the children’s books about Ree Drummond’s dog, and from Little House in the Big Woods. I love how she starts to yawn as she reads. She is so much like me these days. We are too tired from playing during the day to be able to stay awake at night to read.
I wanted to record her reading on my phone but she refused to let me. Oh well. Not a big deal. I just wanted to record how well she’s doing at reading.
She’s been reading well for a couple of years now, but I’m just impressed with how much she’s progressed in that time.
What’s Been Occurring
I wrote about what’s been going on in our lives during my post yesterday. After I posted, Little Miss and I visited a local greenhouse that has been operated by the same family for 50 years with a friend of hers, then the little girl came to our house and she and Little Miss played together for the rest of the afternoon.
They played in the stream by the greenhouse and back here they searched for snakes, found dead animals in the yard that our evil kitten had killed, jumped on the trampoline, and played on the Slip N’ Slide. They never seemed to stop moving. We had an earlier night at bedtime than some nights, though, so that was nice.
I went over to my parents at the end of the day to help straighten up some before my brother comes to visit today for Mother’s Day.
The upcoming week doesn’t look as busy as this past week.
We have gymnastics on Monday and nothing else for the rest of the week other than possibly going to my parents to help clean and The Boy has work. Next Saturday we plan to go have a picnic and see a movie in a town about 45 minutes from us.
What We Watched/are Watching
This past week I enjoyed videos from Forgotten Way Farms (on YouTube) and also watched a Midsomer Murders with The Husband.
I watched half of Operation Petticoat, which I will finish this week for our Spring of Cary post Thursday.
We watched a ton of Bluey, which seems to always be on in the background because Little Miss absolutely loves that show.
I watched a couple of Mary Berry episodes and a really depressing art documentary on Vincent VanGogh with Little Miss as well.
We didn’t have as much time to watch things this week, but we did watch some Newhart (streaming on Amazon now), which is always nice and relaxing.
What I’m Writing
As I mentioned above, I have finished first revisions on Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing and sent the book out to a couple beta readers and on to the editor. This week I am finishing my newsletter for Substack and then I hope to write a couple blog posts that I have ideas for. I have already started book two in Gladwynn’s series as well.
On the blog I shared:
Saturday Afternoon Chat: Trampolines, craving quiet, lilacs are bloomingFiction Friday: Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing Chapter 3Randomly Thinking: A few random thoughts about spoons and other thingsWhat I’m Listening To
This week I listened to Tami Neilson, a country-rock musician from New Zealand.
Blog Posts I Enjoyed This Past Week
Through the Lens with Spring Happenings by For His Purpose: https://forhispurpose.blog/2023/05/12/through-the-lens-with-spring-happenings/
I Should Have Known by Various Ramblings of a Nostalgic Italian: https://nostalgicitalian.com/2023/05/07/i-should-have-known/
Fit For A King by Fuel For the Race Blog: https://fuelfortheraceblog.wordpress.com/2023/05/12/fit-for-a-king/
Now it’s your turn
Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
May 13, 2023
Saturday Afternoon Chat: Trampolines, craving quiet, lilacs are blooming
Note: I usually only share this post on my blog (Boondock Ramblings) but thought I’d share it with my subscribers here on Substack too this week.
I am back this week for Saturday Afternoon Chat and I am sipping peppermint tea but later I’m sure I’ll be drinking cool water as our temperatures are supposed to be higher today than they were yesterday and Thursday.
As I am writing this, The Husband and Little Miss are at gymnastics and I am taking a little bit of what I guess I would call self-care time.
This is the first time in – um – a long time that I have had any time alone to write or think or just decompress. I seriously do not even remember the last time I had a break when it was daylight out without people and animals all around me, coming in and out of the house, looking for attention or needing something.
This past week was very busy but not busy with going places. It was busy with being outside or washing dishes or trying to clean things out or, quite frankly, it was busy in my mind. My mind has been racing 1,000 miles a minute, sometimes a second, these days.
It’s racing over my parent’s health issues, my kids growing up, homeschooling, me trying to help the family financially while also trying to have fun with some side activities like writing, photography, and designing, knowing I need to spend time with my husband, my kids, my parents and feeling like there isn’t enough of me to go around.
I’m finding it hard to simply sit and listen to my own thoughts and try to find some balance in the midst of all the chaos. I’m struggling to find moments of peace in the chaos, something I plan to write about later this week.
Right now the house is silent. The dog is asleep on the ottoman and outside my window there is one lone bird not exactly chirping, but sort of calling. There isn’t even a truck grinding its brakes down the hill like it so often is during other quiet times I’ve been able to grab in the past.
Quiet.
My soul has been craving it.
Not long stretches of quiet because then I feel off-centered and lost and melancholy as I long for the presence of my family – even if they are loud at times and need a lot of attention. I want to give that attention. The majority of the time I want them around me because if they aren’t then I feel like life is incomplete.
Sometimes, though, I need even a half hour of quiet so I can think and remember how much I need the everyday noise and hustle and bustle because without it that would mean that those who are most precious to me are no longer part of my life. If they were no longer here then I would no longer be here because they are what give me a purpose to create and live.
I need a quiet moment to close my eyes and breathe in the peace of God and remind myself that I am not alone in all my fears, worries, and apprehensions, I am not alone with my racing thoughts. God is here even in the chaos, even in the fear, even in the anxiety that tries to take me over.
So today I will take a moment of quiet while everyone is gone and just soak in all the goodness that is my life, repelling thoughts of all the bad that I think my life produces or is filled with.
When I forget how great my life is in the overall, grand scheme of things, song lyrics from a song by Wes King from the 1990s comes to mind.
“Life is precious. Life is sweet. Like the earth beneath my feet. And his truth makes it complete. Knowing Jesus died for me, life is precious, life is sweet.”
Earlier this week Little Miss and I spent hours of our afternoons on the neighbor’s trampoline. I can’t lie. I didn’t enjoy it as I should have. I was resentful. I wanted to finish revising the book I’m writing. I wanted to read. I wanted to have “me time.” And I felt selfish about that.
I felt like I should be enjoying every moment with my daughter because before I know it she will be grown up and moved out and I will have all the free time I want but I won’t want it. All I will want is time with my children back again.
So, I felt my resentment for a little bit, pouted some, and even flounced a little.
But then I worked on just enjoying that time with her, watching her jump and do flips, and seeing how much she’s grown physically and skill-wise in the last year.
Yes, I worked on it. I chose joy when I didn’t feel it because sometimes, we have to do that and, you know what? I did soon feel joy and I felt a slow rhythm return to my soul that I needed. I had been rushing and trying to do too much at once and I feel like God knew I needed that slowed-down time to just be in one moment and not ten at once.
Yesterday the local homeschool group met at an alpaca farm about an eight-minute drive from our house and then stopped for some ice cream at the restaurant where my son is now washing dishes a few times a week.
Little Miss loved the alpacas and kept feeding them the carrots that the owners had cut up for the kid’s visit. She fed them so many I thought they might start spitting them back at her, but they seemed as thrilled with her feeding them as she was to feed them. She stayed with them long after the other kids had gotten bored and wandered off to the little shop the farm has and the woods around it.
After the farm visit and ice cream, there was a Mother’s Day craft at the library. Then it was time to go home and cook dinner and wash some dishes.
Speaking of dinner, lately Little Miss has wanted to make special sauces for dinner, and one might last week she made an amazing cheese sauce to go with our dinner of chicken and rice. Another night she made a similar cheese sauce for our dinner of sausages and egg noodles (though I had rice with mine). The sauce was so good and I saved some to have with my lunch yesterday. I told her it is now her job to make cheese, or another sauce, for family dinners. She’s very excited about this prospect. My only issue will have to be making sure that she doesn’t get so excited she tries to do too much by herself and accidentally burns or cuts herself. She is sometimes impatient waiting for Mom to help so she jumps ahead and does it herself. This can be a good and a bad thing.
I was worried one day when she was making the sauce because I said it was cutting into our homeschool time.
“Is this sort of homeschool? Teaching me about cooking?”
As usual she’s quicker on the uptake than I am.
So, yes, we treated it as a time to learn and it removed the guilt from this homeschool mom.
Today Little Miss has a friend who is going to come to play, which will probably mean more time on the trampoline.
I don’t mind. This hour break has helped me have a little “me time.” Even the short break is so rejuvenating for my spirit. (Doesn’t that just sound so dramatic? “It’s so rejuvenating for my spirit!” *snort* I sound like I’m in one of those YouTube videos with the guitar music and some girl in an old-fashioned dress skipping through a field of tulips.)
In all this rambling, I forgot to mention that our tulips and our lilacs are blooming. The lilacs smell so amazing! Last night I had to go search for our youngest cat who has been staying out past curfew lately and when I opened the back door the amazing sweet smell of the lilacs hit me.
We used to have a very small bush by our garage and a larger bush that is growing in the middle of a tree on the top of the hill behind the house. This year the smaller bush by the garage is much larger than t had been, and an even smaller bush is growing next to the fence next to the house. I don’t remember that bush last year but It is very welcome to stay there and bloom. I should probably cut some of the bushes back but I love to see plants grow naturally. That’s one reason why I have never cut back our wild rose bush. Well, that and the fact our neighbor, who told me the bush is over a hundred years old, said that when her landscapers trimmed her wild rose bush (which was grown from a section of our bush), it stopped blooming as well.
I look forward to those wild roses blooming every year. When they first start to appear, pure joy settles in my chest and then spills outward through giddy giggles. I’ll see them through the kitchen window and go grab the camera to take a hundred photographs of them. A hundred photographs I used to have no idea what I had the use for other than to look at during the winter months when everything is so drab. This past week, though, I decided I can use some of those photographs for journals I am developing.
Speaking of photographs (yes, “speaking of” are the words for the day, apparently), I failed a bit on my Photo a Day in May challenge. I literally forgot about the challenge for nine days, but when I remembered I picked up my camera and took several photos of the lilac bushes and Little Miss jumping. I am not trying to remember to take my camera with me everywhere I go so I can pause a moment in the craziness and photograph something that catches my eye.
As I’ve said before, photography helps to slow me and my mind down, which is one reason I wanted to do this challenge.
Since I missed several days of the challenge, I am going to try to stretch it into June as well.
To end my post (since I think I hear my husband and daughter coming in now) here are a few photos I’ve taken for the challenge so far in May. I’m sure I’ll share a separate post later in the week with one for each day.
How about you? How was your week last week? Have you found any new teas to drink? Let me know in the comments!
May 12, 2023
Fiction Friday: Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing Chapter 3
Guys! Gals! I am excited! I have finished my revisions of the full novel of Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing and I’m sending it out to beta readers and then will have ARC copies ready to go by June. Do you want to get in on reading the full book early? You can sign up to read an advanced copy (and hopefully review it if you like it) here:
To celebrate finishing my revisions (but not my corrections because it has to go to the editors still), I thought I’d share chapter 3 of the book.
You can find the previous chapters here and here.
As usual, there could be typos in this chapter since I still have to send it to my editors.
Let me know what you think in the comments if you want to!
Chapter 3
Glawynn woke with a start the next morning, heart pounding.
A horrible grinding noise had jolted her from a dream. It stopped almost as quickly as it started and now she wondered if it had been part of the dream, which she could remember very little of. There’d been a court jester and a young Frank Sinatra. The rest had faded into oblivion.
The room she was looking at reminded her of something someone might see on the set of a Regency film. She let out a breath, blowing hair out of her face, and struggled to remember where she was.
A solemn woman with her hair high on her head in a tight bun scowled at her from a gold-framed picture on the wall above a full-length mirror opposite her. To the woman’s right, there was a full-bearded man wearing a Quaker-style hat staring at her from out of another framed picture. Both photographs were black and white.
It was all coming back to her now.
Grandma’s house in Brookstone. Her home for the foreseeable future.
She winced as she moved her legs, stinging pain shuddering through the bottom of her feet, reminding her of her stupid decision to wear high-heeled boots to work.
Downstairs the noise that had woken her up had started up again. Some kind of grinding and squealing, like maybe a cat caught in a woodchipper.
What was her grandmother doing?
Or maybe it wasn’t her grandmother. She hadn’t actually seen her grandmother when she’d come home last night. Lucinda’s bedroom door had been closed. Gladwynn had tiptoed past it and crawled into bed without even changing into her pajamas.
Now fully awake, she tossed the thick quilt off her and reached for the flashlight next to the bed, weighing it in her hand.
Yeah, that would work if there was a chainsaw-wielding maniac downstairs instead of her spunky grandmother.
She inched her way into the hallway then slowly to the top of the stairs, ancestors watching her with stoic stares from ornate and vintage frames along the flower-wallpapered walls.
Making her way down the wooden staircase that dated sometime in the early 1900s, one hand on a banister, she winced as the grinding noise grew louder. It was clear now that the sound was coming from the kitchen.
Amidst the grinding, she could hear Dean Martin crooning away and just as loud, Lucinda’s voice joining in.
Gladwynn set the flashlight on a small table sitting against the wall next to the staircase under a framed image of the Grant coat of arms that a great-uncle twice removed, or something had brought back from a trip to Scotland.
She paused to look through the kitchen doorway, unable to keep from smiling at the sight of Lucinda wearing a silky, bright pink bathrobe, her back to the doorway. Her light gray hair was swept back in a messy bun and her plump hips swayed from side to side as she sang while pouring something bright green from a blender into tall glasses.
Gladwynn stepped up into the doorway. Lucinda looked over her shoulder, smiled, and belted out the end of the song, before flicking off the CD player.
“Hey there, girl! There you are! You were passed right out when I got home. That must have been some crazy second day.”
When she got home? Where had her grandmother been last night at 8 p.m. if not curled up in bed asleep?
Gladwynn flopped into a chair at the kitchen table. “Yeah. It was a little crazy.”
“Different than library work, huh?”
“That’s an understatement. It’s like walking from Brigadoon into Saigon.”
Lucinda set a glass of the green concoction in front of Gladwynn and winked. “Glad to hear you referencing a classic movie we used to watch together.”
Gladwynn smirked. “Brigadoon or Platoon?”
“Very funny, kid.” Lucinda winked. “You know we never watched Brigadoon together.” She sat at the table across from her granddaughter, taking a sip from the glass. She smacked her lips. “Oh yeah. That’s the good stuff.”
She sighed and folded her arms on top of the table. “It’s been nice having you here, you know. I’d honestly been considering moving to Willowbrook before you called. This place is too big for one person.”
Gladwynn studied the green substance with suspicion. “You? In a retirement community?”
Lucinda shrugged. “I’m there enough as it is and almost all my friends are there now so it probably wouldn’t be a huge adjustment. Plus, it’s not easy for this old lady to take care of this big house anymore.”
“What were you going to do with the house?”
“Sell it, probably.”
She couldn’t be serious. This house had been in the family for over a hundred years. “Why? Wouldn’t dad or mom or Aunt Margaret or Uncle Doug and Aunt Harriet have wanted it?”
Lucinda shrugged again and took a swig from her glass.
“None of them are interested in keeping up this old place. They’ve all got their own lives and responsibilities. Your siblings and cousins are too wrapped up in their own worlds to care about it either.” She smirked. “Except for Trudy. I overheard her at Christmas last year tell her friend, or whatever he is, that she would love to turn this house into a bed and breakfast one day.”
Yeah, that sounded like Gladwynn’s cousin Trudy. She scoffed. “She would have abandoned that idea as soon as she realized it would require her to actually do work.”
Lucinda revealed a faint smile over the rim of her glass.
Gladwynn twirled the glass slowly in her hands and made a face. “What is this stuff anyhow?”
“It’s a green smoothie. All the rage and very good for you.”
Gladwynn sniffed the glass and set it down again. “Green things aren’t really something I eat. Or drink. Ever. But especially in the morning.”
Lucinda lifted an eyebrow. “Being healthy doesn’t interest you? Well, then, by all means go ahead and pour yourself some cereal that resembles cardboard or throw some heart attack-causing butter on a piece of inflammation-inducing toast and toss a piece of cholesterol-raising pig in the frying pan.”
Gladwynn stood. “Don’t mind if I do. Bacon sounds amazing right now. Also, I think it is the butter that raises cholesterol and the pork that can lead to the heart attack. Not sure about that, though, since I really don’t care.”
She felt her grandmother’s eyes on her as she walked to the fridge, but the woman luckily changed the subject. “So, how did your first couple of days go?”
Gladwynn shrugged. “They were okay. The job is just different than I expected.” She slapped a pack of bacon on the counter. “I caught a couple of the staff gossiping about me yesterday. I don’t think they like me very much.”
Lucinda turned fully in the chair to look at her. “Gladwynn, are you listening to yourself? You’re not in high school. ‘They don’t like me.’ ‘They were talking about me.’ Who cares! You don’t have to be best friends with these people. It’s a job. Work the job and come home. You young people today are too stuck on thinking you have to like your job or the people you work with. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about making money to pay your bills and put food on the table.”
The bacon sizzled in the pan. “I know, Grandma, but it would be nice if my co-workers at least liked me.”
“Did your co-workers at your last job like you?”
“Well, yeah, but we were all similar. A bunch of weirdos spending half of our lives with our noses in a book.”
Lucinda chuckled. “You’re so much like your dad. That boy always had a book in his hands.”
Gladwynn tensed at the comparison. She was nothing like William Alexander Grant or her mother, Penelope Fitzwalter-Grant, which was probably why she was always butting heads with them.
Lucinda picked up Gladwynn’s glass and poured half of the mixture into her own glass. “I’m going to the community center tonight to play Pitch. You want to come along?”
“No, my shift starts at three today. I have to go to a meeting with one of the other reporters.”
“Oh, yeah, which meeting?”
“Some little township about half an hour away. Beachwood or something.”
Lucinda finished the smoothie in her glass. “Oh, Birchwood. Good luck with that. Those people are always arguing.”
“About what?”
“About anything and everything. Sometimes it’s about zoning, and sometimes about the shape of the roads. Sometimes someone looked at someone else funny. Who even knows. Lately, the paper had been writing about some beef going on with the volunteer fire department and the township board or a resident of something. I don’t know. I really don’t have time to read the paper these days.” She put her glass in the sink. “I certainly don’t envy you, young lady. Now, before you go, I’ll need you to help me pick out my outfit for tonight. It’s so wonderful having someone here that can help me choose.”
“What about Doris?”
“I love Doris, honey, but you know she has no taste. No taste in music. No taste in men and definitely no taste in clothes.”
Gladwynn shook her head, placing a couple slices of cooked bacon onto a plate. “Now, Grandma, is that any way to speak about your best friend? And her husband for that matter? Bill is a good guy.”
“Doris isn’t my best friend. She’s just a friend. My best friend was your grandfather and he’s not here anymore.”
Gladwynn flipped a piece of bacon. “So, Doris will have to do.”
Lucinda sighed. “Yes, I guess so. She is a very good friend so she can be my almost best friend. As for Bill – well, that’s another conversation for another day.” She snatched a piece of bacon off the plate. “Now you finish that bit of smoothie I left for you. It’s good for you. I’ve got to get to the post office and then I’m heading up to the Y for a swim. I’m going to swing by Judy’s Market on the way home. Can I get you anything?”
“Grandma, don’t you ever slow down? I want to know how your date went last night. More importantly, I want to know who it was with.”
Lucinda bumped her hip into Gladwynn’s and winked. “There will be plenty of time for that conversation, little lady.” She took another bite of the piece of bacon. “You just get yourself some food and relax until you have to go to work.”
Heading toward the doorway, Lucinda started to hum another Dean Martin tune.
Gladwynn placed a hand to her hip and scowled at Lucinda’s retreating form. “I thought you said bacon wasn’t healthy.”
Lucinda glanced over her shoulder waving the bacon above her head. “It isn’t but it sure does taste good.”
After she finished her breakfast and her grandmother had left to run her errands, Gladwynn made her way to her grandfather’s office, which was also a library with floor-to-ceiling cherrywood bookcases built into the walls.
Little had been changed in the room since Sidney William Grant had passed away six years ago. The top of his mahogany desk had been cleared of papers, but family photos still remained. Rows of books from a variety of eras filled the bookshelves and oil paintings of scenes from the area along with various photographs from his 50 years as a minister lined the walls.
Gladwynn paused and breathed in deeply. She was amazed the room still smelled so much like her grandfather’s aftershave. It was as if the day he died her grandmother had closed up the room to lock in all the smells and memories of him. It was clear, though, that Lucinda, or someone else, had been in the room since then by the lack of dust on the desk and shelves.
She sat in her grandfather’s chair and rubbed her hands along the black leather of the armrests. An old-style radio she’d been told was her grandfather’s when he was young sat across the room on a small table. It was probably built in the early 1950s, maybe earlier. She remembered sitting on her grandfather’s lap as a child in this office, listening to the oldies radio station.
The songs from the 1940s and 1950s had always been her favorite. She still listened to them when driving in her car or while reading.
Though there was a time that sitting in this office had made her feel sad and acutely aware of her loss, she felt an odd sense of joy and peace sitting here today, grateful for the memories of him.
She stood and looked at the books on the shelves, choosing one her grandfather had read to her when she’d used to visit in the summer.
The Hobbit.
She sat back at the desk with it and opened it, the crack of the spine sending a delightful shiver up her spine. She’d always loved the hand-drawn illustrations inside.
An hour later she looked up at the clock and yawned. She didn’t want to leave the refuge of the room, but she should probably get a shower and start putting her clothes away in the wardrobe in her room, something she hadn’t yet done since moving in last week. She laughed softly, thinking of the first time she’d stayed in that room as a young child and how she’d felt all the way to the back of that wardrobe to see if it felt cold as if it might really be a portal to Narnia, which she had been reading about at the time.
Walking back toward the staircase, she marveled, once again, at the size of the house. To get to the main staircase to go upstairs she walked past two parlors, a living room, a sunroom that included a mini library filled with her grandmother’s classic book collection, a dining room that was bigger than her first apartment, and a full-size bathroom. Inside the living room was a stone fireplace her grandfather had built.
Upstairs there were four bedrooms, a room that used to be a nursery but was now a den, two porch balconies outside two of the rooms, a full bathroom that Lucinda had installed a hot tub in three years ago, and an attic on the third floor.
Outside, massive granite stairs with grapevine mortar sidewalls lead up to a wrap-around porch and porte-cochere that led to a three-car garage at the side of the house, at the end of the drive, that had once been a carriage house.
The home, built in 1894, had originally belonged to her grandfather’s grandfather, a prestigious county lawyer and then judge. The woodwork inside was original and Gladwynn ran her hand along it as she walked to her room at the end of the long hallway, which was lit by lanterns that resembled those from the early 1900s but had actually been installed in the 1960s.
This home had always fit her personality more than the modern two-story house she’d grown up in with her parents, two older sisters, and older brother in upstate New York.
Unlike her older sisters she’d somehow never felt like a modern girl. Instead, deep down she felt as if she’d been meant for a different decade. She had even set aside modern clothing for more vintage outfits since high school.
“You’re a girl with an old name and an even older soul,” Lucinda had once told her as they sat on the metal bench in the middle of her grandmother’s overflowing flower garden.
Gladwynn heard her cell phone ringing as she reached the end of the hall. She took her time getting to it, knowing who it would be.
She glanced at his name on the lock screen, pushed the call to voicemail, and once again questioned why she hadn’t yet blocked his number, knowing deep down it was because she hated leaving anything unresolved. Someday she’d have to resolve that situation, but for now, she was going to enjoy a long bath before work.
May 11, 2023
Randomly Thinking: A few random thoughts about spoons and other things
I have no idea why it has taken me so long to write a Randomly Thinking post but here I am, finally compiling my random thoughts and happenings into a blog post.
Enjoy the randomness.
A few months ago, my mom called to tell me that one of the women at physical therapy had noticed something black in my dad’s ear and felt he needed to get it checked for cancer.
My dad set up an appointment because he has had skin cancer removed in the past.
As he was getting ready to go, he took a shower and was trying his face and ears off when he noticed black on his towel. That’s when it hit him. He didn’t have some sort of new growth in his ear. It was the charcoal soap he’d been using to wash with but it apparently didn’t come off very well.
Crisis averted.
***
Sometimes I mumble my starting word count over and over when I am using a writing sprint program in Discord so I can remember it when I write it down. Later I put in how many words I have when I finish writing and it tallies how many words I wrote in a certain amount of time.
When The Boy hears me mumbling my word count, my teenage son asks if I am whispering my activation code for the chip in my head.
***
Little Miss and I were watching Mary Berry one night and she was cooking duck. The Husband said he wanted to know where we could get duck locally and decided to Google it. He didn’t find a local provider but he found a bucket of duck fat for an insane amount of money.
In response to our shock, Little Miss said, “Well, yeah…it’s a delicacy.”
I have no idea where she learned that word but probably from Mary Berry. I think we’ve watched too much Mary, honestly. My child is picking up her lingo.
***
One day I mentioned the book/story “I Once Knew A Woman Who Swallowed a Fly” and Little Miss called out, “No! I don’t like that book! I don’t like the perspective of being in her stomach. It’s gross.”
Again – is this a normal 8-year-old thing?
***
I told Little Miss one day that I didn’t know how she was still awake after staying up late the night before and getting up early that day.
She widened her eyes, pressed her fingers together and wiggled them.
“I’ve been stimulating my brain all day to stay awake,” she said in a silly, high-pitched voice.”
***
One day The Boy was explaining something to Little Miss and I, then realized we already knew what he was talking about.
“Sorry,” he said. “I know I don’t need to explain that to you guys. You’re not dumb.”
Little Miss tipped her head sidewise toward me and said, “Well, I’m not. I don’t know about her.”
I said, “excuse me? I’m not dumb.”
“You do dumb things sometimes,” she said.
“Well, we all do that,” I said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You swear and that shows you’re not very smart.”
Ouch.
I mean. …. She’s right but … ouch.
***
My kids have very big vocabularies and people have told me that they sound like little adults. I’m never sure if that’s meant as a compliment or not. Here is the thing, though, my husband is well-read – much more so than me (I feel dumb around him) and we never talked baby talk to our kids (which isn’t a bad thing). We just talked to them in regular adult speech (within reason) and they just picked up those words and meanings and went from there.
It can backfire, though. One time around 6 years old my son had a friend over and he was talking about Venom from Spider-Man and said that Venom was a symbiote. The little friend scrunched up his face and said, “What’s that?” My son said, “It means he needs another living creature to live off of. Geesh, you really need to broaden your vocabulary.”
***
The Boy has a job now and has been thinking a lot about his future and about what he will do after he graduates. One night I had to calm him down because he thought next year was his last year of school. I had to tell him he has two years of school left, not one.
This calmed him some and then he said, “I don’t have to have a life goal. I’m 16. Right?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m 45 and I still don’t have a life goal. My goal is just to survive I guess.”
***
Every once in a while my teenage son will have himself a rant about how my mom, and me, tell him to use the regular, everyday spoons when he sets the table and not the soup spoons.
“There is no difference! They are just spoons!”
I reminded him that every day spoons are smaller than the soup spoon.
His response was, “The larger spoon should be the default spoon for all spoons! If you want a fancy spoon for your fancy dinner then make it the same size but less bent!”
I was like, “Honey, one is a one is a teaspoon and one is a tablespoon.”
“They are just spoons!” he screamed. “When our ancestors were carving the spoons from wood they didn’t say this is a soup spoon and this is a regular spoon. They said this is a spoon! An all-purpose tool for putting food in my mouth! There is a smaller spoon and a big spoon. That’s a giant spoon even better for shoveling more food in your mouth!”
He literally ranted for four straight minutes about the spoon drama.
I decided not to mention that there are also serving spoons.
***
The Boy and his friend were recently watching a video that showcased the top one songs through the decades. They were into it, all the way up to the 2000s when my my son says “Aw man it sucks. Those generations got that cool music and we got Cardi B.”
I can’t help but agree.
Here is a random photo of my cat:
And one of my dog:
So there are a few random thoughts.
Tell me one random fact about yourself today.
May 7, 2023
Sunday Bookends: A spring outing, reading mysteries, and new glasses for the youngest
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, what the rest of the family and I have been reading and watching, and what I’ve been writing, and some weeks I share what I am listening to.
What’s Been Occurring
I did not share a Saturday After Chat post yesterday because I was out of the house both Friday and Saturday and did not have time to write one.
On Tuesday last week, we traveled to a town near us to pick glasses up for Little Miss and The Boy. Yes, Little Miss is now like the rest of us in the family and has glasses. I don’t really like that she’s had to get them at such a young age, but if she can see better, that’s great.
I wanted to blame too much device usage on her need at such a young age, but then I remembered that I was only a couple of years older when I got glasses, and I didn’t have devices back then. I did a lot of close work with sketching and reading but I did not have a phone or Kindle or anything else that might cause me to be near-sighted. I suppose it is simply bad genetics once again.
Luckily, she looks absolutely adorable in glasses.
The Boy looks absolutely adorable in glasses too, but he doesn’t pose for photos anymore.
The Husband would probably pose but his glasses are old so I didn’t take a photo of them.
After we picked up the glasses we went to the local library for a gathering with the local homeschool group. It was a lot of fun and nice to finally meet other homeschooling parents. I had met a few of them at the end of February but several of the children were sick that week. We missed the next couple of meet-ups because of Little Miss’s dental procedure, weather, and Little Miss getting sick one week.
During this meetup, they had a birthday theme and exchanged gifts between the children to help encourage them to get to know each other. This didn’t really work as much with the teenagers who simply looked at the floor while they handled each other gifts, but it was a good idea.
One of the members brought their pet pig and then there were birthday party type games (Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Musical Chairs, and a pinata). Little Miss had a blast but by the end she told me she was all socialized out and wanted to go home and not talk to people for the next five months.
Yes, she is very similar to me.
After interacting with other people I need a downtime of not talking to anyone or going anywhere for at least a day, if not more.
On Friday, Little Miss and I grocery shopped, which I hate doing but it went well, even though I had to have our van looked at by an exhaust specialist before we went because we have a hole in our exhaust and then grocery shop. I actually very much dread going to the grocery store. My weird health issues seem to kick in during those visits. My legs get weak, my head feels odd, and my lower back hurts by the time I get halfway around the store.
I prayed all the way to the store, though, calling on Jesus’ many names – Elohim, Adonai, and Jehovah Jireh, my provider. I rebuked anything coming against me and by the time I left the mechanic to head to Aldi, I felt so much better. I was able to get all of our shopping done and when I went home I even carried in all of the groceries, something I’m usually too tired to do.
In full disclosure, I did take a l’theanine before I left. It is a natural supplement to help with relaxation but there is no way it had time to kick in and not only that, it does not give me energy or take away the vertigo I experience in stores or in fluorescent lights. Only God can do that. Don’t be afraid to ask him for help in even the smallest situations in your life.
Yesterday we visited a comic shop as a family for Free Comic Book Day.
We traveled about an hour to get to the comic shop, visiting a town near us that we had not visited before. It was full of old houses that dated back to the early to mid 1800s. I honestly felt like I was in an old neighborhood in Philadelphia or something.
The kids and The Husband went into the comic book store and I wandered down the street, admiring the old buildings and beautiful churches.
There was a Little Free Library at one of the churches in the town with the comic book store and I found what I think is a cozy mystery. I replaced it with a book that was in the van.
After our visit there we stopped at a GameStop store for The Boy and visited a park/playground afterward.
It was a nice day, especially since we finally had a sunny, warm day for the first time all week and also because the views were so nice.
I am trying to talk my dad and son in building me a little library that I can install across the street from our house. I think it would be fun for people who are walking or driving by to see and know that they can find good books in.
What I/we’ve been Reading
While I was not a huge fan of M.C. Beaton’s writing style, I couldn’t help reading through Death of a Poisoned Pen, which is a Hamish Macbeth Mystery. I gave up at one point and said I couldn’t put up with her choppy writing any longer, but I needed to know what happened so I went back to the book and finished it Friday night. This was a later book in the series so maybe it wasn’t even written by M.C. Beaton by then. Maybe ghost writers wrote it like they do James Patterson’s books.
Now that I have finished that book I am free to focus on Fellowship of the Ring, which I have a goal to finish before the end of May but will probably finish earlier. I need The Boy to finish it before the end of May as well because I would like him to write a review of it and Huckleberry Finn before our meeting with our homeschool evaluator.
I am also reading a cozy mystery by Amanda Flower, a new-to-me author. The book is called Flowers and Foul Play. It is a Magic Garden Mystery so there is a bit of magic mixed in.
Little Miss has been reading a collection of Charlie books to me. Charlie was Ree Drummond’s (The Pioneer Woman’s) dog and there was a series of I Can Read books written about him. I found the collection at a library sale, and she’s been reading a chapter or two of the books to me before bed. Then I read from The Miss Piggle-Wiggle Treasury to her but I am telling you, I am ready for that book to be over. The stories really do drag a bit and I find the solutions this woman has to common childhood quirks a little irritating. It was written in the 1950s when children weren’t supposed to be imaginative, I suppose because the latest story had a mother trying to figure out how to get her son to stop daydreaming and dragging his feet and instead hurry up and do what he is told.
Little Miss likes the stories though, so I push through for her sake. I can’t wait until we can move on to something else, though. The book is due back this week, but, sadly, I can renew it again.
On our trip yesterday, Little Miss read an entire Imagination Station book by herself – they are about 80-100 pages long and around 12 chapters. They are books produced by Focus on the Family through the Adventures in Odyssey series.
The Husband is reading Peril at End House by Agatha Christie.
What We watched/are Watching
We watched a lot of Newhart this past week and I watched Holiday with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, which I loved.
Little Miss and I watched some Mary Berry.
I actually did not watch a lot this past week because I was either revising my book or reading a book.
What I’m Writing
I am in the revision process for Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing so I worked on that a lot this week.
On the blog I shared:
Spring of Cary: HolidayEducationally Speaking: Homeschool update. On our way to summer break and taking a more relaxed approach to learning
Blog Posts I Enjoyed This Past Week
Rose Fairbanks: Living In the Overflow
Mama’s Empty Nest: Words for Wednesday, Just Like Mom
https://mamasemptynest.wordpress.com/2023/04/26/words-for-wednesday-just-like-mom/
Now it’s your turn
Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
May 4, 2023
Spring of Cary: Holiday
Here we are to another week of Spring of Cary where Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are watching Cary Grant movies for the spring. Katja from Breath of Hallelujah is joining in when she is able to.
I chose the list of movies from the ones of Cary’s I hadn’t watched before.
Our movie this week is Holiday and it was released in 1938, so it was one of Cary’s early films.
The movie icks off with Johnny Case (Cary) coming back from a visit out of town where he says he has fallen in love with a woman and is going to marry her.
His friends don’t believe him and think he’s going to be destitute with a woman and her family leaching off of him.
They have nothing to worry about because when Johnny goes to the address that the woman he wants to marry gave him he finds out her family is super duper rich and live in a house that looks like, as he describes it, Grand Central Station.
The potential bride-to-be, Julia Seton (Doris Nolan), lets him know she’s from the famous, well-to-do Seton family. She also tells him that her father will expect him to start working with the company and become a businessman and Johnny really isn’t sure that’s something he’s interested in. He just wants to have fun. Like he told his friends at the beginning of the movie:
“She wants the life I want, the home I want, the fun I want.”
But does Julia really want all that? We will have to find out.
After Johnny first arrives at the big, fancy house, Julia tells Johnny she’s going to go to church and tell her father about them, and on their way out the door, in walks Julia’s sister Linda (Katherine Hepburn), who is very intrigued with this man her sister says she’s going to marry. It is clear that Linda has an entirely different spirit than Julia. A much freer spirit.
Linda wants to make sure that Johnny is good enough for the sister she loves. Deep down she doesn’t want Julia to get married. We learn later that one reason she doesn’t want Julia to get married is because she doesn’t want Julia to move out of the house and have a home of her own, This will leave Linda alone to be bored and unsure of her own future. For now, she’s simply rattling around in the big house where the men in the family and their goal of succeeding is the main focus and she is expected to attend business parties.
Early on we learn that Julia and Linda’s mother has died at some point in the past, but she was a fun mother who wanted her children to stay somewhat grounded so she had a playroom built in the house that featured more common furniture and the tools each child needed to explore their passions in life (a drum set, paints, and workout equipment for example).
Johnny isn’t very interested in impressing the patriarch of the family. He wants to work for a bit to save some money and then take several years off of work and go back to work when he learns why he’s been working his whole life. This is what he tells Linda, saying he wants to take a bit of a holiday in between his working years. The term “holiday” is sort of a British term to me but I know he means a type of break or vacation.
Linda likes the sound of that because she’d like to take a holiday from her rather mundane life where she feels like her family has lost touch with – well, each other. She longs for the days when her mother was alive and everything felt more real and wasn’t all about money.
Linda can tell right from the beginning that Johnny is a free spirit and while Julia is nice, she is not a free spirit. She is a “this is the way we’ve always done it and it needs to be done this way still” type of person.
As much as Linda is worried about Johnny ruining Julia’s spirit, she also seems worried that Julia will do the same to Johnny.
It all comes to a head at the New Year’s Eve party where Julia and Linda’s father announces the couple’s engagement but Linda refuses to come to it because she was going to throw a smaller, less public, and more intimate party for her sister instead.
The sisters also have a brother, Ned, who keeps himself liquored up to deal with life.
This was really just a fun movie and I absolutely loved Katherine Hepburn in it. Critics called this her comeback movie after she had developed a reputation with RKO Pictures as being box office poison. I feel that in this movie she really showed them that they made a mistake. One critic in 1938 said the same, writing, “”If she [Hepburn] is slipping, as Independent Theatre Owners claim, then her ‘Linda’ should prove that she can come back–and has.”
She was sweet and touching in this movie and just pulled me into Linda’s world so easily. She and Cary had an amazing chemistry and as much as I liked Cary in this movie, I was mesmerized by her performance and simply impressed with his.
I really enjoyed Cary’s youthful exuberance in this movie. According to Wikipedia, he was 34 when the movie was made. He just seemed more chipper and happy in this movie than the previous movies I’ve seen him in. Since Cary was much younger in this movie, he was able to pull off a lot more of the physical comedy. Katherine got in on some of her own physical comedy during at least one scene.
This was one of four movies that Cary and Katherine were in together. The others were Bringing Up Baby (I absolutely recommend this one), the Philadelphia Story (I also recommend this one), and Sylvia Scarlett which The Husband just realized we have on DVD in a collection of Cary movies.
Incidentally, the director of the movie, George Cukor, almost cast Irene Dunne in the movie, which was the actress who was in The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife with Cary. In the end, though, he chose Hepburn, which, as I mentioned above, did worry some in the industry.
I enjoyed this movie more than any of the others we have seen so far. To me, Cary and Katherine are simply a winning combination.
To see Erin’s impression of the movie hope on over to her blog.
I don’t know if Kajta will have a post today or not but if she does you can find her blog here.
Next up in our lineup for movies to watch:
Operation Petticoat (May 11)
Suspicion (May 18)
Notorious (May 25)
May 2, 2023
Educationally Speaking: Homeschool update. On our way to summer break and taking a more relaxed approach to learning
We are on our last month of homeschooling before summer break and to say we all have summer brain is an understatement. Not even the teacher is focused all the way in on school right now. Because of our lack of focus, I have decided to dial down the strict workbook and textbook-heavy subjects for this month, but we will still be doing them twice a week.
I got to mid-April and realized I hadn’t focused as much on the arts as I need to in order to meet the requirements for the state we are in so I decided we would make May an art month. That means more lessons on artists (Monet, Cezanne, Picasso) and musicians (composers like Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart) throughout our week and fewer lessons on math, science, and history. We will still be doing those last three subjects, just not every day.
This is a relief for Little Miss who is so dramatic when I tell her it is time for her math lesson. You would think I would have told her it is time to clean the toilets at a frat house.
She often runs and hides, pulling a blanket over her head in a homemade fort she made by turning our couch to face the wall and hanging the veil-like curtains across it.
Once she sits down and does it, however, she really doesn’t have any major issues with doing the math.
She isn’t a fan of having to write letters either so that has also been a struggle this past year. I need this summer break as much as her.
However, I have told her she will need to do some math during the summer so that she doesn’t have to jump back into it cold in August when we start up again. I’m also considering starting school a month early this year. This will allow us to take more breaks throughout the school year at times when we feel beat down by the mundane routine of daily lessons.
I have been the most relaxed about homeschooling this year than in any previous year. I have finally started to accept that homeschooling is not simply school at home. It is not bringing the traditional idea of public school into your home.
We homeschool so we can break away from a system we do not feel is conducive with the need for children to be free to focus on their passions and to learn at their own pace. Homeschooling parents bring their children home to learn for a variety of reasons, but at the core of it is that the child is not thriving or might not thrive in the traditional environment.
For us, homeschooling has offered more opportunities for learning beyond the scope of a daily lesson. It has allowed us to take a subject my child is interested in and explore it beyond one moment in time in their education. It has also allowed us to go visit or go help my parents whenever is needed, which has been invaluable to us, especially to my son who is very close to his grandfather.
Resting on my newfound acceptance that homeschooling doesn’t have to look like a traditional public school day, we started taking a much more relaxed approach to our homeschool days sometime in March. We did math and reading lessons, but history was reading historical fiction and watching videos and then simply talking about history. Math was lessons in our book but also on ABC Mouse for the youngest. The oldest does his math online so there wasn’t much of a change for him. Reading or English has been some actual lessons about parts of speech and grammar but it has also been simply reading books out loud to each other, discussing hard words when we get to them or discussing what we read.
I read a post on Facebook recently by … that reminded homeschooling parents that homeschooling can happen at any time of the day. She wrote that you don’t have to read to your child only during the day and count that as a time of learning. Read-aloud sessions can happen at night before bed while waiting in the car, or pretty much anywhere at any time.
Life lessons and skills can be taught throughout the day.
Homeschool is a 24/7 type of education that doesn’t require a desk or a book or four walls around a child. It is a constant flow of information and knowledge that can come through the everyday journey of life.
With all that being said, yesterday Little Miss and I watched videos about Mozart while she made slime. We read Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle before bed for our English reading.
Today we have a homeschool gathering at the local library.
Tomorrow we will be painting in the style of Monet while watching videos about him and the other impressionists or while listening to Mozart. We will also probably read some from The Cabin Faced West for history and do a math lesson or simply go on ABC Mouse and have her play some games there related to what we’ve been learning in Math.
The Boy will be reading Fellowship of the Ring and working on a research project and also preparing some Minecraft creations for the art requirements under the homeschool guidelines for our state. Then he will go to work as a dishwasher at a local restaurant, which I see as another educational opportunity and an activity that fits in well with homeschooling.
Later in the week, we will be watching art history videos, and videos about famous composers, and I will be encouraging him to continue bass lessons at home since we are taking a month off from his formal bass lessons (which were 45 minutes away and a bit expensive for us this month).
This month, both The Boy and Little Miss will also be studying music from a book I ordered that is set to arrive today.
I am absolutely loving this freestyle type of learning that incorporates music and the arts into our academic lessons. It’s something I plan to do more of during our next school year.
April 30, 2023
Sunday Bookends: Who is M.C. Beaton? Crazy days with young children and old movies are what I’m watching
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, what the rest of the family and I have been reading and watching, and what I’ve been writing, and some weeks I share what I am listening to.
What I/we’ve Been Reading
I didn’t read a ton last week because I was working on finishing Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing. I hope to have it done in a couple of days and then I can return back to some of the books I’ve been reading.
I took a break from Fellowship of the Ring but am anxious to get back into it this week.
I have been reading Death of a Poison Pen by M.C. Beaton. It’s a Hamish MacBeth Mystery.
Now, in some ways, I’m not sure what I think about the book because there is a lot of head hopping between characters – like how old books were written (you know, where the author tells you what everyone in the room is thinking all in the same scene) and I don’t know that I love Beaton’s writing but I’m caught up in the mystery and I can’t put the book down when I start reading. I need to know who killed the postmistress and the school’s head teacher!
I have a feeling Beaton’s writing will grow on me and I’ll read more by her. I won’t read the most recent Agatha Raisin books that they put out with her name on them, though. I picked one up and it was awful. I don’t think she wrote it at all since I think she was in her 80s when it came out and put out right before she died, actually.
She is the author of two very popular mystery series in the U.K., including Hamish Macbeth (my friend Erin says the show on BBC is nothing like the books, just a warning) and Agatha Raisin, but under her real name Marion Chesney she also wrote a ton of historical romance novels. She has also written under the names Ann Fairfax, Helen Crampton, Jennie Tremaine, and Sarah Chester.
There are 34 books in the Macbeth series and 30 in the Agatha Raisin series. There are also books related to the series and a couple were written with the help of someone named R.W. Green after she died.
Yes, I have been reading Wikipedia. Why do you ask?
The Husband is reading Victory City by Salman Rushdie.
Little Miss and I are reading The Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle Treasury before bed. She loves it and I don’t really but I’m reading it for her sake. They are cute little stories about parents trying to get their children to do the right thing with Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s help, but they are a bit bizarre and silly too.
The Boy is reading his history textbook, and his science textbook and listening to Fellowship of the Ring.
What’s Been Occurring
Last week was a pretty relaxed week but I rambled a bit about what has been going on in my post yesterday.
Today we are recovering from a visit with Little Miss’ friends. I say recovering because they played full force yesterday – spending most of their time on the trampoline – not because it was a bad visit.
We probably won’t visit my parents because my dad is having hip pain after being adjusted by his chiropractor. He’ll have to call the chiropractor tomorrow and tell him that something was not adjusted right at all.
What We watched/are Watching
This past week I watched An Affair to Remember for the Spring of Cary challenge Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are doing.
The Husband and I also watched a Poirot and a couple of Brokenwood Mysteries and a few Newhart episodes.
This week Erin and I are watching Holiday with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn.
What I’m Writing
I am writing the last chapter of Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing either today or tomorrow and then I will begin self-editing the book and rewriting, etc.
This past week on the blog I shared:
What I’m Listening To
The Husband turned me on to Nate Smith this week and then I also listened to Warren Zeiders. Both are country artists but not the garbage we hear on the radio today, thankfully.
Blog Posts I Enjoyed This Past Week
I hope to be back next week with blog posts I enjoyed this week. I didn’t take note of the ones I read this week and I am also behind on my blog reading because of homeschool and working on the book. I hope to get back on track this week. We will see how it goes.
Now it’s your turn
Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
April 29, 2023
Saturday Chat: Zooma is better! Chilly days, playing with the kids, and some old photos
This Saturday evening (because I couldn’t get this post finished before the afternoon was over) I am drinking chocolate almond beverage milk but then I’m going to drink some peppermint tea because our spring temps are low spring temps. It is cold and raining today. It is perfect weather for reading but I don’t know how much time I’ll have for reading since Little Miss has two little friends over and they can be a bit loud and like to try to get me to play with them.
When you were growing up, did you just play with your friends or try to get your parents to play with you? I don’t remember trying to get my parents to play with me. I just went off with my friends and played. No parents needed.
I think my husband created this trend with them when he started chasing them as a zombie one time when they were over. Now they want to play Zombie every time they come over and that entails one of us parents chasing them around the house while moaning and holding our arms out like we are a zombie that is going to get them.
I don’t mind playing a little with them, of course. It does get my exercise in for the day when I do it. I just don’t want to do it all day.
(Update to this part: I’m late posting this because the girls wanted to go to the neighbors’ trampoline and I need to watch them when they do that and there is no wifi out there on the porch. At least I didn’t have to chase them this time. Hee. Hee.).
This past week our Zooma the Wonder Dog fully recovered from the illness that struck her the week before. We were all so relieved. Zooma was very confused when we celebrated her climbing the stairs and jumping up on the bed, but she hadn’t been able to do those things for about a week, so it was worth celebrating to us.
Seeing her run around the yard the other night at full steam was wonderful too.
We learned our lesson too. We haven’t been slipping her any people food unless we know that it is fairly bland and won’t irritate her stomach. So, she does receive a few bites of chicken deli meat or plain chicken, but nothing else. We can’t go through that worry again. (Right after I wrote this, I literally gave her a bite of chicken that was seasoned without remembering it was seasoned. Oh boy! I hope it doesn’t cause an issue. I was thinking the plain chicken would be okay for her. Pray I didn’t make her sick again!)
Little Miss and I have been working on journals for the last couple of months to sell on Amazon. She designed a bunch of covers when she was recovering from her dental procedure so I thought it would be fun to put them up for sale for her on Amazon. Then I decided we would create a journal company for fun. She named it Rose Dove Journals so that’s what it’s called.
We are still waiting for quite a few to be approved by Amazon and I am designing some more prayer, devotional and sermon notes journals.
I don’t think we will sell a lot of journals, but we are having fun so why not try!
Don’t worry I’m not linking to them here. I don’t want my blog to be a full-time advertisement. That’s not why I started back to blogging. I just wanted to connect with other bloggers and have fun.
I used to blog when my son was young – about 14 years ago or more now. He’s going to be 17 this year. I can’t even believe it. When I blogged back when he was young I was called a “mommy blogger”. I wrote mostly about him and what he did and how he slept (or actually how he didn’t sleep) and what it was like to be a mom.
Then for a while I wrote about photography.
Now I just write about whatever strikes my fancy, so to speak.
Speaking of that saying “so to speak” – I use it often and don’t even know exactly what it means. I mean I guess it means “sort of” in a way? Such as, “I write about whatever strikes my fancy – sort of”? I don’t know what it means but it’s one of those sayings I think I use too often.
I also write “instead” and “of course,” too much in blog posts. Do you have phrases you overuse?
Do you think I’m asking too many questions in today’s post? *wink*
Well, brace yourselves because I am going to ask another one. What beverages are you drinking this week?
Oh and one more – what’s the weather like where you are?
I hope you had a good week last week and have a better one this week.
Here are a few photos from today four years ago of my dad and the kids and Zooma. I can’t believe how different the kids look now!
