Sunday Brunch

One of my favorite things about Sunday is waffles. I love them - from Super Multi grain to Pumpkin Spice - waffles are good food. Our typical Sunday includes making and eating waffles as a family before Brad's 10:00 church meetings (sometimes RIGHT before his church meetings!) I'm not sure if I love the waffles for their taste - or just for the sheer fact that NO ONE complains about eating them, but whatever the reasons I'm grateful for Sunday Brunch.

Halloween At Last...

Our family had a great idea this year - yes, just one a year, but this one was BRILLIANT! We all decided to be Harry Potter Characters for Halloween. It was great to have a family theme. We listened to a lot of Harry Potter theme music and spent a bunch of time at Amber Marshall's house while she sewed these great robes for all of our Hogwarts students. Brad is Snape, obviously. I am the lesser known but equally evil Madame Umbridge. Tanner is Oliver Wood, Captain of the Gryffindor Quiditch team. Madsen is Harry Potter for the third year of his life - but the Quiditch Seeker Harry. Camilla is Hermione, LOVED her hair! Ella was Ginny Weasley and SO excited to dye her hair red. Anna was Luna Lovegood - and her personality pulled it off splendidly - including her catch phrase "It was nargles!" Good times. Magical even.

Broken and Blessings.

You know what they say, "when it rains, it pours." Well, it is raining "broken" at our house. I'm broken. A month or two ago my heart was racing for about 15 hours. An EKG showed that everything was fine (thank goodness) but blood tests at the same visit revealed that my thyroid isn't working like it should. Gratefully they can medicate for that. Then I had some cysts last month. Hooray. Fortunately they seem to have dissolved. Next thing? like a complete idiot, I was cleaning cake mix out of our stick blender with my index finger on the left hand while holding the stick blender in "ready mode" with my right - somehow in the cleaning process my right hand pushed down the "start" button and my finger got blended. It will heal and the blessing is that I didn't have to go to the ER. The ironic thing is that all of my children were at school and Anna was at a birthday party and I was SO excited to be ALONE - I guess I need a child to babysit me. A piece of my tooth broke this week. I'm still looking for that blessing - I guess that it didn't break down far enough to require a crown or root canal! Then on Monday (Monday, Monday - so good to me - or whatever!) I found that someone had stolen my email password and was randomly sending all of my contacts pharmacy emails (sorry about that, by the way!) and my dishwasher broke. So with my pureed finger and my broken dishwasher I have been REALLY enjoying life. Today a repairman came over and told us, for the low, low price of $65.00, that we would have to buy a new dishwasher. The blessing here is that we went to Best Buy (after calling around to confirm that they really were the best buy!) and they only had two dishwashers on display. We didn't want either - well, actually I would have liked one of them, but NOT for the price. So we decided to order one from the online store and have them deliver it to the store in a couple of weeks (Thanksgiving dishes anyone?) When he went online to order the one we wanted it was "unavailable" but it said that there was one in the stockroom at that VERY store! Guess what? It was TRUE! We brought home the dishwasher and are now trying to get it functional. The blessing? No one has been electrocuted... yet.

Thankful... Snow (WHAT???)

I know. No. I STILL don't like snow. But... I am thankful that snow (if we HAVE to have it) umm... I am thankful that snow is WHITE. Even with the never ending cloud cover, the white snow reflects the tiny bit of light that does manage to filter through the winter haze and provides a bit of glimmer in an otherwise bleak season. So there. I found SOMETHING that I like (besides the water factor) about snow - if we HAVE to have it. Please know that I am still the person who will hopefully be found (soon and permanently) in a sunny, tropical, island paradise!!! Aloha!

Oh, and I'm thankful to see my cute LITTLE baby helping my cute BIG baby shovel snow... if we HAVE to have it.

Thankful Music

Christmas starts after Easter in most stores. After Halloween it is a FREE-FOR-ALL for the rest of the world - as far as Christmas goes, resulting in a sad neglect of Thanksgiving. I'm sure Chris Stoker would be proud of my acknowledgement of this fact. This year I decided to try something different. I have started playing hymns of Thanks. This morning it was Come Thou Fount. It makes a difference in my attitude, as well as that of my children. I am thankful for good music.