Image of the Day

Enjoy a smile from God! :)

cha cha cha changes

Balancing life's demands as a wife and mommy and everything else isn't easy. I recently realized that I couldn't continue working at our church as the nursery director. I won't say the decision came as an effort of logical, well-thought out time. It was more of a crash and burn type of thing that knocked some sense into me. But at any rate, I am SO happy to just be doing the mom thing right now. I've always loved helping the young families at our church but it's been much more difficult since Isaac died. Seeing all the sweet little newborn babies and pretending like I was fine was starting to take a toll. It was only 12 hours a week, but it has made an amazing difference!




So what HAVE I been doing with the extra time?



* Cooking more. Tried making taquitos for the first time with pretty good results. I baked them so they would be healthier, but the crispness wasn't very consistent. Oh, well.

* We bought Ryan a special potty (or "yoddy", as he likes to call it). It may take a while, but now we are officially potty-training our youngest!

*Cleaning more. My kids have stopped asking me who's coming over now. It's nice to just clean for us. :)

* Mending. I have sewed a tail on a kitty-cat costume, patched up some torn pajamas, and worked on our bedspread that is ridiculously fragile.


* Paintings. Enough said.

My Music Research Study Experience

If someone asked you to listen to ninety minutes of music for $50.00, would you do it? I did.

Recently Air 1 offered $50.00 to the first fifty women ages 25 - 34 who signed up to participate in a music research study. I was thinking, I better bring some reading materials with me, because who actually sits and just LISTENS to music without doing something else? Not me. I'm always washing dishes or folding clothes or driving or . . . . something. So I brought a magazine, but it turned out that I didn't need it. We were given these little pager-type things with dials on them. We actually listed to 375 songs! It was crazy. We heard 7 to 12 seconds per song.

Apparently our city was the last one in a tour of five cities, and the results from our study would be given to Air 1 that night. (It was last Thursday.) The moderater told us we would probably start hearing some different music soon. I feel so powerful! (Just kidding.) Actually, the first time I turned on the radio after that they were playing this new song and it really sucked. :) Who knows what the results were. I think the woman sitting next to me cancelled me out anyway, because our reactions to the songs always seemed to be opposite.

If only I could do this once a week; what an easy way to earn some bucks!

Projects and a Hobby

I have to brag on my girl for a sec. Allison stole my camera from me at the park the other day and took these beautiful pictures. Didn't she do a great job? I think it's time for her to get her own camera . . .

I've been working on a few projects lately. Haven't quite ever learned to do ONE project at a time; it always seems to be several. Keeps things nice and crazy that way.

Ryan thinks it's so much fun to go inside that thing. I don't know why we buy toys for our kids when all they really want to play with is whatever mom's working on. :)

Allie wants me to paint the drawers purple. (They share a room and Emmie's choice for the room was pink; Allie's was purple.) Just today I saw in a craft email a dresser that was done with scrapbooking paper on the drawers. Seems like a lot of work. If you are new to reading my blog you will quickly see that I avoid things that are complicated or take very long!