On Wednesday! hehehe

I went to school to help my daughter’s class with Christmas arts and crafts and we had so much fun!

I was there for the whole school day!

For the first half of the day, another mother and I, were helping the teachers with their craft sessions.

We broke the class up into three groups, two of whom stayed in the classroom with us to make the crafts. The third group went into another classroom with the the teacher to have their ‘Christmas’ with her. She had saved up all of the gifts the children had been bringing for her all week for this special time. They had hot apple cider and she opened her gifts they had brought her. And then she gave them each a gift. She bought pencils for each student with their names on them! I’ll never cease to be amazed how much these teachers give and give and give to our kids - their hearts, their minds, and their pocketbooks! And with her, they also decorated cookies and then gobbled them all up right then!

The kids with us were making reindeer bags to hold all of their goodies in and little wooden ornaments. There was paper, glue, glitter, glitter glue, paint pens - the whole shebang! And it was everywhere! Totally messy, crafty fun!!! I love it!

One of the boys made his reindeer one-eyed and one of the boys made his three-eyed! Silly boys! It was really funny!

Once the children had gone to all three stations, it was time to go to lunch. As it was a special day, the teacher let the children sit outside at the little garden area to eat. It was a lovely little holiday picnic! I sat at a table with six sweet girlies, one of whom leaned on me the whole lunch period - it was so cute and sweet!

After lunch, we went back to the classroom for the ‘party’ - the whole day seemed like a party to me! LOL! Anyway, the children had brought all kinds of goodies! The teacher had issued a good bit of control, in dictating who would bring what…so they didn’t have all cookies and candies!

There were crackers, chips, popcorn and even vegetables! And the vegetables were actually gobbled up!

And the sweet little girl who leaned on me during lunch, made me a card - so nice!

It was a lovely day and I’m glad I finally got to know her class better! I usually know them quite well a few weeks into the school year, but, this year I’ve been so busy on the computer, that I really haven’t gone up there much at all. So it was nice to feel like a ‘room mom’ again!

I just love online shopping when you can find great coupons!

One great place to find these is CouponChief - they have tons of merchant options!

I have a personalized letters for children business, and I am constantly having to shop for supplies and mostly I do that online.

When children are subscribed to my service, once a month they receive a personalized letter from me, in which I tell them about a great book and strongly encourage them to read, making sure they know that it is fun and awesome, not just a chore! The children also receive easy-to-do crafts and fun goodies.

I buy all of the crafts and most of the goodies at Oriental Trading Company, and there are some great coupons for them at CouponChief.com!

And I buy business cards, ‘#1 Reader’ magnets, and pencils at VistaPrint.com and they have great coupons for them, also!

One time I even found a coupon for free shipping on the free business cards - so I payed $0.00 for 250 business cards - it was awesome!!

…was totally kick ass! We had such a great time!

When he comes, he usually only gets one night with us, but, this time he was able to get here earlier in the day.

He got here at 12pm - which gave me three glorious hours with my big brother WITH NO CHILDREN around!!!!!

Wooohoooo!

You see, my stinkin’ brother is a kid magnet - I was gonna say he’s a rockin’ cool uncle, but, it all started looooong before any of us became parents!

Even when we were kids - and there were babies around whose attention I desperately wanted to catch, because I’ve always loved kids and babies - I just couldn’t - because they were all enamored of Mic!

So what that boils down to is this: when they are around, I really don’t get to say much of anything to my brother. LOL!

So the two of us hung out, really for about four hours, because we actually didn’t come home until after the kids were already home from school. I had informed them in the morning that we might be a little late.

So anyway, he picked us up a coffee, and I made us some sandwiches and I showed him some stuff around the house, that I wouldn’t get to with the kids around - one of which is the neighbor’s house across the street. It was built around 1845, and there are many trees and tall shrubs in front of it, so last time Mic was here, you couldn’t see the house all that well. Now with all the greenery gone - you can see the house great! And Mic and I both just really dig stuff like that!

Then we had a blast driving around, talking, and seeing some of my favorite places. I also showed him the kids’ schools, and then we went out to my MIL’s place to see the horses. One of the horses was completely obssessed with Mic and wouldn’t leave him alone, even ‘lipping’ the back of his neck - it was so funny!

Then we went to the top of the ‘mountain’ (we are Colorado people, so even though some out here do qualify as such, they are not mountains to us..heehee) on MIL’s property on which my hubby and his bro hung a tree swing fourteen years ago. It is really cool, because it is right at the top, and as you swing out - you are going over the descent of the mountain. Very scary - I am so glad I have never seen my children do this, I’ve never gone up there when they have. Which is really good, because Mark says he pushes them really high! No thank you. I don’t want to see that!

We really had such a great time, a nice bro and sis time - but, then, it was time to go see on the kids. We drove up, and the kids were riding bikes/scooters in the college parking lot and screamed with delight when they saw us! They followed us to the driveway and swarmed the van like a pack of hungry wolves! Hungry for their Uncle Mic! Heehee!

They played with him all night - basketball, hideNseek tag, gameboy, etc.

Mark came home and cooked us a nice dinner, which MIL had come over to enjoy with us.

And we had a lovely evening.

Mic had to get up very early and Patrick had exams the next day, so we were all a bit anxious to get to bed at a somewhat decent hour.

I think we finally called it a night around 10:30 or 11.

And I think I’ve cried every day since. It’s Saturday, he left on Wednesday…

It was so kick ass to see him, but, I think with his visit being a week before Christmas, it is kind of making this first holiday away from home harder on me.

You know, like - if I hadn’t seen him, I could ’shut down’ that part of myself somewhat, so as not to freak out with sadness over not being with them. But spending time with him left those ‘doors wide open’! If you know what I mean!

Not that I would ever EVER give up a chance to see him, and who knows - I mean, I expected Christmas would be hard anyway….so you never know. I might’ve cried every day before Christmas anyway.

I’m just so damn glad he came during the day when the monsters were away - that was totally KILLER!!

I really, really need a new mouse - and I have always wanted to try a wireless mouse. I’ve heard various complaints about them, now I can’t even remember what they were, darn it. But I still want to try one. I get so sick of my darn mouse cord getting caught up on stuff!

I might just have to order one of those from Technical Cable Applications next month when I start having some money coming in. (Go away, evil finance-draining holidays! Grrr!)

And it sure would be cool to have a Graphics Tablet.
I always wondered how graphics artists make their art happen,
and I expect that would be a cool way to do it. I could have my
signature on my site and all sorts of cool things. Oh! I could
write notes to the kids that I send mail to - or it might be
perfect for a page I have planned called
‘The Bookworm Hall of Fame’ - on which I was
going to display all the names of the kids I’ve
sent mail to - and I could actually handwrite them!
That would be cool!

Here’s something pretty cool - a light-up keyboard! That would be great for my late nights on the puter! And would be quite a conversation piece, I’m sure! I know I’ve never seen one before!

That’s right - that is exactly what geocaching is - a worldwide treasure hunt!

It is so much fun! I mentioned before that my husband got me into it - he discovered it on the web a few years ago.

It began in 2000, when the president of the United States ordered the discontinuation of the degradation of the Global Positioning System signals from satellites, which meant that civilian users of GPS are now able to pinpoint locations up to 10 times more accurately than before.

What this means is - my GPS can find cool stuff hidden in the woods! Wooohooo!

Really - people take say, an ammo box, fill it up with small, usually inexpensive, non-edible goodies, and a logbook and pencil - and hide it in the woods. They then mark the GPS coordinates, go home, log into Geocaching.com and log it there as a new cache.

Then I, or anyone with a GPS unit, can go out and find it! See - a treasure hunt!

When I get to the cache, should I find it, if I want to take out a goodie, I need to replace it with a new goodie.

The goodies might be keychains, small toys, cool Geocaching coins, and all sorts of odd little trinkets.

Often when a person first hides a cache, they will make the ‘original’ goodies kind of special. That might be a gift certificate to a nice restaurant or even a $50 bill! They don’t always do that, but, sometimes…

Also, when you find it - you sign the logbook that is in the cache, and when you come home, you log your find on the Geocaching.com website. That is the number you see in my Geocaching button - I have found 13 of them. I have searched for a lot more - some of them are very hard to find!

And sometimes the caches are tiny, so you don’t trade goodies, you just sign the logbook that is in it.

Ok, I could go on and on - there are many variations and cool things like travel bugs, but, I’ll leave that for another post.

At least now you have an idea of the game!

Here is a site I am going to need to hold on to, for sure!

The site is FAFSA online and they are so full of information and very helpful!

The thought of the kids going off to school in just a few years scares me to death, financially, at least! Well, maybe in more ways than that, I’m sure - but, the cost of it is looming over my head like a big, black cloud.

I think that FAFSA could be really helpful in alleviating some of my fears!

One of the parts of FAFSA on the web that I really like is the secrets section - all of the little nitty gritty things that a college counselor would know, you know?

They also have the FAFSA form tutorials - those are really great!

The financial stress of sending your kids off to college can surely be overwhelming - but, thank goodness there’s help out there!

I got to thinking today about my five things meme and I realized, first off, that two of those things were related - the belching and the day camp experience.

Yep - the guy counselors, whom I adored and idolized, are the ones who taught me how to burp! Hahaha!

Funny thing is, I don’t remember one single girl counselor. Not one.

And girl counselors were always in charge of me. They would separate the kids up into groups of about 10, and assign a counselor to each group - of the same gender.

The sessions were two weeks long, with an overnight in the woods the last night. And the sessions ran all summer long. So - if I went all summer, that’s about six different girl counselors assigned to me per year - for five years - and I don’t remember one of them. LOL!

I do remember the counselors Steve, David, another friend of Steve’s, and the director Lou, whom I had an insane crush on! And I still have a picture of Lou around here somewhere.

And I think that would be Steve that was the belching coach. And he was the one that would speed up the bus on the freeway access road at the hill - just a bit - so that we would bump up in the air a little bit!!

See they would take us to the YMCA in the middle of the day to swim and buy drinks from the soda machine (Strawberry Crush for me, please!) and then go back out to the woods for the rest of the day.

On the first day of the session, you would get assigned your counselor, and then the pack of you would go out wandering in the woods looking for the perfect campsite. Once you found it, you would make it ‘home’. We tied twine on the trees to mark off our campsites, and then who knows what else to make it our own special space in the woods.

You know, come to think of it, I think there was a time or two that we were assigned a guy counselor.

And from the guy counselor, I learned to cook one of my favorite breakfasts - scrambled eggs with taco seasoning. In fact, I had it for breakfast this morning - on toast! YUMMM!

It is truly heartbreaking, as this camp is now held at a park. A park?! How lame! It is a huge park, but, it is still a park! Lame-o!

The area where the camp used to be held is now a new residential development - figures! - and a fancy shmancy walking trail, paved with concrete! Concrete?! You want to go walking through the woods on concrete? What is wrong with this picture?

Mark and I took the kids over there a couple of years ago, and we went off the concrete trail, as we are ‘real woods’ people, and I actually found some of the old neato spots. I might cry just typing this.

Seriously, that was just such a special time in my life. And to think it happened because my parents couldn’t afford ‘real daycare’. Wow. That blows me away just thinking about it.

When we were there, I found a special spot by the creek that my friends and I had a secret fort in, and we found where I think the horse barn was, and we found the old cemetery — in which some of the original Richardson residents are buried. Like - old!

Oh! And one of my best friends - her nickname was Animalson (Allison). There were a few of us regulars, who came all summer - myself, Allison, Jennifer…and the guy counselors gave Allison and I those nicknames…mine eventually was shortened to Animal after she left - and one counselor even called me Ana. Hahaha!

I could write forever on this topic - I so loved that whole experience!

I have been working on losing weight, and getting healthier since we got here in Alabama.

I think it was just the change I needed to shake things up. It is extremely helpful that I am finally living in a small town, like I’ve always wanted to - and also that we have so much wilderness so close by. And I have whenever-I-want access to horses.

I’ve talked before about how I lived in the Dallas area my WHOLE life and just recently moved from there to a small town in Alabama. I think that finally ‘leaving home’ - whether or not I go back - just the actual act of ‘leaving home’ was very good for my psyche, you know?

I have been steadily losing weight and getting more in shape since we got here. I am definitely more physically active out here, for various reasons. Our house has two staircases, we live on a large lot (on which the kids, dog, and I run around a lot), I tend to the horses quite a bit, the dog and I love taking walks in our gorgeous neighborhood - just to name a few.

I am trying to approach ‘getting healthy’ in lots of ways - not just simply eating less and exercising. So I am trying to tackle this from more than one angle.

One thing I’ve always heard is that people that drink diet soda have a high tendency to be/become overweight - and not to mention that artificial sweeteners are just poison for your body anyway - so I stopped drinking my diet soda and also switched to putting sugar in my coffee instead of artificial sweetener.

And that one step has actually made a big difference. It was really weird - it was like something just *poof* let go….it’s odd, and I really can’t explain it. Perhaps someone out there will know what I’m talking about. Anyway, I still occasionally have a diet soda on the weekend - but, even that is rare. And it is great to be free of that!

I’m just trying to take little baby steps in different ways in my life, and I think it is helping.

There is much more I wish I was already doing -yoga and meditation on a regular basis, playing my DDR game on the xBox, walking the dog more, etc - but, I feel like I am getting there - and I am not berating myself for not being there, because I know I’m moving forward, and that is freeing.

It would be really awesome if I could have some personal training and maybe I will do that, too, eventually - if my work online, like this great sponsored post, keeps progressing well.

Anyway, I have been meaning to start a blog just on this subject - but, right now the blog name I want is taken - and the person hasn’t posted on it in a YEAR!! And you can tell from this gabby post that I’ve got a lot to say about it! I have been trying to think of another name that I would like, but, the one I have in mind is really the one I want - so, we’ll see, I guess.

Well, I’ve been tagged for the ‘five things’ meme by Genki Girl - thanks, mama!

Let me see now…

1. I always wanted to be a truck driver and I am sickly obssessed with trucks of all kinds and even large machinery - there is something so incredibly sexy about a humongous piece of equipment! HAHAHA! No, but, really - I mean that - I swear I do- it was an accidental, but fitting, funny-funny, but, I just love those big machines - and I do think they’re sexy! - it was really great all those years that my boys were obssessed with construction vehicles and we watched every construction movie ever made - multiple times! (whose blog has a pic of their kids in front of the big tire? Genki, was that you? that will be funny if it is you, since you’re the one that tagged me! well, that was one of my favorite videos…about those giant trucks, I think we still have that one, too) And we had to stop at all the cool construction sites - and my family would call me up….”Lisa, there’s a giant grader near my house, quick! Bring the boys!” LOL It was so much fun!

2. I can belch SUPER LOUD! (My family always loved that!)

3. One of my nicknames as a kid was ‘Animalisa’ - I loved it!!

4. The woods are my ‘church’. I was truly blessed, in that my folks couldn’t afford a ‘regular daycare’ and so every summer I was sent to YMCA day camp (which was held in the woods) for the whole summer - and it was there that the foundation for my spiritual life blossomed. (Not that I knew that then.) You know, it’s funny how upset we get when we ‘can’t afford something’ - and I cannot begin to tell you how different my life would be without that experience! I think I’ll remember that next time I ‘cant’ afford’ something for my kids!

5. My husband has a gorgeous, and studly, and manly— fancy and pretty ‘99 F250….and I miss his ‘78 F150….because of the sound it made - rumbly rumbly old truck - I would get frisky when I would hear him pull into the drive - EVERY time! His ‘new’ and purdy one is oh-so-quiet…aww….drat! Also, along those lines - he bought me a ‘98 Nissan Quest…very nice van, it has been good to us - very little, almost no, trouble with it. But I miss my ‘77 Delta 88 - her name was Bertha - and she was the greatest!!!

Ok, so there you have it. Now it’s my turn to tag!

I tag: Super-Mommy, Devilish Southern Bell, Brainfizzles, Momgadget, and Casual Keystrokes

They are evil! Pure evil!

Ok, maybe it’s not that bad - but, geez louise! Mark and I sure got into trouble with them!

I had always told him before we ever got one that he and I would be terrible with credit cards - I just knew it!

But then, you get that first one…and it is so damn exciting! And then - they raise your limit….wooohooo! And then you get another one….alright!

It’s so addictive…and you feel like, “Oh, we only have to pay the monthly minimum, it’s cool - we can handle this. No problem. Let’s just buy one more thing…” Or, “let’s just pay one more bill with them.” Or, “let’s just buy groceries with it this time.” …ad nauseum!

And before you know it, you are sunk - completely sunk.

If we pay off our credit card debt before we die, I will be amazed.

And the rotten thing is, they just keep sending you more…and more…and more cards!

It’s compound doom! We really should have gotten some credit card advice straight from the beginning and maybe we could have avoided some of the compound doom we launched ourselves into!

In keeping up with credit card news, I definitely can see that we are not alone in this nightmare of debt! And that makes me feel a little better - like we’re not the only ones who got sucked into this hell, you know?

I hope and pray that we can one day get out of it.