Two Things about Me

2 names you go by:

• Windy
  
• Mom/Mommy/Mama
  

2 parts of your heritage:

• German
  
• Polish
  

2 things that scare you:

• Heights
  
• Not being able to breathe
  

2 of your everyday essentials:

• my water bottle
  
• comfortable shoes
  

2 things you are wearing right now:

• pajamas
  
• slippers
  

2 of your favorite bands or musical artists (at the moment):

• Michael Buble
  
• Billy Joel, Elton John, George Michael, James Taylor, Dianna Krall, Maroon 5, John Mayer, Erasure - sorry I couldn't make up my mind!
  

2 favorite songs (at the moment):

• The Way I Am - by Inrid Michaelson
  
• Sway - by Michael Buble
  

2 things you want in a relationship (other than real love):

• Understanding and forgiveness
  
• Laughter
  

2 truths:

• There's no such thing as a free lunch.
  
• When Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.     (Same goes for Papa, Emily, Peter, or Laura.)

2 physical things that appeal to you (in the opposite sex):

• Long eyelashes (Shad's are unbelievably long!)
  
• Square shoulders
  

2 of your favorite hobbies:

• Reading
  
• Eating! (I don't care if it's a necessity; I'm counting it as a hobby too!)
  

2 things you want really badly:

• To be a good mom
  
• To enjoy life
  

2 places you want to go on vacation:

• London
  
• Paris
  

2 things you want to do before you die:

• Learn Spanish
  
• Accept myself for who I am
  

2 ways that you are stereotypically a chick:

• I obsess about my weight and my belly
  
• I care too much about my hair looks (which is a bad thing because I have super-fine hair and it will never look good)
  

2 things you are thinking about right now:

• How I'm not going to get anything done today because Laura threw up this morning.
  
• That I'd better go get ready for the day (since I'm still in my p.j.s as noted above)
  

2 stores you shop at:

• Walmart Super Store  (the only shopping I really do is for groceries and household items)
  
• Target
  

I'm thinking it would be fun to read 2 things about YOU!

 So if you're reading this, copy this and post it on your blog with your answers. (You'll have to turn the font black once you copy it, since mine is white.)

Grateful Sunday

Today I am thankful for the sound of laughter, particularly children's laughter.

Shad had a lot of High Council work to do today, so we did not see him until he came home at 3:00 pm. Usually he would have gone right to sleep, gotten up at 4:00, got ready, and been out the door for work. Instead, he decided to go in a few hours late for work so that he could spend some time with his family. After dinner and scriptures, Emily gave our FHE lesson (yeah - we had a FHE this week). To culminate the evening, we watched The Road To Morocco with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.

I am a HUGE old movie fan and saw this at our library. I grabbed it, hoping to share it with my kids.  The kids were laughing so hard during this movie. It was so fun to watch them laugh and to hear them giggle. It made my day!

(I also love the sound of laughter because it usually means an absence of the sound of crying!)

Kids' Choice Night

Emily got to choose dinner and a movie Friday.

She chose the dish she tried on her 

"mini-mission" to Louisiana - Jambalaya.

Now I have never even eaten Jambalaya myself, let alone cooked it, so I was very grateful that Emily's "mission president" gave me her recipe which centered upon getting one of these babies:

I followed the directions on the box, used a pound of 

Hillshire Farms low fat smoke sausage

 and voila:

Since I have extremely wimpy taste buds, I did follow the suggestion on the side of the box to reduce the spicyness (is that a word?) of the dish by adding an extra 1/2 cup of rice and 3/4 cup of water.  It was still spicy enough to get my nose running a little.

Emily enjoyed her meal choice.

Peter was a little leery, to say the least.

Laura enjoyed the sausage.

Emily recently finished reading all 13 of The Series of Unfortunate Events books by Lemony Snicket (it  only took her 5 weeks), so for her movie she chose this:

We managed to borrow a copy from the library on Thursday. Emily was so excited that we just HAD to watch it Thursday night. The kids liked it so much that they convinced me to let them watch it again on Friday night. It was a fun movie, but definitely for kids who are a little older. It scared Laura (almost 5 years old) the first time through. There's one point where a huge snake jumps at the screen -

we all jumped at that one!

Friday Funk

I'm going to indulge in a little pity party for a minute.
Today has not been my best day so far.

First off in my journey to a Friday Funk, we forgot FHE - again! Shad is only home Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night. Tuesday is Young Women's - so I'm busy. Wednesday is High Council - so Shad is busy. And Thursday usually means one of the kids is somewhere besides our house. So, we have FHE on Friday morning before piano lesson. Last week we didn't have it because I was chaperoning at Youth Conference. One week missed and the habit was broken! I remembered FHE at noon while we were at the dentist's office for the kids' check-ups.

Forgive the quality of these photos - they're from Shad's camera phone.

Another cause of my Friday funk is that the mayor and his puppet (AKA the Police Chief) are trying to stretch manpower to make it look like we have more officers than we do, and so they've decided to put everyone back onto five 8-hour days (we'd been doing four 10-hour days for years). This change eliminates Shad's usual swing shift and today he found out that he's stuck with a graveyard shift - again! No one at our house is happy about this. No one!

In running to the dentist and picking up Peter from chess camp and picking up kids to play with my kids, I didn't eat lunch. When I picked up those kids who would be playing with my kids, they were doing a science experiment with cookies. So my lunch consisted of eating chocolate chip cookies! Why - oh why- do I do such things?!?! I put on 5 pounds in the last two weeks. I'm always trying to make sure my kids don't eat too much junk food, so I eat it so that they won't. Not a good strategy!

And the final straw for me today was going to Lelly's blog to see what our SPT challenge is for next Tuesday and discovering that she's taking a hiatus from blogging, and therefore from SPT, because her life is over-burdened right now. I feel bad that her life is hard right now, but I'm selfishly bummed because I've really enjoyed doing SPT and now it's on hold for a while.

All right, now that that is all off my chest, maybe I can salvage this evening and enjoy Kids' Choice Night. Emily picked Jambalaya and I imagine Peter and Laura are going to refuse to eat even a bite!

Kids' Blog

I spend so much time on my blog, or reading other blogs, that Emily has decided she wants her own blog. Click on this site to check it out.

Wordless Wednesday - Future Babysitter Extraordinaire