Success!

This weekend was my daughter's most successful show ever.  She's been doing craft sales for a couple of years, so it was pretty good.  The rain stayed away Sunday all day.  We even got to take down the tents and load everything up into the cars without rain.  It was great!  The sun was even out!  I didn't take any pictures the second day, so this is a picture of Saturday, when it was kind of early and very overcast.  

As to what my daughter is doing now that she has graduated homeschool (which is what everyone asks), she is crafting and doing the craft sale circuit and working on a novel.  Apparently, it's a pretty unusual thing to be doing, according to our family and friends, but I don't think taking a year or so to decide what you want to do is a bad thing.  When I was trying to decide what to do about college and career, I was in the public school peer dependent mindset and I made all of my decisions based on what my friends were going to be doing.  My daughter is making her own decisions.   Meanwhile, she's got a way to make some money while she writes and is happy as a clam crafting and writing.  :-)  

The club is possibly doing another sale this next weekend.  :-)  

I'm having another catch-up Monday today, working on my calendar, my blogs, my Words-With-Friends games ... and the housework.  It's gonna be another busy week!

Rain, rain, go away.

 It started out pretty good this morning, lots of people and the rain was holding off for the craft fair.

 Then it rained and most everyone went home.

This is the gutter which ran underneath our chairs.

Still, my daughter did well, before the rain and we will go back tomorrow.

A Giveaway!!!

I have recently signed up to blog for Family Christian Stores and I'm excited to be able to offer you this giveaway.  They sent me a copy of The Action Bible Guess It Game and we played it the other day.  It is different from most trivia games in that it gives you 20 clues and you get more points based on how many clues you need to use.  This makes it more fun.  Unfortunately at our house, the master of all things trivia, the youngest son, wins every time but it is still fun and educational.  It had us looking things up to verify that they had all their facts right.  (They did!).  The art on these cards is very well done and I think your family will enjoy it.  Register to win!

(Isn't this exciting??  A giveaway!)


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Getting ready.

Ready for the craft sale.  My daughter set up her table in the living room just to see how the amount of her products matched her table size and to see how she could arrange it.  It think it looks like she has plenty of stuff to sell, don't you?

I'm kind of nervous about it, just because it's going to be a long day.  I worry that I will get so tired that I will just involuntarily put my head down on the table and start snoring.  She has strict instructions to nudge me if that occurs.  :-)

Balance ... are we there yet?

I've been juggling things my whole life and I guess that's what it is all about.  Right now, I'm trying to juggle my job, my homemaking responsibilities, working on Mom's house, getting ready for the craft sale this weekend, meeting mom's needs, taking care of my family that lives with me ... I'd throw in homeschooling to just pile it on there, but if you know me and you've been reading this blog for long, you know my kid pretty much homeschools himself at this point.  His sister helps when he needs help. There is a book I am trying to decide whether or not to purchase for him to help him with his spelling, but if I do, I'll just hand it to the boy or the sister and tell them to handle it and they will.  They are very responsible and she's been my assistant teacher and assistant mom to him since the day he was born.  My mom asked her the day he was born -- she was 22 months old --- if he was the best toy ever and she said "yeah."  :-)

Today we can cross off a few things accomplished ... we got about 15 bags of garbage out of mom's house.  Some of it wouldn't have been garbage if it hadn't sat there for nearly a year and gotten somehow damp, but now it is.  We are on the last room, sorting.  We started on it yesterday and its the smallest room in the house, basically a walk-in closet so it might go pretty quickly.  Then, we'll move what we are moving here, here and then we'll have to start cleaning and organizing our house, donating some of our furniture and moving some of mom's furniture here.  It's sad and every now and then I really intensely wish that we could buy their house, but we can't.  :-(  

As to things gotten done today, after work, I also did quite a bit of work on my house, took out our garbage, washed our dishes and cooked our dinner, did some drawing and now I am feeling quite lazy, but I may go to Wal-mart and pick up some things I know Mom needs, so I won't have to do that when I go see her tomorrow.  There's not a conveniently located store between here and there yet.

So anyway, I go back and forth, working a little bit on this and a little bit on that, trying to achieve some balance, but I only get it for a few seconds at a time.  ...

Like I said, life.

The way it goes sometimes.

Free Range Learning shared this this morning, on Facebook.

This is what most days look like to me, but today, it seems more than usual?  Maybe?  I got up planning to go to mom's house and clean and make some phone calls and then go see mom, but I remembered that my rule is kind of, clean mom's house on the days I don't go see her, since she's so far away now that even if I only stay a little while, with being on the road at least an hour each way, I am gone from the house for at least 3 hours.  :-(   So I decided to stay here at home until 2:00 and get some things done at my house.   Normally, on Monday I would do some cleaning of our house, but with my burned hand (second degree burn to right index finger last Monday), I felt that instead of doing the kind of cleaning that gets my hands wet and uses chemicals, I needed to do some desk work, reconciling my calendar, cleaning out my purse and things like that.  I did also do a bit of laundry and I will load the crock pot before I take off on my trip.  I've also been spending some time promoting my various online businesses and blogs, so that hopefully, some passive income will be rolling in just about time for Christmas.

Some days when I am off, I spend about half the day paralyzed, trying to decide what to do so today I am glad that I just did something.  I got several things checked off my list and I feel a little bit more in control of the coming weeks, since I have cleaned out my purse and reconciled all those little appointment cards with my master calendar.

Trying to keep up with everything is a bit much sometimes.  :-)  Working, homeschooling, several small businesses, my daughter's craft business (big sale coming up), Words with Friends, homemaking, taking care of mom ... in other words, LIFE.

Where did this week go?

We are just keeping busy around here.  I did go to see mom and the visit went well.  I think she's settling in a little bit there.  I'm not sure I should say that, lest it jinx it, but it seems so.  We were not able to make a decision fast enough to maybe move her to that other assisted living.  The room became available on Tuesday and was rented by Friday.  We will give it some thought in case in becomes available again and as always, keep observing her and make sure she's reasonably happy where she is.  Having to be responsible for making decisions like that is hard.

Around our house, we have the wonderful news that my son is going to bring his girlfriend home for Thanksgiving!  It's exciting!  I feel that I need to clean the house, starting now, but still have mom's house sitting there needing to be cleaned out so I guess I'll work on that first.  :-)  I am also going to try and perfect a roll recipe so that we have good rolls for dinner.  That's something we haven't been able to do yet.  I've been able to make sweet potato pie, cornbread dressing and gravy, but not the rolls.  We are very picky.

Another exciting thing is our local craft show, my art is going to be displayed and hopefully sold, by someone who has taken it on commission to sell and at the same time my daughter's knitted and crocheted goods are being sold down the street.  Exciting times for our handiwork too!  Also my friend is going to get to sell her beautiful handmade wreaths and I'm excited for her too.   We had a good day shopping yesterday and though I overslept, I woke up in a great mood.  I'm just going to go with that.

I also need to go to the grocery.  :-P

No surgery but ...

I went ahead and took my day off with pay.  I went to mom's house and cleaned for a while, came home and made lunch and then headed out to go car shopping.  The plan was to go car shopping and then see mom, but after hours and hours of dealing with the traffic while car shopping in the heat, we found ourselves at nearly 7:00 p.m. about 45 minutes from home and about 40 minutes from where mom lives (which is also about 45 minutes from home).  If we had went to see her, we would have not been able to stay very long at all, since my husband needed to go to bed early, for work today, so we decided to come on home and procrastinate seeing mom until today.  We found a couple of vehicles I liked but we did not have universal family agreement on anything.  :-(  

After we finally got home, the kids and I went to mom's house to clear out some garbage bags and bring them to our house for garbage pickup this morning and then my son did school work until midnight.  We would not have made him do that, since we wanted him to go car shopping with us, but his sister, the assistant (really main, in charge) teacher said that he was behind because the day before he had goofed off all day, so if he didn't finish school work from the day before he would be grounded from all screens.  So we skipped reading our book last night.

Yes, we are still doing read alouds every night before bed, a tradition we started soon after the oldest son was born 22 years ago.  Every night, either I read, my daughter reads or we listen to an audiobook before bed.  Right now we are listening to the Septimus Heap .  My daughter is 18, my youngest is 16.  I don't know how long this tradition is going to go on, but I'd personally like to adopt a couple more kids and just do it forever.  :-)   Books make life better.