One Thousand Gifts

This is the book I am reading: One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp. Carla surprised me with it after I had been enjoying it in Scott's Parable in Saskatoon. I visit her blog once in a while and enjoy her style; having her message in book form is great.

Watch the video, and if you want to borrow it when I'm done, let me know!

Family Day, How We Love You.

You made it alright that I had to work on Saturday.
You made Sunday into another Saturday (minus the work).
You made it ok to stay up a little late on Sunday.  We didn't, because we were still so tired, but we could have.
You gave us another sleep in day.
You gave us time to experiment with breakfast.  Yummy smoothies.
You gave us a chance to go to the church for Lattes & Bouncy Castles... good visiting.
You gave us a weekday to go out for lunch.
You gave us hours to do work around the house and time to play and time to browse around online...
Family day, you are fabulous and we appreciate you.

M's off to bed now, and Sean will be home soon from golfing (yes, indoor).  That means soon we'll be pressing play and working out, but I think I have a few minutes to share some online finds.

This video caught my eye and imagination - color is a wonderful thing.

I love this scraproom transformation (it belongs to Donna Downey).  The 'before' would be amazing, but I love the brightness and colorfulness of the 'after'.

 

I downloaded a couple of quotes to print off from Becky Higgins' blog.  Wise words.  You can head there for the stories behind them.

 

Oh, and I did a bit of online shopping over the weekend!  I figured if Sean can order stuff online all the time, I shouldn't be shy about it, either.  :)   I like shopping for scrapbooking stuff in person, so I can see the whole thing and the textures and details, but there is nowhere to shop around here, and shipping is less than travelling!  Especially if you're shopping somewhere like Crafty Steals, where stuff is 50% off or more.  Thrifty, that's me.  I'm sure I'll be letting you know when the package at the door has MY name on it for a change!

I think that's all for now.  I'll save the photo of how M did my hair for another day...

Leave a comment - I would love to know what special or fun things you did today.

Looks Like Christmas

 

The tree went up tonight!  Sold the microwave stand, moved a few things over, and put up the new tree.  I did all the `fluffing`(funny how no one else likes that job), put up the lights and garland, but the actual decorating has to wait till M is home from school tomorrow.

I put on the music station and heard this song - thought it was worth sharing!

Merry Christmas!

 

G is for Geocaching!

I had heard about geocaching a few times before I got around to looking it up...  watch this:



I saw this Friday night while M was at camp and couldn`t wait to tell her about it.  We had a full weekend, but first thing Monday morning, we were armed with printouts leading us to two caches in our neighborhood, a camera, a pen and pencil for signing the logs, and a handful of our handmade flower petal fairys to trade.  We went to the first one, hunted around and ended up finding it - a great first cache and very exciting way to start.  The second cache eluded us - probably with a GPS unit we might have had a better idea of which part of the park to look in.

Then yesterday, M and I drove to Winnipeg, and our friend Catherine hitched a ride with us - she had done a bit of geocaching with another friend, and I had printed out some possibilities along the #1 highway, so between the rains we made two stops.  The first one was a disappointment, because even with the hint, the area was too big.  Again, a GPS would have helped.  I've priced some out, but wanted to find some caches and be sure we were in this for the long haul before we made that purchase.  The second cache was much easier and a great place to stop, so our disappointment did not last long.

Madeline found this one!

And then again after supper we went out to hunt for two by mom & dad's place.  Mom came, and Jess and the 3 boys, and we found them both!  They had all heard of it, but never done any actual hunting.  I don't know if they're hooked yet, but we are!

So TeamLinz (CaroLYN and MadeLINE) is at 4 caches found - in two days! I've told her that when we get to 10, we'll make and hide our own.

something to try

There are lots of blogs out there that have a narrower focus on scrapbooking or recipes or crafty stuff, but I've chosen to make mine an extension of who I am, and so you'll find stories here from our lives, funny stuff that M says (like this morning when I woke her up: "Is it Saturday yet?"), my scrapbooking layouts, spiritual stuff, and creative stuff.

That said, I like to try to keep this worth reading, so I was browsing on StumbleUpon yesterday to find something cool to post for you, and found this:



I made one and didn't show M, but sent it out the door with her to play with on the bus...  A fun start to both our days.  The longest part is drawing it out on the paper and cutting - the taping is simple, and in just a few minutes you've got this fun crazy paper thing that you made yourself!  (Let me know if you make one, too!)

PS - Jess and Dave got home safely from Israel - I'm looking forward to hearing all about their trip.

Links to Cool Things

Hey, friends!
Here are a few links that I've been collecting to share with you:

The Uniform Project - Something to watch that will inspire you.

Operation Nice - Something to read that will inspire you.

The Breathing Earth - Something to make you think about the world.

Bomomo - Something to play around with.

Stormtrooper a Day - Something just for laughs.

Have fun!

Dancing Matt

Have you seen this video yet? I think it's great & just saw it again today, so I thought I'd share. Enjoy!

Watch This

and then show your kids, if you think they're old enough. M and I had a good conversation after I showed her and asked, "What can we do?"



I saw this on Anne Jackson's blog, which I've been following for a couple of weeks now. She had a good post the next day, too about the 'shock value' of showing poverty like this. I hope by passing it on to you, it spurs you on to something - in my heart right now is 'how do we grow kids to know God's heart?' so talking to M about this was what I did.

Advent Conspiracy and other stuff.

First, check out this video. Really.



Powerful, hey? So what 'cha going to do about it???

**********

I was surfing blogs on SIS to find one with tunes so I can add some to mine, and I saw a couple of girls had done this quiz and said the results were amazing. So I took it, and they are quite accurate. And you can post your results on your blog... but I'm not sure I know you well enough to post that. That would be some good vulnerability there, but nope, sorry.

But do try it yourself!! The COLOR QUIZ...

It's been a good Saturday - Sean and I spent the whole day together, doing nothing and taking M with the social life to swimming this morning, a swimming birthday party this afternoon, and a bowling birthday party this evening. I asked her if she knew what it said to me that she gets asked to all these birthday parties (there's another one next weekend, too...) She said, "That's I'm a nice person and a good friend and they like having me around?" Bingo.

I've been playing in my room (sorry, STUDIO!) today, trying to figure out how to rearrange it. I've also been working on magnets to sell (just got an order for 6 sets from Janet at work) and the most amazing Christmas gift ever (hopefully!), but I've been tidying and tossing stuff and moving stuff too, so I can get rid of the extra bookshelf and see if I can make better use of my space. I have a feeling that this will be a long process.

So this most amazing Christmas gift? I can't wait till it's done and I can photograph it to share with you after the holidays. I think it's cool, and I've been working on it all year. Little cost money wise, but big cost time wise. The best kind of gift, I think.