my blessed life

Christmas cards~sending them and receiving them~are one of my favorite things about the holidays. I started sending them to friends and family when I was just about six years old (I've always been an avid letter writer, so I always had pen-pals). I love the whole process of Christmas cards: choosing the card(s), making my list, addressing the envelopes, putting on the holiday stamps, dropping those huge stacks of cards into the mailbox. It's all so much fun to me! In the early years of our marriage I discovered how to stamp my own cards, using rubber stamps and ink. That started a whole new Christmas card process for me. The first year that I stamped our cards I did a 3-stamp-multiple-color-plus-ribbon process on over 100 cards. Yeah, a little too ambitious, but they turned out great!:) (front cover) (inside) The next year I wasn't nearly as crazy. I still stamped over 100, but I kept it to a 2-stamp-1-color process. (front cover) (inside...

We've been making crayons again!! This is one of my all-time fave crafts that the we've done! First of all, we gather up all of our broken crayons--of which there are always many. I always save them now, since our first venture into crayon-making . It's a great way to recycle! We make sure all the paper is peeled off and then we divide them into color groups. Next we used scissors to cute them into small enough pieces and put them in the muffin cups. I found this cute Christmas tree silicone muffin pan in the *dollar* section of Target (I think it was one of the $2.50 items, but still a great bargain!). But before we got around to our project, my son decided to try his hand at making Silly Putty muffins. In case you ever wondered, Silly Putty does NOT come off of silicone. It actually adheres quite well. Just so you know... So we just left that cup empty. :) If you're using a silicone pan (which I highly recommend) place it on a baking sheet for...

It all started down on the farm in Arkansas, well, technically Pocola, Oklahoma (we're so close, you know)... We went berry picking yesterday~strawberries!! And, oh my, were they beautiful!! I mean, look at that !! Nature's very own valentine ! It's just perfect :) The berries were so gorgeous and yummy, we got a little carried away. We picked waaaaay more than we needed for that simple strawberry shortcake we were going to make. So I decided that my mom should teach me how to make jam... heehee ! I really was surprised at how simple the process actually is, it just takes a little time. And really that wasn't too bad either: it took us about 2 hours to make 3 batches (according to the Sure Jell box recipe ). 1. First I hulled the strawberries. 2. Then we washed them~2x~they had a lot of dirt from the fields 3. Next, we sliced them up and squished them really good with a potato masher~just until they started getting juicy. 4. We put 5 cups of smashed berries into the...

I mentioned last week that The Princess has been learning a poem during the month of April, since it's National Poetry Month. Vince filmed her just in time for Earth Day~it seemed appropriate. As a proud mama, I just had to share.... We've been having some Earth Day fun picking strawberries at a farm here in Arkansas (we arrived here yesterday). Now we're getting ready to make some jam~yum! I'll have more to post on that soon! What have you been doing today?

Well, I did it! I bought the very first plants for our container garden. I really wanted to do a raised bed garden, but what with our house being for sale and hoping to move soon we thought it would be wiser to keep it small and in containers. I'd really hate to have a lovely little garden patch in the backyard and have to leave it for the next owners~they're already getting *my* blueberry bushes {sigh}. So here's what we picked: a red bell pepper plant (because I love those and they are ridiculously expensive at the store) cherry tomatoes green bell peppers jalapeno peppers and more green bell peppers I still have another cherry tomato plant and three Roma tomato plants to put in pots. I ran out of large pots and had to make a quick trip to the store. I plan to get them planted today. I also picked up some seed packets: sweet basil, cilantro, garlic chives and lettuce. I've never grown herbs from seed before, but I thought I'd give it a try. Lettuce i...

Some of you may remember that we've been trying to sell our house here in Alabama. Even though we've had lots of interest and have shown it a lot, you know how the housing market and economy are right now. So it doesn't seem that we'll be moving as soon as we thought. We've decided to take our house off the market for right now and try again in the Spring. In the meantime...we're planning our first garden ! Whether we're here or we move somewhere else, we are hoping to plant a vegetable garden this Spring. So I am now in the *information gathering* stage of this. I've started reading a little about compost bins and found a great idea over at Simple Mom last week. We're thinking of tomatoes, peppers (sweet & hot), squash, zucchini, cucumbers, strawberries, a few herbs.... I'd love to hear what you think grows the easiest for beginners! Any tips you can throw my way would be greatly appreciated!

Some of you may know that we've been striving to become *greener* in our household. We still have a long way to go, but we made some major improvements in 2008 and we hope to do better yet in 2009. Recently I found a great little idea for all of those Christmas cards that we send and receive. Now, I LOVE Christmas cards! (Strangely enough, addressing Christmas cards is one of my favorite things to do in the holiday season.) And even though our budget was as tight this year as it's ever been, I couldn't not send out cards. I just shortened my list:) Now that the holidays are over though, it's time to sort the cards we received. Each year I always have four piles: one for those special cards to keep, two for the pictures to go into my album, three for those that I can recreate into next Christmas' gift tags and four for those to toss. Well, this year the first three piles were the same as usual, but the fourth was different. I found a great *green* idea on Katie'...

A few weeks ago I told you about those t-shirt bags I conned my sister into sewing up for me, right? Well, she got them finished and brought them to me while we were all in Kansas City last week. Here they are in all of their glory (all ten of them!): So today I got them ready and loaded them in the back of my car and headed to the store. Then I promptly forgot to take them inside with me . I decided that I would just tell the clerk to put my stuff back in my cart with no bags (like at Aldi's or Sam's) and then bag them in my own bags when I got to the car. I've never gotten such a funny look in all my life--apparently I'm the first person who's ever asked her to do that. I explained that I'd left my *new* reusable bags in the car and asked her if there was any special procedure for bringing those in with me. I wondered if she would think I was a total freak at that question, but she seemed quite familiar with that scenerio and told me all about how easy that w...

According to Wikipedia , April 22nd marks the anniversary of the beginning of the modern environmental movement. I don't know how long it's been celebrated, although I've heard of it before I really always forget about it. However, lately I'm thinking more about taking responsibility for how I treat the environment--and setting an example for my family. Some things I'm doing are: recycling all my plastic shopping bags recycling plastic storage bags (like Ziplocs) changing all light bulbs to the compact fluorescent ones buying more organic foods switching to *green* cleaners My next thing is to start taking my own bags to the store with me. I was getting ready to invest in some of those canvas bags that you can get at Hobby Lobby or Wal-Mart for 3/$5.85--then I found this awesome project. Being involved in student ministry insures that I have more t-shirts that I could ever possibly wear, so I'm making them into resuable shopping bags! Well, to be honest, I'...