Make a Statement

SaraAmarie has a new kit is coming out Saturday at Sweet Shoppe Designs

A preview of the entire kit:



and here is the layout I did using it. I already have an idea for another one! I love kits that you want to use more than once!

NDISB June Blog Train

I'm SO sorry for posting this late! Just call me the caboose ...

The Natural Designs in Scrapbooking designers has created a wonderful collaborative kit, a collection of wordart and the creative team is has used it for goodies just for you!

Check out the NISB Blog for a full run down of the kit and to all the blogs you need to visit to get a new part.

Here is a preview of the wonderful kit by the NDISB designers.

I've made a quick page for you, I hope you enjoy it! Click here to download.



Your next stop is Samceline http://www.samceline.de

We are a multi-cultural family

Don't be jealous, that's just how we roll!

Our evening commute involves 2 stops at 2 different child care locations to pick up our littlest loves. We pick up the baby first and she is then forced to endure the painful 10 minute ride home. You would think she would live for the few minutes of alone time with me, while my husband runs in to get our son. When else does she have my undivided attention where she can pepper me with questions at the speed of light?

This totally unstimulating experience has caused her to find her own form of torture entertainment. She has taken to making up songs of total gibberish. She is 4! She knows, and regularly uses, thousands of words a minute. I think she is singing to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle (or ABCs, however you want to look at it), but frankly I try to tune it out and just be happy she isn't whining about being hungry and thirsty and demanding we stop at Old MacDonalds just this once.

Yesterday, however, I was exhaused and just couldn't take the loud gibberish so I told her to cut it out. It went something like this:

Me: Sweet little princess, would you please stopping singing gibberish?
SLP: It's not gibberish!! Its SPANISH!! How silly of me!
Huz: Is that like Oui? she said Spanish, not french, get with it!
SLP: *exasperated sigh* NO! That is NOT spanish
Huz: Oh? What is it?
SLP: *eyeroll* Its a GAME!

Get it? Oui = we we = Wii? If you have kids, I'm sure you can imagine how well she took my sudden burst of laughter!

I'm so happy we are raising such diverse children!

Have your kids misunderstood something that had you rolling lately?

Organizing my digital life

My employer offered a 'time management' course right before the holidays.  It wasn't your typical spiel on using a particular system, not carrying around a binder with all your life history in it.  It was just good advice about tweaking whatever system you like to use to help you find some peace - and hopefully a little more time to do the things that are important to you.  I've always considered myself a pretty neat and organized person.  Sometime between a family of 2 and a family of 5, though, things have become out of control!  

When my husband and I married, we combined two complete households.  We still have two of a lot of things.  Like irons.  I can't tell you the last time I used an iron, much less two of them!  We have two crock pots, 2 vacuums (OK, that's handy in a 2 story house) and 2 lifetimes worth of accumulated junk.  Oh yeah, we have 3 kids somewhere in this mess too.

Aside from getting healthy one of my biggest goals for this year is to get this place organized!  With the extra hours at work, and the addition of exercise into our nightly routine I've not had a lot of time to get started on this goal.  So instead of feeling a sense of peace I've been stressing over something additional.  Good plan there ace.  I've finally taken the first step.  Its a small one, but I feel better already.  

I've organized my blog reader!  You didn't see that coming did you?  I use Bloglines, and this is what it looked like last night

After about 30 minutes worth of work, I wittled my blogs down from 203 to 140.  The majority do not update daily - I'd be doing nothing but reading blogs if they did!  

I have six general catagories

• Food - recipe and baking blogs
• Photos - photographer blogs and photo editing help 
• Money - to assist with my efforts to be more frugal and become debt free
• Scrapping - anything scrapbooking related
• Weight Loss - yeah, blogs about weight loss
• Mom Blogs - pretty much anything that doesn't fit in one of the above and is written by a woman!

I am SO happy I took the time to do this!  I often only have a few minutes to read and I'm looking for specific inspiration but I have to hunt through 200 blogs trying to pick out the weight loss or money or whatever.  I like that I can expand each list and click on individual blogs or I can just click on the subtitle and it will show new posts all in one window.  

My next computer organization project is to get the 103GB on my laptop and 149 GB on my EHD tagged in ACDsee and purged of digital scrapping supplies I'll never use.  

The one where the Daycare calls about THAT

As a mom, I think our greatest fear is our children being hurt or sick. We spend countless hours and energy in the pursuit of making our home a safe haven for them. We prepare healthy meals and wash their dirty little hands hundreds of times.

Of course it is inevitable that they will catch a cold or some nasty virus, especially if they go to school or have siblings that do. We give them medicine and take them to the doctor and stay up all night worrying about them.

Then they grow, and they start forming a strong sense of independence I like to call PITA syndrome.

They don't want your help with anything, even if that means walking around with shoes on the wrong feet all day.

This was the stage my middle son was in when he was around 4. I don't remember where I was this particular Saturday but I had managed to escape was away from home for a few hours. I came home to find blisters on my little mans fingers. Seems that when my husband was warming up his lunch, and made the dreadful mistake of leaving the kitchen for a minute, little man took it upon himself to grab the hot plate. Blisters appeared almost immediately on the pads of each finger. I'm sure ice was applied and then a little neosporin and a cute spiderman bandaid for each finger.

These were minor burns and were all but gone by Monday morning when he returned to day care. He had not complained for one minute all of Sunday. Come Monday at nap time though, those fingers must have been horribly uncomfortable. I mean, who can be expected to rest with that kind of pain, even if there is no visible damage - there is a bandaid for goodness sake!

This is when the daycare calls. Might as well have been Child Protective Services. Apparently my cute little man had changed the facts of the story ever so slightly. In his mind, HE was doing ALL the cooking. And of course, the administrators believed him. It seems totally plausible that a 4 year old managed to get a glass plate out of the cabinet, grabbed the big bag of dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets, placed them on the plate and turned on the microwave. When I told them what happened but mentioned that I wasn't actually there the director told me "I'll have to call and confirm this with your husband, this is highly unusual." And she did. And he felt like a heal!

Talk about guilt! Is it not bad enough our little man had been hurt? In a deep recess of my mind, I'm thankful they look out for the kids well being. I know they have a duty to protect. That did not make me feel like less of a good parent at that time though! I was sure that CPS would be knocking on our door at any minute. And not just for the burns, but for the fact that we were feeding him dinosaur chicken too!

We had a long talk that night with our son about telling stories. I don't think it worked, this boys imagination is a force to be reckoned with!

How much homework is too much?

I've been dealing with homework for what seems my entire life. I had barely stopped having my own homework before it reared its ugly head in the form of my oldest sons. Even in Kindergarten they bring home packets worth of homework. My eldest has never enjoyed homework so it became a struggle early on. We both dread the start of a new school year, not because of school itself but because of the battles against homework. His high test grades made it apparent he was learning the material, however his over all grade would suffer because of missing or incomplete homework.

We live in a state that has standardized testing. Because of this, the teachers teach for the test and especially in elementary school work becomes very redundant and boring. My son would consistently score above average on these, once again showing the material was being absorbed without the addition of homework.

My 1st grader has 10 spelling words, 8 pages of homework, 5 sight words each week and is supposed to read aloud to us 30 minutes a night. During Soccer and Baseball season, 2 evenings a week he has practice. That leaves only 2 nights to get the homework complete. We are left with the dilemma of having him stay up past his bed time to complete it or just turning it in late on many occasions. At 7 years old he is already starting to feel, and resent, the pressure of good grades and homework.

None of this takes into account the time commitment of myself and my husband. While some of this pressure might be relieved if one of us did not work full time, I can't help but believe he would be no more likely to want to leave school and come home to immediately start working on school work again. I know it makes me cranky when I have to take work home on a regular basis. When I leave work I want to leave it there. I want to go home and enjoy my time with my family doing things that benefit my family.

I ran across this article on MSN and it brought up some very good points.

I do think kids in high school need some homework to prepare them for the self study discipline that will be necessary in college. They are also able to do this with little to no parental supervision and are able to go to bed later and still function well. Teenager bed times, that sounds like a post of its own!

Do your kids have homework? Do you feel it adds benefit to their learning or just additional stress?

Who made up that rule?

The one that says you should pick on someone your own size?

My 7 year old has been coming home from school sad the last few days.  He is normally such a happy child, glass half full kind of kid.  

Apparently some harlet at school has started telling everyone that he failed Kindergarden and that is why he is 7 when most kids in first grade are still 6. It's all but impossible to reason with a crying 7 year old using words like "cut off" and "school district".  

For the first time ever he even asked to stay home from school, begging to at least not have to go back to the same after school care.  It seems her prime pick on time is while they are waiting for the daycare bus to pick them up.  

I think it's probably wrong of me to want to go shake some sense into her.  I mean, I teach my boys that violence is never the answer.  She is picking on my baby though.  AND SHE MADE HIM CRY!  I should feel bad for not liking this child I've never met.  But I don't.

I should pick on someone my own size.  Or maybe turn the other cheek like I tell him to do.  Who came up with the rule that its ok to pick on someone if they are the same size as you anyway??