'Tis the season

My husband & I usher at Providence Performing Arts Center(PPAC). We have been doing this for 3 years now. It is good, because we get to see shows for free & on occasion have a night out on the town together, all for very little cost. (gas money if we have to pick up my mother-in-law, who doesn't drive) This weekend is the "annual" Nutcracker ballet. I had to work tonight & I passed out programs. The area of the theater we work in changes for each show if you want it to. I like working on the door, because you get to see everyone come in & their outfits; from blue jeans with holes in them & ratty, untied tennis shoes to very fancy outfits. Tonight an adorable almost 4 year old came through my door and I gave her a program, not because she can or can not read, but because maybe someday she'll want to put it in her scrapbook. Her name was Ella & she ever so politely said thank you with no prompting from mom or dad when I handed her the program. (I found out her name after the fact, as they left early.) But it just amazes me some of the outfits I see coming in there. Fussy's fight the frump would have a field day! fussypants.typepad.com
Sorry I didn't feel like doing the whole little link thing.
Time for bed.

Cute things your children say

Wednesday my girlfriend Dawn agreed to watch my girls, so Bill & I could go Christmas shopping. We stayed out way later than I planned, but part of that is we got such a late start on our day. Went to leave and couldn't locate the gift cards we had been given for Christmas shopping. They weren't lost, only temporarily misplaced; in fact they were right where I always put gift cards we have. Then when we finally got everyone in the van, it wouldn't start. Ended up having to jump it and got the battery replaced the next day. So, I had originally told Dawn we'd be there about 10:30 but it was closer to 11 by the time we made it.
I tell her to give the girls quiet time on the couch, if they fall asleep great, if not that's okay. Well, Rachel still getting over her laryngitis falls asleep for about 1/2 hour until she slumps over and Emily starts yelling at her to get out of her space. Great! Now Rachel is awake. Again, not the end of the world, but the nap would have been good for her.
So we're driving home after picking up the girls and I ask Emily about above story. She says she didn't wake her sister up, Rachel says she did and the did not, did too's start! I quickly stop this and say it isn't a big deal, but from the back seat I hear Rachel say, "But, God knows." It was kind of said under her breathe, but loud enough that I could hear it. OH MY GOODNESS! It was all I could do to not bust out laughing.

busy weekend

Well, our thanksgiving weekend was busy. Thursday we went to our friends, the Kerr's, for Thanksgiving. Her brother & his family were in town, as well as her folks. Ken(her brother)made some absolutely lovely shrimp on the barbie, as an appetizer. Dawn always tells me the secret to moist poultry is brining your chicken or turkey. She is soooo right. The entire meal was delightful and afterward we played a little Mexican train dominoes.

Friday, I was hoping to accomplish various things around the apartment, but instead ended up helping hubby & the girls put up our Christmas tree. We do every other year here at home, so last year we were away. It was a bit bittersweet to be decorating our tree & combining a lot of the ornaments we had with ones my mother used to use/I grew up with. I did get a few things done other than that & in the afternoon, Daddy made snowmen ornaments with the girls. I was impressed to say the least.

Saturday dawned, and Daddy had mentioned going to La Salette to see all the pretty lights. We called our friends, the Kerr's to see if maybe they wanted to meet up and go with us. It was a done deal. Afterward we went back to their house for dessert and hot chocolate and I was hoping a game of Norwegian dice(some may know it as Farkle). No such luck on the dice.

Sunday was church obviously. My mother-in-law needed a ride to the bank and we all came home after that and took nice long naps. I should have known something was up with Rachel at that point, when she took an almost 3 hour nap and went to bed without a fuss when we got home from having dinner at my mother-in-law's.

Monday came and Rae was not 100%; I could tell(as us moms always can). She had 2 episodes Monday night of a croupy sounding cough within a couple hour time span. The second one scared me a bit, but thankfully we avoided the ER and she went to the doctor's this am. She has laryngitis, but the doctor said at their age, when the vocal cords get inflamed, it can make it difficult for them to breathe. She had a one dose shot of steroids and other than not wanting to go to bed tonight is doing much better.

I hope the busyness of this past weekend is no indication of what the month of December is going to be like.

Counting our blessings/ What an awesome God I serve

Phillipians 4:19 NIV And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.

Matthew 6:25-26 NIV 25"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?

With this being Thanksgiving week & in light of what happened to us yesterday at church, I just wanted to share a few things.

My husband left retail in 2006 after many years in it. We toyed with the idea of keeping it part time. "Just in case." Just in case, you may ask? Just in case what? Just in case the job he took didn't work out, or our finances became too tight, or fill in the blank with your just in case scenario. Well, we felt God leading us NOT to keep the retail job part time, so we didn't. Fast forward 9 months. My husband calls me on a Friday afternoon, while the girls and & I are in NY helping clean up my mother's estate, with the news that he just lost his job. God provided for us by giving us distributions from my mother's estate, along with unemployment. In the fall he got a photography job, but the conditions were not as good as they seemed. Now we are at the beginning of 2008. He got a temporary job at Staples corporate, well that ended the end of June, and we have since been unemployed.

Now here is the good news of how awesome God is. ALL of our bills are current. That is not saying our financial situation is not tight! It is beyond tight & I feel like I am constantly trying to juggle our money around to pay bills. We have NOT used any credit cards since Bill lost his job in June. And God has been blessing us in other ways that may seem small, but are really huge.
A friend blessed us with much needed groceries- I'm not talking just dry goods, I'm talking meats-chicken, pork, hamburger, fresh fruits and veggies, etc. We received money in the mail, as well as a grocery store gift card, 2 separate occasions. And Sunday at church we received more cash along with 2 gift cards- 1 to Walmart & 1 to Toys'r'us. The cash was absolutely huge as I was wondering how we were going to come up with our rent money. This just took a huge chunk out of it.
And we also had a 2 week period the end of September of NO unemployment or other funds coming in. A big thank you to God's servants who listen to him & are obedient.
GOD IS TRULY AWESOME & FAITHFUL!!!!

Mind boggling things I saw today

I had a doctor's appointment this afternoon for a checkup. As I was driving to it, I saw several things that boggled my mind. If any of you reading in bloggy land have ANY insight to the following things, please do share.
Bumper sticker on a car. First of all let me just say I like to read bumper stickers; yes, I can read them and still pay attention to the road. This bumper sticker was a fish- like the Christian fish; but it wasn't the Christian fish. And it wasn't the darwin fish either. Inside it had the word WITCH, on it's head it had the little pointy witch hat & underneath the fish was a broom. I had to call several people to see if they had any inkling, the best I got was from Supra at our church. She told me it must be a fishwich & that maybe the person put it on their car for the halibut!
Okay, you know you cracked a smile at the halibut part. But I am honestly not kidding about this bumper sticker. One of the nurses at my dr's office is into wiccan, but it was very busy in there today & she wasn't my nurse so I couldn't even ask her. I do pray for her though.

As I was getting off my exit there is a bicycle store right next to my exit. On the outside of their building they had a sign that said: "electric bicycles." HUH??? Wouldn't that be a moped? or a scooter? Wouldn't electric defeat the whole purpose of pedaling/exercise???

I come up to a major intersection. On my left is a 24 hour Walgreen's, across the street on the other left corner is a 24 hour CVS, across the street from CVS on the right corner is a Rite-Aid, and on my right is Dunkin' Donuts. Three MAJOR drugstores & 2 of them are open 24/7. Am I the only one this strikes as odd? Are there so many people in this neighborhood who get sick that they need 3 drugstores on opposite corners from each other??? WOW!!!!

In other news today, for my few faithful readers, who have been praying for my nephew, please continue to pray for him and his mom, my sis-in-law. Adam ended up in the hospital with a blockage in his bowel. They say there is no evidence of cancer stuff, so don't know what is causing the blockage. Also due to all the other stuff going on with him, they can not use all of the traditional methods to clear out the blockage, so if they can't get it cleared he will have to have yet another surgery! Obviously my sil is stressing about all of this & I can't say as I blame her, but she fell Monday night and cracked 3 ribs so she isn't doing to great herself. Please pray for both things to be resolved quickly.

Well, it is late & I must be off to bed. Hope y'all have a good evening.

Good news, bad news

So, thinking just maybe Rae, doesn't really have an ear ? infection, but it's just a little clogged; we administer said anti-inflammatory, the girls play a little play doh & then she lays on daddy with the heating pad. All per the on-call triage nurse. (okay, not the play doh part) Sunday dawns and we decide not to say anything about above incident, figuring, if she really is in pain, she'll say something. Not a peep out of her.
However, today we are sitting at the table at lunch & notice Emily's ear inside, but not down in the canal, is bright red. I need to back track a bit here. A week or so ago, she had scratched her ear so hard she made it bleed. We started monitoring it & putting a bit of neosporin in it to keep it soft & help it heal. Great, all gone! But she keeps asking for the medicine in her ear. Even last night(Sun.); so Bill puts a dab of my face moisturizer on it and to sleep she goes. I call the nurse to get her opinion, as I'm not one of these people who likes to bring their child(ren) in for every little sniffle and sneeze. And as I've posted before, we are a relatively healthy family, in terms of illnesses. Lo and behold, they see her this afternoon. At some point, either from when she scratched it or before that, Emily got an infection in there. So she is now on topical & oral antibiotics.

On a different front; some of my "doing life together" ladies & I got together for an afternoon out. Trader Joe's just opened here in RI, so we decided to go check it out, do lunch, and a few other stores, after church yesterday. We had a lovely time, thanks to all the hubbies for watching the children while we did this. But the best part was reading about what Bo Hunkmeister did. I'm only mildly envious, because my first b-day we were together, my husband put 37 helium balloons in my apartment with 3x5 index cards attached with 37 reasons/things he loves about me. (I happened to be out of town for said b-day & came home to this.)

GO BO! Hold that bar up high for the rest of the men!

A trip to mecca aka IKEA

So, a little while back (the exact time frame escapes me)my good friend, Maria sent me a link to enter a contest through IKEA. I'm all for entering contests if I'm not going to get more junk snail mail or spam e-mail. So I enter said contest & get a notification back that I won one of their instant $20.00 gift cards. Give them all my info & a few days later, in the snail mail WA LA(is this how you really spell that? Noah Webster must be turning over in his grave!), said gift card arrives. It has been hanging around for a while now as mecca IKEA is about a 45 minute drive heading towards Boston, from where we live. Now, not being a "true" New Englander, this doesn't really bother me. But especially with gas prices as they were(we are down close to $2.00, here), this is not a trip you make any old time or every day. So I say to the hubby after his bible study this morning; "Honey, do you feel like going to IKEA today?" His response? "Why absolutely, oh beautiful love of my life!" Okay, so he wasn't really that sickeningly sweet. But he did agree to load the girls up & head out with us. He had never been to mecca IKEA.
We get there, walk around for a while, then went & had an early dinner. As we sit down, Rachel says, "my ear hurts." Bill asks her if she wants him to pray for the pain & she in her pitiful voice says, "uh, huh." As Bill walks around the table to pray for Rae, we hear Emily say, "In Jesus' name, AMEN!" and then promptly inform Daddy that she just prayed for Rach. (as she has recently taken to calling her.) So she feels no one else needs to pray for her. Then, on the way home I called the peds office to see what I should do, as my girls don't generally get sick. Give her some ibuprofen & a heating pad when we get home & call them in the am to bring her in. Emily, again informs us that she/we already prayed for Rachel & she doesn't need any medicine, but "mommy, can I have some too?" So we tried to explain that we can all pray for Rachel's ear pain & that sometimes God wants us to use medicine to help us get better. We will have to see how she is when she gets up, in the am. I'm just praying it isn't an ear infection or strep.

Oh yeah, as we are pulling out of the parking lot, I could sense he wasn't impressed with wasting his afternoon his visit to IKEA. So in my ever observant & un-filtered way of saying things, I stupidly ask him what he thought. He says, "It reminds me of a high-end Job Lots." (I think he might have meant bldg. 19, but I could be wrong)

In the meantime my friend, Dawn, aka "the domestic goddess" & martha stewart, jr. calls me, ME!!! to ask me a recipe question. Okay, so it was on a recipe that I had given her, but still. I'll have to get it back from her to post on recipeasy. I got it from the owner of my local meat market, but since my family wasn't crazy about it, I just gave her the entire recipe.

btw- thanks Maria, for hooking me up with the IKEA give away!