Family Briefs

What do you get when you cross one sick child with three healthy siblings? (scroll down for answer)

FOUR SICK CHILDREN!

And when you have FOUR SICK CHILDREN, how do you keep up with who had what medicine when (or which medicine was given to whom when? I forget)? You certainly can’t keep up with it in your head because your brain cells are fried from having four children :). Read the rest of this entry »

Has it been a week already? Hard to believe . . .

A few weeks ago, we went to our favorite Mexican Restaurant. The kids ate mostly chips and salsa and were too full to eat when the food arrived. Hubby and I talked about salsa ingredients, and decided they’d had a pretty well-balanced meal.

So when I came across this Black-bean dip recipe in the June issue of Parenting, I thought this was a perfect idea for a meal that the kids would be sure to love! I bought 4 different kinds of tortilla chips, including Tostitos with a hint of Lime. I can just envision our family sitting around a big bowl of dip, passing around the chips - we might even ditch the plates for a night! Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hard to believe it’s been a whole week since my first S.M.A.R.T. Habit Saturday post. My goal was to declutter at least one area of the house every week. Well . . . does it count if you picked a big project and didn’t finish? I chose decluttering my closet - mostly because I still had summer clothes in storage (what? we’ve only been having 90+ degree temperatures for 8 weeks or so . . . ). Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not always in tune with catching my children doing something good. As a mother of four, sometimes I have a hard time doing anything other than putting out “fires”! But, like any household with children, we have problems and hurdles that we must overcome (for my sanity, if for no other reason :)). In trying to find solutions for these problems (leaving clothes on the living room floor, not staying in your chair at the dinner table, hiding a mess that was made, etc.), I often resort to a new rule or a new consequence. This seems to smack of negativity to me, and then I remember I’m supposed to be accentuating the positive! Read the rest of this entry »

I came up with a great idea for the leftover plastic wipe box - you know the one that you don’t need for wipes anymore ’cause you just bought it on vacation since you failed to pack enough wipes? Read the rest of this entry »

I decided some time ago that my least favorite task was figuring out what to fix for supper every day. When I made the choice to put together a meal plan at the beginning of the week, that became my least favorite task :). Once I work out my meal plan, I then work on my grocery list; then I go through my coupons and look at the sales flier for the grocery store (which sometimes calls for some revisions of the meal plan).

Even though, it’s my least favorite task of the week, I recognize it as a necessary evil that makes the grocery shopping and meal prep SOOOOOO much easier! I’m willing to sacrifice! So while I’m sacrificing, I decided to team up with Laura at The Organizing Junkie and participate in “Menu Plan Monday.” Read the rest of this entry »

One of my goals for the year was to de-clutter the entire house. Whew! I didn’t know what I was stepping into when I proclaimed that goal. It’s such a nebulous goal that I, not surprisingly, haven’t made much progress (I did clean out a bathroom cabinet and a medicine chest in February and two toy boxes just last week). But our house MUST be de-cluttered - we are up to our eyeballs in TOO.MUCH.STUFF!!

I decided if I broke this huge task down into smaller, more manageable pieces and blogged about my progress (challenging myself with some accountability), I might meet with better success. Read the rest of this entry »

My parents divorced when I was about five, and I became estranged from my dad (by my choice) when I was about 20. Naturally, Father’s Day has never been one of those holidays I spent much time thinking about (much less, celebrating).

When I first got married, this holiday did create a little panic in me every year; of course it was my responsibility, not only figure out what to get, but actually to go out and purchase a gift for my father-in-law from my husband and me. (For those of you shaking your heads in a “shame on me” fashion, you need to know this is just how it is in my marriage - why fight it?) Read the rest of this entry »

As I sat rocking my youngest tonight, I had a flashback. The sun must have been filtering through the curtains just right in a way that I remember from my childhood.

Often, I would be playing across the street with my sister and two boys that lived in the neighborhood. Without fail, my mother would call me inside to get ready for bed just as we were beginning to play something new. I can remember running across the dead-end street, through the drainage ditch in our front yard, complaining all the way about having to go to bed while it was still light. Read the rest of this entry »