Lia's rummage sale extravaganza

   I started doing something called The Compact about 2 years ago. For those of you who haven't heard of it, it started in San Fransico several years ago when a small group of people agreed to buy nothing new for a year in an effort to reduce waste, the impact of manufacturing on the environment and consumerism. Or something like that. Look it up. It's not always easy but it is getting easier and my kids have pretty  much accepted it as normal. I have ADD so disorganization can be a stumbling block because I sometimes forget that one does not simply walk into a thrift store or rummage sale and find exactly what one is looking for the first time. So I do end up having to buy new and paying full price occasionally. This weekend, however was a Compact success.
   The PTA had a rummage sale last weekend and I helped with the setting up and during the sale. We  had four days of donations, two of which I helped with and then the day of the sale. Since JR had to work some of those days, I had to take the kids with me. (get a sitter you say? We don't do that. It wouldn't be a PTA function if there weren't 6 or 7 kids providing crazy background noise and the custodian telling them to get off the stage and quit playing on the piano) This was like a three day trip to the mall for Lia. JR came and helped set up for a while the day before the sale as well. The prices were insanely low and an hour before we shut down, we handed people paper bags and told them they could fill a bag for $2. I was "working" (code for looking for cool stuff) and Lia was off "playing" (code for looking for cool stuff) with another little girl. I laughed when I saw the other little girl holding up a dress and her mother telling her, "That doesn't fit you. That's why we donated it." I told Lia she could get a few things and to put them aside and I would pay for them at the end of the sale. I won't do that again. We ended up spending $48  but we got a ton of neat stuff , including but not limited to:
     an adult Nike Oregon Ducks football jersey. It's a 2X but I have 2 cousins who are big guys (tall) and they can fight over who gets it
   an Omega juicer that  retails for around $200. Don't get grossed out. We knew most of the people who donated stuff. When you go to someone's house to eat, you eat off their dishes, right?
   A dart board
   Matching, dark brown slipcovers for a couch and love seat. I'd been looking for some for my 15 year old Southwest print couch and love seat and these looked brand new.
  2 small Ikea shelves, one of which has a lamp attached. I'll put these in Lia's room because she loves to arrange and rearrange the tchotchkys in her room but doesn't really have a lot of room for them. The lamp also just happens to match Lia's room. :-)
  A Salad Shooter
 A cheetah print Snuggie that Ian immediately claimed.
 A pair of Kenneth Cole sandals that a friend donated after wearing once
A kids sized Nike Ducks football jersey.
A few miscellaneous clothing items for the kids, a TON of books ( because I can never pass up a book table at a rummage sale), A VCR with a coaxial connecting cable for an old school TV that we put in our guest room, A like new, cloth shower curtain to replace the one I've had since 2004 and a matching bath mat (to replace the one I've had since 2004), a few miscellaneous kitchen items: a 12 muffin pan to replace the 2 six muffin pans I've been using (not a necessity, just a personal preference.), a couple steel utensils to replace some of the plastic in my kitchen, some Pampered Chef measuring spoons- you know the adjustable ones that let you measure 1/4 teaspoon up to 1 tsp- so I can dispense with the handful of odd measuring spoons cluttering up my drawer, a wooden, folding dish rack and a magazine holder- they're great for holding kids flimsy paper back books. Somehow, I managed to come home with a queen sized dust ruffle which is weird because I don't have a queen size bed.
     I think my favorite item is the plastic "No Whining" sign. I couldn't decide which room to hang it in but settled on putting some string through the hole at the top and wearing it around my neck. The same friend who donated the shoes also donated her Snuggie collection. Since Lia is always using mine, I grabbed a pink one for her.

This is a close up of the dart board and Ian's first bulls-eye.  

   And remember when I laughed at my friend's daughter for trying to buy her own dress back? Yeah. I was washing the clothes Lia picked out and pulled out a dress that looked familiar. It should have. It belonged to JR's cousin's daughter (who graduates college next year), Bekah and then, last year, when she finally grew into it, Lia. I told you my kids were getting into the Compact, too.
  I know you didn't really start reading this post because you wanted to hear about my juicer and a couple of football jerseys. You came to see what Lia picked out when she was unsupervised and allowed to bag her stuff herself, away from mom's prying, censoring eyes. So, without further ado, I give you Lia's Rummage Sale Extravaganza (ganza, ganza, ganza!): A pictorial essay

A friend of mine wore this one Halloween and  Lia  and her son had played with it at their house so when she saw it , she snatched it up.

Some wall hangings that don't really (at all!) match her room and some stuffed animals- because she didn't already have a box overflowing with stuffed animals in addition to the pile on her bed.

A dress she not only found on one of the donation days, but changed into while we were still there. And a  butt ton of costume jewelry.

The dress, all the jewelry and the "high heels" she has pranced around in all weekend.

Myriad tchotchkys, mini train case, a wallet and brand new bath stuff.  I said I liked her wallet and wished I had seen it because I've been using the same wallet for years. She offered to look for one for me at next year's sale, since she's good at picking out wallets. Also, I didn't know she had chosen  the shower gel and body spray but they were new in the package so I let her keep them. The label on the body spray says Berries and Cream. Lia used some yesterday and it smelled like feet. 

The beginning of her Beanie Baby collection. yay

 Her key chain collection. Currently housed in her mini train case. Also a few more pieces of fine jewelry in the upper center of the collection.  

Aaanndd..One more random knicknack that slipped by me. 

Last t but not least, a couple more of Her Ladyship rocking The Hat.  

Birthday season has officially begun here at Hoose Ay McLain! We kicked it off with cookies for Ian's class and his birthday dinner tonight. He picked shrimp, salad and home made french fries, followed up by cake and ice cream. Bekah helped us start a new tradition of using leftover icing as war paint. Tomorrow is JR's birthday. We'll be meeting some friends at a place called Roscoe's for some pool. Saturday finds us at home for Ian's birthday party. Nothing fancy. We're just cooking out and letting the kids have a water gun war. Should be fun. I'm going to try to do what we call a quick company clean up tonight and get my shopping done tomorrow. Trying to keep it simple, sweetie. Enjoy your weekend ! 

The candle was hand made by Ian on a field trip to the Oregon Trail Discovery Center.  

Note the small dollop of frosting under his left eye

A new tradition is born. Icing becomes war paint

     

Our First Year Part 2 or "Wagons West!"

  It could have been an uneventful trip. If we had taken other people's kids. If we hadn't taken a jittery cat. If we could have sedated our kids for the entire 2600 miles. But we all know none of that happened. =)
  We pulled out of Millry, Alabama (where's that? you ask. My daughter, Bekah, will tell you, "First you get out your map of Nowhere. It's right in the middle.") 4 hours later than we planned. The trailer with all our worldly possessions (not counting the house worth of stuff we left in storage at my in-laws) was smaller than we anticipated so we had to pack a few more things in the back of our SUV than we'd initially planned. Bekah and the cat, Jeff,  were supposed to have the whole third row to themselves. But we put one of the seats down and all our electronics in the "way back" and the space formerly occupied by the seat. That left Bekah in the smaller of the seats and the cat in his carrier on top of the TV in the back. Oh yeah, and our luggage. And a box of pillows and throw blankets. Sounds comfy, huh?

All we needed was a rocking chair on top for Granny...

  We stopped for dinner at a restaurant by the freeway in Meridian,Mississippi. Since the cat had been cooped up for about three hours, I decided he needed fresh air and probably had to pee. We put a harness on him and hooked a leash to it and attempted to "walk" him in a vacant lot by the restaurant.  Did I mention he was jittery? Did I also mention that I'd only put the harness on him once or twice before and then only to make sure it fit properly? Did I mention as well, that we had lived in the country for most of his life and he wasn't accustomed to the sound of eighteen wheelers whizzing by on the freeway? Furthermore, the harness was for small dogs. I remember thinking it was stupid that the pet department of Walmart didn't sell harnesses for cats. How else was I supposed to take him out for a wee? As he jumped around at the end of the leash and somehow worked his way out of the harness and under a conveniently placed brush pile in under thirty seconds, I realized that they don't sell cat harnesses because there's really not much of a market for them.
  The brush was really thick and it being Mississippi in July, I was wary of snakes, so I didn't just reach in and try to pull him out. I don't remember now who took the kids in to eat and who stayed outside to try to coax the cat out of the brush but we traded off at some point. I do remember that JR was so upset, he couldn't eat his dinner and that he took the bag of cat food over to the brush pile so the cat wouldn't starve immediately. Despite the fact that we lived in the country, Jeff didn't venture far from the porch. I never walked out on the porch in the morning to be greeted by dead mangled critters.  Survival was not his strong suit. Before we left, we decided to try once more to find him.  JR and the kids went toward a ditch further away from the road and I went back to the brush pile. I heard a rustling noise and went over to the food bag. I fully expected to find a badger or raccoon but there was Jeff with his head in the bag! Talking softly to him, I eased over and was able to grab him before he could disappear back under the brush pile. I was so thankful, I almost cried.
   Apparently the truckers had failed to communicate to one another that there was a frightened cat at mile marker whatever and to find an alternate route because they were still racing by noisily. And Jeff wasn't over his fear of them. I held him in a death grip as I tried to get JR's and the kid's attention to let them know Jeff was safe. There was much rejoicing and Jeff was more than willing to get back in his carrier once we got to the truck.  Thus went the first three and a half hours of our trip.

I Heart Mom

     Today would have been my mom's 63rd birthday. On April 8, 2011 she died of a blood clot following quintuple bypass and heart valve repair surgery. I was going to write a well researched piece about the fact that heart disease is the NUMBER ONE KILLER of women in the U.S. and go into all the signs and symptoms, like unexplained fatigue, shortness of breath, dizziness, cold sweats, indigestion/ nausea/upper abdominal pain, and pain in the throat, jaw or arm (especially the left), but my kids needed me tonight. My six year old, Lia, fell on a play structure this afternoon and her shin was hurting so I had to put a warm towel on it. My son's hamster died yesterday and as Ian went to bed tonight, I tried to discreetly remove the cage from his room so he wouldn't see the empty cage and get upset all over again. Turns out removing the cage was what upset him and led to a (very short) crying spell. So, I sat in the room with him, hugged him, told him it was normal to want to keep your loved one's things just as they were and not change anything and we talked about grieving. Bekah sat around and talked about her day, derby practice, something funny someone posted on Tumblr, and other things for a few minutes before hugging us and going to bed.
   I was going to list all the normal values for total cholesterol (less than 200), and the various components of total cholesterol such as LDL, the "bad" cholesterol (less than 130)  and HDL, the 'good" cholesterol (38-94) and triglycerides (35-135). And then I was going to explain them (look it up). I was going to cite lots of research but when I typed "Women and Heart Disease" in my search engine, I was overwhelmed with all the information. So I'm urging you to educate yourself. Learn what high blood pressure is (anything greater than 120/80) and the connection between high blood pressure and heart disease. While you're at it learn about normal blood sugar levels (70-110) and how abnormal levels can affect your heart. There's also a menopause connection. Researchers have noticed that women are more susceptible to something called Microvascular disease or MVD that affects the small blood vessels of the heart and is not detected by the usual studies that focus on larger arteries. So your heart goes for a long time without receiving the oxygen and blood it needs before you ever realize you have a problem and you've already sustained damage to the heart muscle. This seems to be triggered by the drop in estrogen after menopause
   But, I'm not going as in depth into these matters because I was busy with my kids. I was getting irritated because they just didn't understand that I was missing my mom. Then it occurred to me that I was being selfish and that they needed their mama, too. I started thinking about my mom and the good, the bad and the ugly. My mom wasn't perfect and she made some mistakes along the way but most of her parenting was motivated by her love for me and a desire for me to turn out to be a decent human being. She always loved me and believed in me and as I'm writing this, I'm tearing up thinking about the times in high school, when anxiety would get the better of me and she would stay up until early in the morning listening to me and encouraging me and, above all, to never, ever give up. For my mom, life was to be explored and lived as an adventure. She liked to talk about people grabbing life "by the horns". I didn't realize how much I still depended on her until, suddenly, I couldn't call her to ask her opinion on something or tell her about something funny or great the kids had done. And I realized I want to be a mom like my mom was. I want to be a mom that my adult kids WANT to have around. And I want to be the mom that they really miss when I'm gone because I made their lives so great.
     So, I guess I would summarize these somewhat disconnected thoughts with this advice: if your mom is still around, love her and appreciate her. If she wasn't such a great mom or your relationship hasn't been so great, love her anyway. Try to focus on just one good, happy, positive thing you share. Or just call her and tell her you love her and you appreciate her efforts. You'll both be glad you did.  And then, if you have kids, be the best parent you can. Even if your kids are grown and you have a weird relationship, just tell them you love them. You don't have to see eye to eye on everything. Put in the effort and FIND something you can agree on and go from there. If your kids are young, start making memories now. Your kids will appreciate the attention. And lastly, do what you can to be there with them for a long, long time.
       And, so I don't get in trouble, here are a few websites you might want to check out:http://symptoms-of-heart-attack-in-women.com/, http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/heart-disease/HB00040, http://abcnews.go.com/Health/HeartDiseaseNews/top-symptoms-heart-disease-women/story?id=14009993#.TzTWBsU7WAh.

feng shui and hoarding

    I'm having a get together this weekend and am frantically trying to get my two households (my mom's and mine) worth of clutter junk stuff under control. The basement in my house is finished off and divided into three rooms, what we call "the big room" that's at the bottom of the stairs and affords no privacy and two other rooms with doors.  One is my older daughter's room and the other is a library/spare room. Since we've moved in, the big room has just been a big storage room but the library/spare room has been set up and used by company twice. The other night, my daughter and I moved the boxes into the spare room (one with a door) and the futon and chairs out into the big room. The big room looks so nice as a family room- which it will be some day. It was so nice to be able to close the door on the stuff I haven't been able to go through yet. I thought of all the other stuff that I'm still trying to find a permanent home for and for a brief moment, I entertained the idea of using that room for a junk room.  Then I realized I would have to give up my quiet library and any overnight company would not have any privacy. Plus, I don't want to be a person who has a junk room- that room you just toss everything into and don't ever deal with again.
     That got me thinking about the claim that clutter creates negative energy and how some people feel  Feng Shui creates positive energy flow.  Most people who de-clutter their space will testify to feeling so much better mentally and emotionally.  When I was purging our stuff to get ready for our move from Alabama to Oregon, I had a great time getting rid of stuff. Our local thrift store put up a "No Vacancy" sign and I gave my friend's daughter two pick-up truck loads of stuff for a yard sale and I still have a room full of stuff at my mother-in-law's house I need to get rid of when we go back to visit.  I brought you through all that to bring you to this point- my clutter-energy connection theory.  I'm just wondering if it's not that the stuff creates negative energy but that being the person who holds on to things past their usefulness drains your positive energy.  Is it possible that being concerned with the management of your belongings brings unnecessary stress into your life and closes up your world just a little bit?  Maybe letting go of your junk frees up your time and energy for you to go places or pursue other endeavors that will move you further toward being WHO you want to be instead of being WHAT you own.

Dinner's ready

  I hate to be busy. I know a lot of people who seem to manage 3 or 4 activities in one day but I'm not one of them. Lately, my life has gone into overdrive. Or, as some people would put it- out of neutral. 4 nights a week, we have something going on in the evening which wouldn't be a big deal except my husband works nights and has to leave the house by 6:30.  I'm not terribly domestic to start with. When we were dating, J.R. took pictures of me cooking so he'd have proof that it did happen. Nobody would have believed him otherwise. I really thought that if God had intended for me to cook, He wouldn't have put so many take out places between my job and home. But, I digress.  
    Being busy in the afternoon/ early evening made dinner hectic to say the least. Not that the kids minded Ramen for supper. They thought they were on vacation- for the first couple of days. J.R. could only pretend it was Pho for so long.  So, today, while the kids played in our snow storm  squall flurry near miss, fought, drank cocoa, caught up on homework, fought,  went to derby practice, fought wrestled fought and watched The Flintstone's, I cooked. I made a double batch of pancakes this morning and froze the leftovers then got started on dinner. I made double batches of 3 dishes everybody likes and put them in the fridge and freezer.(I have no idea what I'm going to do next week because that was my whole repertoire of "stuff all 3 kids like") So now, we can either heat up the whole pan and all have the same thing or everyone can just pick what they want and eat buffet style.  Whatever they wanna do. Just so I'm not tearing my hair out at 5 o'clock.
  Of course, Sneaky Mom paid a very brief visit. She added flax seed meal to the pancakes for some extra omega-3s and encouraged me to try to find a way to incorporate more fiber and protein without making them dense and unpalatable. (If this makes me sound the least bit schizophrenic, don't worry, my kids think I am, too)  Then we ground up some carrots and kidney beans and mixed them with the ground turkey that I put in the Taco Mac- which I made with homemade cheese sauce.  She was going to puree some cauliflower into the mashed potatoes for the shepherd's pie but J.R. made them and she forgot to mention it until he was putting the cheese on top. I also made this chicken and noodle stuff that tastes a little like chicken and dumplings. We call it Chicken and Noodles (pretty clever, huh?). The original recipe calls for Velveeta (it's a Southern thang. Don't judge) and, sometimes, sour cream. But tonight, we used leftover, homemade cheese sauce and Greek yogurt. It was less processed, anyway, and that's one of Sneaky Mom's big goals. Now that that's done, I'm off to make matching clothes for the kids from some old drapes.

A good week

  My house would usually not be described with such vague, subjective adjectives as "neat" or "tidy". I do try but I get pretty busy with the kids activities, JR's activities, PTA, my other  activities, church, the cat, grocery shopping, Facebook, staring out the window to make sure the guy walking his dog has a baggie and isn't afraid to use it. But, I digress. Today, my sister-in-law arrived from Southeast Asia where she teaches English. Since we knew she was coming ahead of time (just popping in has proven tricky in the past), we decided that was as good an excuse as any to clean it. I spent a lot of time developing the most efficient strategy for decluttering and organizing all of our things so that all I would have to do would be to dust and vacuum the day before she got here. Like many great planners, my husband and I spent all day Thursday and  Friday putting up clothes, toys, books and every piece of paper that has ever entered our house. We also managed to make fliers for the PTA Holiday tree recycling fundraiser that I naively volunteered to coordinate, coach Ian's basketball team both afternoons, take Bekah to a poetry reading for her English class, help the PTA collect food for the holiday food drive and distribute those tree fliers, dance every time a really good song came on the radio and laugh our butts about my "mommy voice" off at dinner. I'm gonna get mushy here but my husband rocks. He worked off Wednesday morning, took a nap and got up and started working on a few projects around the house. When we went to bed Friday night, I could see my kitchen counters and the floor in every room of the house (except mine. Well, you can see the floor but not the top of my dresser). It was a blissful sleep.