For the past year, our family has been experimenting with supplying most (if not all) of our family’s needs for clothing (although I do draw the line at underwear!), furniture, linens, books and educational materials by buying used items from thrift stores, garage sales and second hand book stores.  For someone who doesn’t really enjoy shopping, it has been an interesting year.  I am pleased to report that we have been more successful than I would have believed possible at the outset.

Our children aren’t being dressed funny.  In fact they dress very similarly to their peers.  Our house is very comfortable and neat (which is really all we were aiming for with so many boys!) and our educational needs are getting met.  The best part is that my hard-working husband is starting to see his hard-earned paychecks stretch a little further!

As an added bonus to all of our thriftiness, our children are now actively looking for ways to help us save money and live better.  They have also learned quite a bit about the value of a dollar.  Tech has even come to share my interest in economics.

I’ve been having so much fun crafting and baking with and for my children that I really haven’t been taking much time for blogging lately.  I can’t help it; these people are just so much fun to spend time with!  

I hope that you have the most wonderful and blessed Christmas yet!

I’m sorry that it has been so long since I have written anything.  We have had a busy week here catching up on Christmas reading and crafts. I still have a couple of sewing projects to finish before Christmas so I may be hiding in the shower for the next couple of days until I finish them.  You CAN sew in the shower, can’t you?

Eaglewood and I attended his company’s annual Christmas dinner on Saturday night.  The food was wonderful, but what REALLY impressed me was the service.  When asked about my meal and dessert choices before dinner, I had casually mentioned to our waiter that I am allergic to sugar and would be foregoing dessert.  At that time she took it upon herself to check with the chef about each and every menu item to find out which would be safest for me and work out some substitutions.  Truly, I wasn’t expecting or asking for any special treatment and had only mentioned my allergy to keep from being pressured about dessert!  However, her help made the whole meal so much nicer since I didn’t have to automatically pass on everything with a sauce (most have sugar in some form) and could make informed choices instead. 

Our dinner out did not come without a couple of complications, though.  Near the end of our meal, our eldest son called to let us know that Flash had miscalculated an otherwise impressive leap over the baby gate snagging his toe which was now swelling and turning purple at an alarming rate.  Lovely.  There’s nothing like hearing that your son has a possible broken toe (turns out it isn’t!) to top off dinner, is there?  Also, Eaglewood’s boss decided and tried to convince others that my name should be Madeline and that I should be in the medical profession.  We left early to check on Flash, but I bet we left them all with plenty to talk about!

I’ve been thinking that if you were to take an item that had something like… possibly black glitter on it and lay it somewhere like perhaps your bed (for just a moment!) that black glitter could eventually end up pretty much all over you where it could then spread to your baby.  Your baby could then join you in “sharing” the fun of being covered in black glitter to every other member of the family and that it is just possible that they might not really share a fondness for black glitter.  Not that anyone would do that mind you…  It’s just something I thought you might want to avoid.

I’m beginning to think that humor may provide an important clue as to how different people approach life.  While I will not even pretend to know if this would work for your family, it certainly does tell me a lot about mine!

For some reason, my eldest son was the one child who inherited my um… off-beat sense of humor.  My husband and I tried to avoid it for his sake.  We even named him after his father (who’s a nice normal, stable, and occasionally even predictable kind of guy!), but he takes after me anyway.

Tech and I are the only two family members who regularly get grilled to find out what on EARTH we are laughing about.  We can’t tell you.  We don’t really know.  Even if we did know how it all started, by the time you have noticed our amusement, the whole conversation will have become warped beyond all recognition.  Lilly seems to be just about the only one in the household who can actually keep up with the weird twists and turns our thoughts and conversations take.  Either that, or she has become really adept at faking it.  I suspect the former since she laughs with us a LOT.

There is one significant difference in how Tech and I approach humor and strangely enough, it mirrors how we approach life.  Tech is outrageously bold.  He takes the lead in things.  I don’t.  I tend to be somewhat reactionary.  My style tends to run to running commentary on anything and everything.  I also have a tendency to rant about things at times.  For some reason, my children LOVE my rants.  They sometimes go out of their way to get me to do so.  If you cannot be taken seriously, you should at least try to be amusing to others, I guess. 

Eaglewood, Lilly and Flash are altogether different.  They are planners.  They are thoughtful and deliberate.  They are careful and intelligent, NEVER silly!  It is not that they aren’t amusing and fun to be around, they just have a different (and rather linear) approach to things that often leaves them looking at Tech and I a little funny. 

I have to say that Tech and I are VERY glad that people like Eaglewood, Lilly and Flash exist.  They aren’t easily distracted, they get things done, and they can actually follow directions and patterns the same way every time!  That last item is very nearly astonishing to people like Tech and myself who tend to get… ummm… creatively distracted.

The Hulk is a whole different kettle of fish.  He’s an amused and amusing bundle of giggles with a sense of humor that is wholly and entirely his own.  He finds humor and enjoyment in the strangest things sometimes.  It’s not that he’s wrong.  He just sees the world from a completely unique perspective.  Once he explains what he’s laughing at, you can usually see what he means (although not always).  It is just something that you would not have seen or thought about on your own.

With Wildchild we may be dealing with a con artist.  Really.  He seems to use humor as a distraction technique to help him get what he wants.  At least he’s a bright little guy!

If you’ve made it this far, you have probably already learned more about my family and me than you ever wanted to know.  My advice to you would be to run before I get started on my parents and siblings!

Check out Cake Wrecks for anything and everything that can go tragically and hilariously wrong with cake. 

Stuff Christians Like covers just about everything quirky and amusing about the modern American church.

Bella Bluegrass looks at the world through the eyes of a very pampered house cat.

Your turn!  What blogs or web sites make you smile?

Milehimama tagged me for a book meme.  I’ve done this one before, but it is always a lot of fun, so I will be happy to do it again.

The rules are:

Pass this on to 5 blogging friends. Open the closest book to you, not your favorite or most intellectual book, but the book closest to you at the moment, to page 56. Write the 5th sentence, as well as two to five sentences following that. 

I couldn’t use the book closest to me or even the book after that as they were both too short to have 56 pages.  However, the third book in the stack on the shelf above my head contained a book that was not only long enough, but that also contained THIS intriguing fifth sentence…

“The operation, which replaced part of the President’s jaw with rubber, was a success, but it wasn’t made known to the public until 1917.

Can anyone guess which book THAT came from? Do you know which President is being discussed?