Turkey Day!!!

How about just a little photo essay of the day...

The table is set and we are ready to celebrate the good things God has given us.

Roscoe is not very happy at his place in the living room- far, far away from the table...

We had rolls,

famous broccoli salad,

sweet potatoes,

stuffing,

amazing delicious succulent turkey,

creamy mashed potatoes,

gravy,

sparkling cran-apple

(and I don't know why this is underlined- I can't get rid of it!),

funny cousins,

silly Uncle John taking pictures of the food...

(ok, I started it by taking pictures of the food. He was mocking me, but we had a good time watching him do it...)

Ooops. I forgot to take a picture of the pumpkin dessert. It was yummy.

It's good to be thankful all year long,

but it's especially good to be thankful together with family and friends.

It's flurry-ing!

It started shortly after 1pm, and it came down hard for about an hour. Then, it was on and off- big flakes and small...

So pretty.

The temp is above freezing, but it will cool off tonight so I don't know about school tomorrow.

Maybe a 2-hour late start...? (I love those because we don't have to make them up but we do get to sleep in.)

Here's His Royal Shortness in the flurries...

I had to throw some treats out there to get him to explore long enough to get pics.
He's close to finding the last treat.
After 3 minutes, he is done with the snow.

May I go in now?

Thanks. I'm exhausted. That was hard work. (you can still see bits of snow in his fur.)

On a completely different note- I won a contest! Check out the 5 Inky Fingers blog and you'll see!!

Flurries

Flurry. What a great word. It's almost like a combination of "fluffy" and "furry".

Flurry. Say it slowly... fuh-luuuuurrrrrreeee. It's beautiful, really.

Why? Because it is often proceeded by another beautiful word: snow.

Snow flurries. Possibly brought to you on Sunday, Nov. 21, 2010 by weather.com and accuweather.com.

Not probably, just possibly.

That's enough to get me all a-tingle.

The latest from Abbyland...

She bought herself a new hat. It has ear flaps- you know, just in case we have a really cold winter...

Personally, I like this version better...

TTFN!

Yipee! It's time to set our clocks back!

It's my favorite night of the year! I get an extra hour of sleep! 'Course, my inner clock doesn't realize that and it wakes me at the normal time but it is just wonderful to roll over and tell my inner clock to snuggle back in for an hour!

And, just so I don't have TOO much fun with this, my neighbor's garage band picked tonight to practice. I can't always hear the tune, but the beat pounds through my bedroom wall just fine...

Dum dum dada dada, dum dum dada dada, dum dum dada dada.

Argh.

Operation Christmas Child

Operation Christmas Child is a ministry of Samaritan's Purse. It exists to provide Christmas gifts to children of poverty around the world. The gifts that are provided are shoeboxes that are stuffed with things that kids want/like/need.

Our church has participated in OCC for a few years now, and Abby and I have always packed up a couple of shoeboxes to donate. Our Life Group also packs shoeboxes together as a group- we started out doing 30 boxes a few years ago, and this year we have worked our way up to 60. Everyone signs up to bring 60 of a certain item, we spread them out on many tables, and the adults supervise the kids as they choose things to go in each box.

I've been thinking a lot about OCC. There are people around the world who donate much more than one box a year. Why don't I do that? So, I prayed about it and decided to do a dozen boxes. Lots of the items that I purchase for the boxes are packaged in 12s, so it seemed like a good number. I also started looking for bargains for the boxes in December. I decided to buy a dozen items each month. That way, I would spread the cost over the whole year instead of just one shot in the fall. Of course, the school supplies were all bought in August during the big sales, but everything else was purchased through the year.
I use this bookshelf in my guest room to hold all of the items as I gather them through the year. I found out that boys age 10 to 14 had the fewest boxes donated so I decided to do all of my boxes for that age group. Makes it easier to buy in bulk. I found bargains in many places- The Dollar Store, office liquidation stores, WalMart, Target, Ross Dress for Less, craft stores, online toy outlets, and craigslist. (Craigslist is where I found lots of Beanie Babies for less than a dollar each- and they still had their tags. Since they were part of a collection and hadn't been used as toys, they were ok to put in the boxes. Beanie Babies happen to squish nicely into the shoe boxes.)

I have to tell you, I had a blast planning and shopping for the boxes the whole year. It kept me thinking about and praying for the boxes specifically, and Samaritan's Purse in general.

Here is one box worth spread out on a bed. There are school supplies, personal hygiene items, bandaids, toys, a kazoo, a flashlight & batteries, duct tape (every boy likes duct tape), candy, a T-shirt, and a string bag backpack so the guy can carry all his stuff around.

It was pretty easy to spread it out on the bed, the tricky part was getting it into the box!
Thanks to some nice big rubber bands, it almost all fit. I had to leave out one of the pads of paper, but I will use those next year.

Now I have to go to the Samaritan's Purse website and send in a donation to cover shipping. They will send me labels to print and then I just stick them on the boxes and that is it! The labels will track the boxes and in January I will get an email telling me the country where they were sent.

The boy that gets this box will get some cool and useful items, but more importantly, he will be invited to do a Bible study that will explain to him how much God loves and cares for him. That is the coolest gift of all.

I hope you got some good ideas from this post. Maybe you will pack a shoebox this year. Maybe you will pack more than one. Maybe you will make it a family tradition to pack shoeboxes together and deliver them to a local participating church. Maybe you will just send money to Samaritan's Purse. Maybe you will do something for a local charity instead.

Whatever you choose to do, I hope you have as much fun with it as I have had with the shoeboxes. I can hardly wait till next year!

When worlds collide...

I'm a scrapbooker. I've already scrapped a page about this blog, now I am blogging about my scrapbooks. Talk about a close encounter of the hobby kind...

So, here are some of my scrapbook pages. They aren't in any particular order, and they're the ones I think are blog-worthy. (I'm not going to put the ones I don't really like on here.)

This one was done for my hot-cocoa lovin' kiddo in 2005.

This one was done the weekend we got the dog. The lay-out was patterned after Susan Goetter's design on her blog.

The dog at the vet. (Every event must be scrapped...)

An artsy shot of the dog with the words of the dog-food commercial about shelter dogs. I got this idea from another scrapper on scrapbook.com

You can see more of my pages on scrapbook.com (My name on that site is "quilt", which I used because I couldn't think of anything else at the time.)

I find scrapping and card-making to be such relaxing hobbies. I love the planning, the cutting and pasting, the patterns on the papers, all the stickers, and of course, the finished results. I have recently played around with digital scrapbook layouts and have found that it is almost as fun as the cut-n-paste version. I use a company in Georgia to print my 12" x 12" pages for a whole lot less than FedEx/Kinkos.

It is so nice to have a history of me and Ab in photos. Sometimes, we pick up a scrapbook from years ago and sit down and just relive the past together. It is a bonding time and it shows her that I value her and the time we have spent as a family.

Thanks for looking- why not drop me a line and share some of your hobbies with me!?