Fact: The Sun Is Out

I want to use this space honestly, but on the rough days I don't want to fill it with complaining and whining.  So I'm just going to stick with the facts.
Fact #1: HandyMan is still getting over whatever bug knocked him out for the weekend.
Fact #2: I am still recovering from a concussion.
Fact #3: MMan is cutting teeth and not sleeping more than 5 hours at a time.
Fact #4:  GGirl is perfectly healthy and has more energy than the rest of us combined.
Fact #5: The sun is out and it is relatively warm (40*).



So, in the face of feeling cranky, I bundled MMan up and we went for a short walk. The same strech of road I paced while trying to get MMan to join us last summer.  I walked in squishy mud and wished spring was closer, but know that this January thaw was just a tease.  But for a brief few minutes today, I embraced the sun shine, I saw blue sky and a glimpse of spring.

My Favorite Kind of Day

This morning GGirl woke up in the most pleasant, cooperative spirit and has been an absolute ray of sunshine.  It is a clean up the house, do laundry, get stuff done kind of morning.  Conversations like this make housework so much brighter:

GGirl: Mommy, can I help?
Me: Sure. (full of all the energy a skeptical, un-caffeinated Mama can muster)
GGirl: Oh! Thank you! Thank you!

You would have thought I had announced that we were having cookies and milk for breakfast with a side of icecream sundae. 

So she's cleaned the mirror while I cleaned the bathroom,  took the vacuum away from me, and loaded the washer and dryer for me.  Singing the whole time she worked.

I was particularly impressed with the vacuuming technique:

A Blog Morph

For the new year my friend Jenny had a genius idea.  I liked it so I'm borrowing it.  I am not at a place in life to be experimenting with recipes: I barely have time for the tried and true.  Occasionally I have an insightful child rearing moment, but it's mostly just chuckling at their antics.  Life with my little ones is flying by and since I can't remember what I had for lunch yesterday (did I have lunch yesterday?) I fear many of the little moments with my children will be lost in the abyss of late night feedings and mountains of diapers. 

I recently "hired" another "assistant" in the form of a smartphone. It will make life easier to snap a photo, write a note and post.  Someday I'll be able to scroll through and chuckle again, and the pictures will be in one place when it's time to make the slide show for some major life event.

So I'm off to the mundane.  Making laundry soap, doing dishes and laundry, changing diapers and being Mama to the GGirl and MMan and wife to HandyMan.

New Webspace...

Welcome to my new corner of the web!  I enjoy blogging and it is a medium that I enjoy using to connecting with friends and others who share some of the same aspects of the day with me:  be it gardening, chasing toddlers, cooking or crafting.

My posts have been on the decline lately because the summer has been busy and the software I was using was obnoxious.  To keep all the geek-speak out of this, lets just say that the way I was doing my blog was rapidly becoming confusing and "un-fun".

So it was time to change.  I hope you enjoy the new web-space as much as I am!  I've transferred most of my stuff over to this new site, but some of the links may still send you back to the old site.  If that happens there's a link at the top to bring you back to the Active ThrivingMama site.   Thanks for reading and I hope you'll take a look around!

P.S.  So sorry about the inundation of posts if you subscribe in a blog reader - something glitched when I switched a program over.  Another switch too out all my photos, so I'll be working on that in the next couple of days!

Why I Keep Fighting

Five years ago by body was attacked, and I waged war with everything my doctors could give me to rid my body of cancer.  After three months of chemo and 3 weeks of radiation treatments, I won that battle.  And I kept fighting.  I keep fighting because progress is being made every year with new treatments.  In my relatively short lifetime, the type of cancer I had has gone from a terminal disease to having one of the highest cure rates among cancers.  That's worth fighting for!

While I have won back my health, my fight against cancer continues for those who are fighting for their health.  For friends who have been diagnosed with cancer, and those unknown to me who have had a portion of their life shattered by cancer.  I continue so that my daughter, my nieces and my nephews may see more curable cancers in their lifetime.

I have walked a marathon to raise awareness and funds for the Leukemia Lymphoma Society, I have participated in the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life as a Survivor, as a Participant, as a Team Captain and as a Committee Member.  I have grown and cut my hair a number of times to donate towards wigs for women who have lost their hair in their fight against cancer.

This past weekend involved a lot of fighting.  On Friday and Saturday was our local Relay for Life.  For those of you not familiar with the event, it is an all night walking event and teams come together to raise money and spend the night walking.  This year I was on the committee so I did a lot of walking, just not on the track.  I helped set-up, break down and everything in between.  While I worked behind the scenes (where I tend to work best) there were 30 teams who had raised money and were walking and having a great time.  We wanted to raise $85,000.  At the end of the event, our staff coordinator announced that our small town Relay had raised $98,500 and she expected the final to come in over $100,000.  While this is nothing to shake a stick at, in order to fully appreciate the magnitude of this accomplishment by our teams, you have to realize that in this area of New York, we reported a 10.6% unemployment rate in February of 2010.  In the perspective of the current economics in our area, I am amazed and so grateful for all the hard work of these teams, individuals and our committee to make this happen.

Following Relay, I headed for a Hair to Share event in memory of a local teacher who had lost her fight with cancer.  My hair had been living comfortably in a braid between washings for about four weeks.  It had grown too heavy to pony-tail and it was definitely time to cut it off.  So I did.  And so did my friend Margery.  About 9 inches of my hair was cut to send off to the Beautiful Lengths program.  I have seen the wigs that have come back to our community through this program and was so glad to help.

Most people don’t have to go outside their circle of friends or family to see lives that have been affected by cancer.  Take a stand.  Join with those who are fighting for their health and fight along side them.  Check out the links in this post to learn more about programs you can get involved with.

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Sunday Sunshine: Family Time & Early Spring

Practicing Contentment by remembering the graces in the week and practicing gratitude by giving.

This morning, while I am going to miss my after church quiet time at home, taking a moment this morning to write while rain pitter-patters outside and I can listen to HandyMan play with a happy GBaby - it's just as good!

This week we took a break from our normal and spent a week with family in Arizona.  This first taste of spring warmth will hopefully pull us through the last weeks of winter back home.  It was such fun watching GBaby grow closer to her grandparents, aunt and uncles.  She has explored the outdoors on her two little feet barefoot and now with sneakers and is getting the walking thing down pat! She continues to hold her record as a great traveler as she played happily throughout all our flights on Monday.

One of the biggest bright spots of last week came on Monday when we were traveling.  We placed the "amen" at the end of a a prayer for smooth travels and an on-time or miraculous early arrival.  It was almost like God was sitting up in heaven, scratching his beard saying, "yeah, ok".  Not 2 minutes later, my cell phone rang with an alert that our first flight was delayed by 2 hours.  A quick schedule review in my head told me that we would miss our connection which was the last flight of the day to our destination.

So I sent HandyMan and GBaby to drop the dog off with friends and I went inside to call the airline.  After navigating the goofy voice prompt system, I finally got a helpful reservations agent on the line.  I quickly explained the situation and no sooner did I finish explaining than he offered to re-route us on another airline which would have us arriving at our destination an hour earlier than scheduled.  He put me on hold to finalize the plan with the other airline.  Holding...holding...holding...holding.  Finally he came back, gave me a confirmation number and we were ready to go.  We made our connections with plenty of time and arrived an hour earlier than originally planned.  Direct answers to the small prayers are great!

It has been a good week, full of brightness and family.  May your week be blessed!

Week of Many Hats

Where has this week gone?  It's Thursday already!  How did that happen?  I've had on many hats this week and here's a bit of what I've been up to:

Charity's Candles - I've been getting ready for my craft fair this weekend at SUNY-Oneonta.

Web Design - I've been doing some updates on the web-pages I manage.  Have I mentioned that I also do web-work and  web design?  I've been working on my friend Perri's site for about two years now I guess.  She has some great photography and I still have a few more changes to do for her :).  I'm also the Online Chairperson for our local Relay for Life so I'm responsible for 'personalizing' their template website for our event.

Work & Life - I've also been busy with some other part time secretarial work that I do for our church.  On top of the GBaby's sick again and we're all working off of random sleep.



Yesterday I did sneak in some baking therapy.  I made the Challah recipe from my Bread cookbook and you can see the results- and it was so yummy!  I also had a Lemon Meringue Pie failure (yummy but ugly) and a success (yummy and pretty) but I didn't get pictures of those.