Green Thumb Mama

So what do you do with the upper part of the jeans when you use up the legs for fabric panels for skirts?

You make purses for your girls! These are my prototypes for the ones I've decided to make my nieces for Christmas. Theirs will be lined. My girls' aren't lined because I was trying to figure out how to make them. I have bunches of fun iron on decals I used for the front and back of the purses. The handles are made out of the side seam of the jeans.

It's amazing how much you get done when you're not on the internet all day....


Tonight my husband is taking my girls on a Daddy-Daughter date. Rebecca was lamenting that she didn't have any skirts that were warm. Most of her skirts are light summer-ish or just below knee length and it's COLD now. So I had her get a pair of jeans someone handed down to us, I added alternating panels and voila! A warm denim skirt to wear on a date with her Daddy! She's so excited...she looks so grown up. Sigh. Susanne is wearing her usual....mismatched skirt and shirt with bizarre leggings and cowgirl boots. She's such a flower child. :) I love her for that!

Go read a story that made me cry this morning and made my nose, stuffed up with cold, run all over the place!

The Cake Pan

We have 5 bedrooms in our house. One of our rooms does not have an exterior window in it anymore. It did at one time when the garage was separate from the house. In the early 90's the people who owned the house attached the garage onto the house by building an enclosed and insulated "shop" space complete with massive canning pantry. Adding onto the house that way made the bedroom window for the room next to the garage an interior one. We've used this room for a variety of things: it was my step son's room at one point in ancient history, my first homeschooling classroom, it then was a sewing room, then my son's room, then sewing room again. It's a typical 10x10 room. Nothing massive.

When we thought at one point the Ruth (Jonah's sister) was going to join our family, we decided we'd fix the room up, repaint it and use it for her. Health and Welfare nixed that idea. All children in state custody must sleep in rooms with exterior windows in case of fire. We talked with our kids about this and Rebecca generously offered to temporarily move into the sewing room while Ruth lived here. Well, Ruth is not moving in. Her abusive and manipulative treatment of Jonah has caused some alarm and our social worker feels the two of them need to be in separate homes so Jonah can continue to reconnect with his family and heal minus her manipulation.

I had already painted and cleaned up the room considerably, it was a shame to leave it empty. So today I got the idea to move our homeschool classroom into that room. I was getting tired of our classroom being in a major living area of our house. At times, our classroom was quite cluttered and made our living area look awful. I broached the subject with my kids this afternoon and they quite agreed. In fact, they loved the idea of having a room, rather than a living area, as our classroom.

So the four of us set out to move everything.

It's been a week since I've refused to get on the internet. It's been great. I recognized in myself a week or so ago that I'd been spending too much time on the computer. It wasn't that I was disregarding my family or my responsibilities, it was that I was trying very, very hard not to have to deal with things I don't want to deal with. Emotions. Heavy things. Tough choices. It was easier for me to drown those things by uselessly being on the internet reading blogs (I subscribe to a gazillion), hanging out on Facebook, incessantly checking my email, and generally wasting time. The problem with being an addictive personality is that I can very easily find ways to get out of having to use my coping skills to deal with stuff. It's easier to avoid the issues all together. I got very convicted by the Holy Spirit about my inability to deal with the things He felt I needed to deal with in a mature fashion.

Don't get me wrong. Life is good. I am not depressed. I am quite content. But I have my own demons I deal with on a regular basis just like everyone else in this life. I have worries about my kids and my foster son. I get lonely. I don't get enough sleep. Financial stresses get to me some days. It's all normal life stuff in my opinion. But rather than just face them, trust God with them, work and pray through them....I have a tendency to avoid and numb myself out. No, not with addictive chemicals...with mindless time wasters. If I keep my mind busy, it doesn't have to deal with the issues that weigh heavy on my heart.

So here I am, a week later, still dealing with some stuff, but dealing with it head on and with God, rather than the alternative. I've gotten a lot done. I've painted the spare room (Spare Oom...HA!), I've done some organizing, I've been reading more, I've spent even more time with my kids, and I've learned that I don't need to be "connected" to the world so much. I'm learning, again, to be inside my head rather than running away from it.

Life is moving along and I'm moving along with it, rather than running away from it. I'm not really sure how much I will be blogging. I guess it's up to the Holy Spirit and where He feels I am in my processes of working through things and marching forward. At this point, I am content to be where I am - Internet addiction under control.

I've fallen out of love with blogging. I've decided to take a wee break for a while. I'm not going to quit forever, I just don't have anything to say right now.

Have a great winter everyone! :)

Organized family nights happen in greater quantity during the winter at our house. When I say organized, I mean we make a point to say "It's family night!" and I go to great lengths to have treats and games. In the summer, we are usually hanging out swimming in our pool, or camping, taking walks and so on. Our family time is spent outdoors. When the days get shorter and colder, the evenings seem to drag on and on and so a couple family nights a week really helps with cabin fever! Not to mention the benefits for the family!!

When you're foster parenting, it's even more important to have these family nights. It's essential to keep your family core intact and connected. Fostering can add an element of stress or chaos to your family and it helps to have a united base. It also gives your foster kids a taste of how true families play and interact together. Having fun, laughing and joking, teasing and working together to play a game can help a foster child learn how healthy families behave.

AND....Mommy needs it too.

I needed family night badly last night. We've had such crazy schedules lately, I felt disconnected with everyone. I declared it family night at breakfast yesterday morning and my 3 kids bounced up and down in their chairs. Susanne decided we needed to have cupcakes. This child is my cupcake girl. Every special occasion needs cupcakes in her mind! :) I decided we needed a new game.

So while Rebecca was at her piano lesson in the afternoon, Roger, Susanne and I headed out to the store to get cupcakes and a new game. We chose Phase 10. I learned this game last New Year's Eve and I was dying to teach it to my family. Rebecca had played it once before and she got excited to play again too. When Jonah got home from school, he informed me that he knew how to play and that he was TERRIBLE. I assured him it didn't matter, we were just going to have fun with it. Little did I know, he was pulling my leg!!! Silly boy. He's actually quite good at it and thoroughly enjoyed the fact that he had fooled me! :) He was quite instrumental in teaching the game to everyone and reminded me of a few rules I had forgotten.

It was slow going at first, but then everyone caught on to the game. It was SO fun! In between plays Roger and Jonah had a table battle with Lego men. Susanne didn't want to play by herself, so she helped Daddy. Rebecca felt we all needed to be a bit more serious and frequently hollered out "AHEM!!!!" I turned on some smoooooooth jazz music and did a few goofy dance moves that got a great many groans. We had pop corn and cupcakes. We had laughter and loudness. It was awesome.

It was therapy for me.