No, actually,everyone should know about THIS!

Barring any DRASTIC Divine Intervention, I am OUT of the baby making business!

(My last, literal, "childbearing year" was 1998.)

But my sisters are not!(Well one is, possibly, but she still has little ones...) And neither are many of my friends.
Considering that, I received an email today that made my "everybody should know about this" ice-cream thing seem incredibly trivial.

The email is about a condition called retinoblastoma. It is a cancer of the eye, the retina actually, that can show up in young children.

What to do? Take pictures of your kids. Not only does photographing your children preserve memories and make you feel like "a good Mommy" but they can also save your child's life. You know that 'annoying red-eye' thing you often get when taking pictures of your children? Well, turns out there is a use for it;

"A white reflection in a child’s eye [rather than the normal red] could be a sign of cancer.
Several eye conditions can cause a reflection like this, but the most serious is retinoblastoma, an eye cancer affecting only babies and young children."

I can't seem to upload the picture here but this is a link to examples of what you should look for.
Here is a link to a good brochure by retinoblastoma international.

Yes, retinoblastoma is fairly rare but 'rare' NEVER equals impossible. It happens that one little boy at our church lost an eye to retinoblastoma. Besides, it seems like a pretty easy thing to check for.
Where's your camera?

Everyone should know about this!

I don't plan to do alot of advertising on here but everyone should know about this! :-)
If you click on the picture, it should take you right to thier web site.
( Shouldn't they pay me for this?)

--Oh I was in such a hurry when I posted this (running late, as usual) and the image is cropped so poorly that I didn't really even tell you what "this" is. Baskin-Robbins has a 31cent-scoop night once a year. You can get a scoop of ice cream for just 31cents.
This year, that night is April 30th!
Wouldn't that be COOL if your birthday was April 30th and you could go to 31Flavors that night?
(hint hint to you know who you are)

(Okay, I suppose I did a little advertising with my favorite lemon products, sorry about that.)
Oh and by the way my FAVORITE lemon Cookie at the moment is, of course, Girl Scouts' Lemon Chalet Cremes! Call me if you need to try one!

Was it something I said?

To date, I only have 4 blog links listed in my sidebar. They haven't been there THAT long either. But I noticed that two of them don't even exist anymore. Should I take this personally? Did I say something wrong?
They are really funny women too.

I assume they weren't just hiding from me...were they? hhhhmmm....

So you tell me;

Exactly how high can a mountain of laundry get?

The dirty one or the clean one?


sigh...

The Lemon Seven

Okay, you know what memes are right? You get "tagged" by another blogger to do something specific - tell a certain number of things about yourself or answer specific question(s)... then you comply, post the requested response on your blog and then tag others to do the same.
Well, I am quite late on a tag I received, literally, last year. Technically I am only 4 months late, but it was at the end of Dec 2007. Although my friend, Luisa, had decided not to tag anyone, my smart-alecky comments caused her to make an exception. (Lucky me.) ;-P
Seeing as this is my first meme on this blog, giving you just seven completely random things about me seemed a touch odd. So I decided to give it a theme; lemons.
Seven things about me relating to lemons:


1) One of my very favorite scents is Lemon!
It wakes me up (atleast to the extent possible on the amount of sleep I get), It makes me smile. It is such a happy scent. -- Not candy counter kind of lemon, freshly scratched lemon peel kind of lemon! (Closely followed in preference by the scent of a bowl of fresh nectarines.)

2) This is the background image for my profile on our laptop;




3) I think Lemons are like sunshine in the form of fruit.

4) So far, my very favorite lemon candle is Henri Bendel's lemon Verbena- I found mine (on-sale) at Bath and Body Works.
If you know of any other really good lemon candles, let me know!

5) This is my FAVORITE recipe for lemon bars! (thanks again, Luisa)

6) Somewhat recently my daughters and I have developed a patronage to CVS drug store's Essence of Beauty Line in the Lemon Twist scent. -don't be confused with the Citrus coconut scent - it is NOT the same! Don't accidentally grab the sunflower one either- the packaging is VERY similar!
Note: I was excited to see that both the bath gel and the hand soap contained citric acid (the nearly vital ingredient for any good lemon product) until I found that most soaps on the market contain citric acid. Oh well.

7) I have had the ability to bite right into a lemon slice since about the age of 3, and often do. (much to my dentists' chagrin)

There you go, 7 things about lemons and me. I now tag Mary, With a Y and my sisters, April and Holly. (sorry, my sisters both have 'invitation-only blogs') Oh, and no you are not required to give it a theme, unless you want to.

PS: Apparently "soon" = just shy of a month

A note about spelling;

FYI I am the best speller in my house. And the fact that that statement is true is an inconceivably huge joke. I would be hard pressed to find a report card of mine that did not include the two phrases "poor penmanship" and "spelling needs improvement".
There are, however, a few words that I spell the way I spell them because I have declared them so spelled! Does that make any sense?
I have declared the words 'alot' and 'atleast' to each be one word, not two words each, a lot & at least, as recommended by every spellchecker I have encountered. I believe there are other words that I have declared the spelling of, but I can't remember them right now. I'll let you know when they come up.
I just didn't want you to think I was making thoughtless mistakes - I am, infact, making informed decisions and they are spelled that way because I have decided it so.
Too bad I can't seem to take charge of the rest of my life as that way - just decide that it is so...
PS - I know, I know, this was not a "real post". I have not forgotten my promise to post soon. I guess "soon" is such a relative term...
PSS You can add the word 'infact' to "my declared so spelled" list too!

I promise I am posting soon!!

Really!

A close to 2007...

I'm not exactly sure what I want to say except that I just wanted to squeeze one more post into the December folder.
This hasn't been a great year. In alot of ways I've been sliding backward this year. (maybe even, this decade)
But I am trying to think of all the things I've got to be grateful for as well;

~I'm still married (I've been hearing about alot of divorces lately)
~I have three really great children
(I was going to say that they are practically brilliant- but that is as much a challenge as it is a blessing...) :-)
~As far as we know all 5 of us are in good health
~My husband has a job and now that he has tenure he would have to do something pretty drastic to get fired!
~All 3 of my children (INCLUDING the teenagers) are active in church -you don't know how big that is.
~Both my cars run (at the moment anyways)

You know... I will be adding to this list this week.
I need to think on my blessings just a little more often!
So for now.....

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!

Post formatting

I have yet to figure out how the formatting on this post window works. It is driving me CRAZY! What is worse is that the 'preview' looks exactly like I want it to, but the post comes out completely off. sigh, oh well. sorry if things look odd for a while. I will try to figure this out.

Why empty trash cans need lids…

Had I thought of it sooner I would have taken a picture and had it here for you to view, but for better or for worse there is no photo.

We have a few trash cans. At least one of them we use around the yard for weeding or whatever. Well, it got left near my garden, the lid got left off, it rained. I figured—okay that’s good, I can water things with rain water sometime. Well, later (and by later I mean at least a month) it snowed, the water froze. Not that big a deal, right? As we were pulling out of the driveway one evening my husband noticed the trash can across the yard and we mentioned that, for fear of the ice causing the can to burst, we should tip it over tomorrow. My 9yr old son obviously overheard these comments because after he got home from school the next day (I was, of course, not home) he went and tipped the can over to break the ice and empty the water for us. Well, it turns out we had a guest. Lying in the middle of the large ice chunks was a perfectly (*PERFECTLY*) frozen squirrel. It was really creepy. Eyes open, claws perfectly positioned out in front of it. It looked like the taxidermy animals at a nature museum.

Two of my children thought it was “totally cool!”, while the other thought it was “the most disgusting thing! It died in our yard!” I had kind of mixed feelings. I hate the squirrels, every year they try to make a home in our attic. (EEeeww!) And they destroy every birdfeeder we try to establish. I am constantly threatening to get a BB-Gun and sit stealthily in the backyard waiting to ‘bump them off’, literally, as they run across our deck railing. But at the same time the scene seemed sort of oddly tragic.

Later on, my daughter turns to me and says “Hey Mom. Do you realize you finally killed a squirrel?” “Yea, I was thinking the same thing when I was standing over it.”

End of the story; Somewhere in the woods behind our house some four legged animal will find its own form of frozen dinner, you will always remember to put a lid on your empty trash cans and our family now has one more to add to our “one-word-that-tells-a-whole-story" list: squirrel-cicle.