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Kids and Allowances: How Much is Enough?

Raise your hands if you, like me, are completely befuddled by allowances?
Way back when my kids started doing regular chores (let’s say, around the ages of 5 and 6 for the boys), I figured it was high time to offer them up some kind of incentive for their help around the house.  Even though their [...]

I’ll Take my Coffee With a Side of Boobs

When I first heard of the bikini baristas a while ago I thought, yeah - this will blow over like yesterday’s news, thinking that it was, quite possibly just a slow news day around The Sound.
Then Stephanie wrote about it here and I thought again, okay, obviously this is not going away - but it [...]

In which I get a free ride home, thanks to my employer

For the past six months I’ve had a little piece of paper hanging in my cubicle at work. It says:
Guaranteed Ride Home

Employees who ride the bus, carpool, vanpool, bike or walk to work on any given day are guaranteed a free ride home – via taxi – in the event of illness, emergency or unexpected [...]

By the Book – Food for Thought

I really really love wheat like only a Mormon can love wheat. We’re supposed to gather a year’s supply of food which for many people ends up being several barrels of wheat stored but never used. I have hundreds of pounds of it in my garage along with other food items, working towards [...]

A grand kind of love

 

The first thing I remember about being a child, before I would always be remembered as being the older child, was that I was loved greatly by my paternal grandparents (my maternal grandparents died shortly after I was born).
“Your Ma Ma used to carry you everywhere. Around the block for a walk when she wouldn’t [...]

The Path to Peace Is Filled with Potholes (And I Lose My Way A Lot)

For the last couple of years, I have been attempting to speak from my heart (and to speak less often).
I succeed about one out of ten times.
Here is one of those times…
I am heading upstairs, to get clothes for all of us to wear. Our housemates are still sleeping, so I want to be quiet, [...]

And Then There Were Three

Up ’til now I’ve pretty much only shared the fact that we are adopting an older child from foster care, but not much more beyond that. I had a curious reader ask me for more specifics: What age range? What gender? What race?
Well from the get-go we knew we wanted to adopt siblings. It’s [...]

Six Fitness Tips

There are those days the alarm goes off, you hop out of bed, grab your workout gear and workout with total exuberance.
And then there’s every single other day.
My friend in High School used to say, “I had a fight with my pillow and my pillow won.” She wasn’t much for working out first thing in [...]

Survival tips for meeting bloggers IRL (In Real Life)

If you’ve been blogging for very long, sooner or later you get the opportunity to meet other bloggers In Real Life (IRL), especially if you’re a member of Seattle Mom Blogs, where we like to inundate our gals with invites to lunches, brunches, cocktail hours, and everything in between.  Then there’s the annual big-time event [...]

In which I talk about yesterday’s shooting in downtown Seattle

When school shootings started to be the in-thing I was well out of the school system. While I was thankful that I would never need to worry about a fellow student losing it and shooting up the school, I was fearful of my dad. He is a teacher at a public high school. I used [...]

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