Creative Homemaker

My 19 year old son just told me about this cool electronic gadget you can buy that you attach or aim at nonworking light bulbs on a strand of Christmas lights. It analyzes and finds the burned out bulb. I looked at one at QVC. You have to aim the tool at each light, and it lets you know which is not working. The tool costs $15.92 plus 3.97 shipping and handling. And not only that, but then I'd have to actually use it!! Yeah right! I think I'll go buy me another set of $2.99 lights from Wal-Mart.

Ok, I’m sure that you all are tired of looking at perfect houses and wondering why you can’t have gorgeous things like all of these other toured homes. I was thinking you could take a look at mine and then you’ll know that it can be Christmas even in the midst of chaos. First of all, I’m the one that does the decorating, so I have no excuses. I do have some beautiful eclectic things, but I’m cheap, move a lot and hate it when things get broken. So what I have is mostly kid-friendly pieces. Last year, I cleaned out some stuff and decided that others could enjoy them before they were ruined at my house. Here are a few of my favorite decorations. First of all, my children’s nativity scene, my dear sister, Nin, made this and gave it to me years ago. It has been through all of my children and still looks pretty good. It’s in the bathroom, because I can’t put any priceless items in there, the kids would play at the sink and break it. I looked in this morning, and someone thought that the...

Being a military family, each night I make the troops start at the front door and do a “walk-through”—police call. The object of this "order" is to get anything that is yours and pick it up, put it away or I get it and it disappears. Thinking I could just command and not inspect, I sent them on their errand. Miss Busy came back a few minutes later and said, “Yeah, Mom, nice house, but I sure don’t like all the junk on the floor.”

This evening after dinner, I was standing in the kitchen tidying up when the doorbell rang. My kids have been trained NOT to go to the door--they escape, and they get in arguments with neighbor kids etc, so I went to answer it. I opened it to find no one there. Aargh, I hate it when those rotten neighbor kids “ring and run.” I was going to find them this time. Even though I was only in slippers I headed out to the sidewalk to see if I could find the perp and give them a good tongue-lashing. I glanced one way and then headed toward the mailbox, I heard something near the side of our house and called out. “Ok, you may think it’s funny to ring the doorbell, but I don’t!” I saw movement, HA, I had them now, someone moved to hide behind my Suburban, probably thinking they could scoot around the back of my truck and then they would be home free. But I had parked it so you couldn’t get in between the garage and the garbage cans. I stood at the end of the driveway, I wasn’t going back i...

It has been weird-real-life video for me to stand here and rinse and wash someone's entire life. I have seen one couple marry and raise children, take trips on ferries, attend graduations, and have parties. I’ve watched them open Christmas presents, and babysit grandkids, I’ve seen new puppies, sons playing baseball, and kids riding carousel ponies. It is so heart breaking to me to see these photos in this condition. Oh, I know that no one plans to have a 20-foot wall of water entire your living space. (And it was a beautiful home; I've seen the pictures to prove it.) But it sure makes me more passionate about the Creative Memories Mission On my morning walk back from the school bus, I stopped with a friend at the home of a neighbor to let her know that her garage door had been left open. She mentioned that if someone had broken into her garage they could have all the junk in the garage except for her girls' Baby Books. I nearly yelled at her to get them in the house an...

I was sitting here reading through some of my favorite blogging posts, (I'll post my favorite blogs soon, I promise) and I just came to the conclusion that this blogging thing could really take a large portion of my life. I can actually DO the laundry instead of blogging about how much there is. I can actually fix dinner instead blogging about what I would have prepared if I hadn't been sitting at the computer all day. I can actually sew my kids Christmas presents instead of pining away at the fabric my sister sent me. What a concept! Work! Good, fulfilling work! I was reading in the book of James today, (you know, in The Bible) I'm doing Read thru the Bible in a Year . It says in verses 22-25 of Chapter 1 22 But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; 24 for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he wa...

Today's batch was fairly easy to clean up. I had them in the fridge over night so mold would not grow. The first two garbage bags went much faster, but then they were mostly pictures in frames, with their own set of problems. These pictures were stacked closely together, so there were lots of pictures in a smaller space. A few things I learned that I thought would be of interest to you and good info to pass on to our customers. Please take your photos out of the developer's bags/envelopes. They almost always have dye in the paper used to make the envelope. When they get wet, the dye will run and stain the top picture. Fortunately, for Mrs. "C", most of these were double prints, so the duplicate was somewhere in the stack. In the stack I did today, I only found one CD, and while it did work and the pictures loaded ok on my computer, there was only one CD. I was hoping I would find more CDs when I started today, making my task go a bit more quickly. There ar...

Today I started in on a small garbage bag on photos. I say small because it was small in size, but the number of photos was nearly overwhelming. The photos were stored in a canvas bag, through the mud, I read "garden Tote" on the side. It had pockets on the inside and out. It was full of nearly a dozen sets of "picture developer" envelopes, 2 slip-in style pocket albums, and stacks (about 8 inches thick) of photos. I'm estimating 500 photos in this bag. They may be the worst out of the bunch. It looked to me like the bag had been full of water and the muddy sediment settled and landed right on the photos. (I just can't even imagine the heartbreak these people went through--to see all of their things FULL of mud.) I would grab a small section of photos and peel and swish in the sink to remove the chunks of mud. (You know, all those pdf things on CMC-Network don't even begin to come close to what I was actually doing.) They say "gently agitate...

I was prepared for the worst. I had water and gloves and tools to scrape the mud, garbage bags in which to put the broken picture frames, tables to lay out the photos. But I wasn't prepared for what I saw when I opened the first bag. I'm ahead of myself-- I was moved to volunteer with the cleanup, and came in contact with Kathryn at Daring Young Mom she referred me to a cleanup volunteer who had the photos. She came with 4 bags and 2 boxes, the bags were mostly pictures in frames, old 70's high school pictures, a black and white or two, and lots of snapshots. I was amazed to see that under an inch of gooey mud, they weren't in too bad of shape. Water really isn't an enemy to a picture, they are developed in liquids, and as long as they don't dry out in this condition, they can be cleaned and made right again. I started in on the first pile. I had glimpsed a black and white in the bag and thought I ought to start on the oldest ones first. They seemed to be the m...

This morning, Sweet Boy came up to me and crawled into my lap after I had finished reading my Bible, everyone else was still asleep. He put his arms around me and whispered in my ear, "Mommy, you are a nice mommy." Ahh, that makes it all worthwhile. Filled my tank for the day.

http://www.daringyoungmom.com/2007/12/08/flood-washington-with-relief/ I read this post through a link on a blog I regularly read. Please read her post and then decide if you can help. I'm sending food storage items and blankets and clothing. These poor people have lost everything, destroyed by 14 feet of dirty, river water. So sad. Please help if you can.