Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

Wow, it’s hard to believe January is almost over. Here are some of my favorite parts of last week:

1. Mom’s day out. I had some gift cards for Michael’s, which is too far away from us for a casual stop in, so I finally had a day where I could plan to go to there and JoAnn’s, which is nearby. Just down from JoAnne’s is Tuesday Morning, and I had time for a stop in there, too. Found some good deals, had lunch on the go at Chick Fil-A, and then my husband took me out for Mexican food that evening. A fun day overall!

2. Surprise discoveries. While tucking my gift cards away in my purse, I discovered a forgotten JoAnn’s gift card and $20 in an envelope from my last birthday. Sweet! I didn’t think the gift card had much left on it, but after I made my purchase the clerk told me there was still $12 left.

3. Antibiotics and healing. This week I’ve been recovering from what was a worrisome infection. A former pastor used to say God heals “with medicine, without medicine, and sometimes in spite of medicine.” 🙂 I’m so glad for these tools He has allowed men to discover.

4. Kids pitching in. My son and daughter-in-law made some delicious lasagna for us last Sunday, and my youngest son cooked his first meal ever last Monday, and all of them loaded the dishwasher afterward. Jesse ran to the store for some essentials for me, the first time since he started driving that I asked him to do that. He even brought me back some M&Ms.:)

5. A new quilt. I had been looking for one for a long time. The bedspread we had was deteriorating. I wanted something with pink, blue, and green, and kept finding various combinations of those colors but nothing with all three. Finally I stumbled upon this at Tuesday Morning:

It’s still not exactly the shades I was looking for, but it is closer than anything else I’ve seen, and it was inexpensive enough that if I find something I like a lot better, I won’t have any problem storing this for company use.

Bonus: My son Jason, who has been unemployed since Thanksgiving week, starts a new job Monday!

Despite recuperating, it’s been a pretty good week. I could add that receiving a few notes, e-mails, and Facebook posts that people were praying for me was a blessing, too.

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

Another week has flown by! Here are some of my favorite parts of it:

1. The little doohickey that enables me to listen to an audiobook on my iPhone through my car speakers….a car which only has a cassette player. I forgot what you call it, but one end plugs into a CD player (what we used to use it for) or an iPhone and the other end is a cassette tape that goes into the player. It was hard to hear just the iPhone over car and traffic noises.

2. A thoughtful husband, who, after just overhearing me talk about the above device in a conversation with my son, while I was wondering where that device might be since we hadn’t used it in a long time, quietly found it and set it up for me so it was all ready to use next time I drove.

3. Enlarging small photos. I mentioned last week going through a box of my mother-in-law’s old photos. The majority of them were only 2 x 3 inches, and I wasn’t sure if she’d be able to see them well enough to identify any of the people. I scanned them in and printed them out 4 x 6, and I was so glad that worked well.

It’s been fun looking at them with her.

4. Working on a Cooking for 2 recipe book. With just three of us at home, and sometimes just two, often I just make regular meals and then have leftovers for lunch or another dinner. But I do have a lot of recipes for just 2-4 from when Taste of Home used to publish a Cooking For Two magazine (I miss that one!) I’ve been wanting to pull those out and compile a separate recipe book so I could find those without digging through the others I’ve pulled out of magazines. I was especially glad to find a scaled- down Texas Sheet Cake recipe — I love that but rarely make it since the original recipe makes a cookie-sheet panful.

5. Having the Frazor team at our church last Sunday. Always a joy.

Bonus: Finally getting decent pictures of these guys, as decent as I can get through a glass window and screen.

I didn’t think rabbits ate seeds, but apparently they found something in the bird feeder they like!

Have a great Friday!

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s been an overcast week here in eastern TN with the possibility of snow tonight. No accumulation expected, though many students, as well as parents and teachers, hope that part of the forecast is wrong! (Update: that part was written yesterday afternoon. We did get a bit of snow, but only got a 1 hour delay for school.)

Here are some of my favorite things from the last week:

1. Audiobooks. Wow, that has really transformed driving time! I’ll say more about it when I finish the first one.

2. Looking through a box of his mom’s old pictures with my husband. Jim’s sister had sent it just after their mom moved to be near us and we had been meaning to get that down from the attic for a long time so she could help us identify some of the people in them, but thankfully Jim knew who most of them were. We found several of his mom as a child, which Jim had never seen before, and several with her sister, who had passed away many years back.

3. Twice-baked potatoes using this recipe. I’ve had them a couple of times, but this was the first time I made them. So good! And though I am not the best planner in the kitchen, I did even plan ahead for this by making extra baked potatoes for a dinner earlier in the week.

4. These:

They say you shouldn’t go shopping when you’re hungry. They’re right. :blush: I dashed in for some supplies for Jim’s mom, saw this, and grabbed it. It’s a layer of brownie with a layer of chocolate chip cookie on top. Wonderful.

5. Finished projects. Jim’s mom’s new place has a shadow box outside each resident’s door for photos or whatever. My main project this week has been working on a collage for that (thus the looking through old pictures mentioned above). I wanted to include some older ones and some more recent ones. I got that finished yesterday — but forgot to take a picture of it! But here’s one of my favorite pictures of his mom:

And this is hot-off-the-press just finished last night — I haven’t even rinsed or pressed it yet:

Normally I like to use as much as floss as possible and not leave any white space behind the Xs, but this was a kit and I didn’t know if there would enough floss to use more strands than called for, so I just followed the instructions. But I like it overall.

Hope you have a great weekend in your part of the world!

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

The week after Christmas is relaxing in some ways, but sad in others as visiting loved ones go home and Christmas decorations come down. It’s sad that it’s over. But it is kind of nice to get the house back to normal and to make plans for the new year. I’m not sure why changing over the year brings about a flurry of organizing and cleaning out, but I’m going with it!

Here are some faves from the past week.

1. A short work/school week.

2. Knowing that there is more daylight since Dec. 21 even though it doesn’t really seem like it yet.

3. Playing games. Jason and Mittu got some expansion packs for their Catan games, and Jesse got a couple of new games for Christmas. It’s been fun to play all together. I’m looking forward to playing more.

4. New officey stuff. I’d been wanting some kind of memo board ever since we set up an office in this house, but was undecided about style and size. I’d thought about making the kind that has criss-crossing ribbons. But then I saw this at W-Mart today, and I like that it has both cork board and magnetic board, and it will fit right under a cross stitch picture I have up. Can’t wait to ask a certain handy hubby to take care of that for me. 🙂

And I was tickled to find pink push pins for the cork board:

5. These:

Also just discovered at W-Mart. My sweet tooth got really overfed over the holidays and I’m needing to get it back under control. These are really good and just 120 calories per pouch. Just enough to satisfy that desire for something sweet and chocolatey but in controlled portions. No, this isn’t a commercial. 🙂 I just really like them.

Bonus: A visitor:

We’ve seen bunnies in the yard occasionally, but this is the first time I remember seeing them right outside the window. I had spilled some bird seed when I refilled the feeder a few days ago, and I guess he found it! It’s hard to get a good picture, though, because he’s pretty skittish — any movement or even the click when I take the camera from its charger makes him jump.

I need to hop away, too, but I’ll be back to visit with you later today. Happy Friday!

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s going to be hard this week to figure out which five things to draw from the last week as favorites, as nearly every aspect of Christmas would qualify. But I’ll do my best.

1. Christmas, of course. Though things were different this year, even a little disjointed, it was a lovely day. I wrote more about it here. The family time, love expressed, wonderful foods and smells — the whole month, really, has been a nice celebration of Christmas.

2. A new iPhone! I didn’t think I’d be getting one til later in the year, so I was very surprised! Love it.

3. A Tivo. I’ve wanted a DVR for years. So frustrating to tape things and then have to search which tape it’s on and where on the tape it is. This eliminates that, plus it’s really nice to pause a network show in play whenever you need to why you take care of other needs and then come back to it!

4. Days off. Jim was off all last week and this week, and Jesse is off until next Wednesday. The week before Christmas was pretty busy, but this week after has been like a whole week of Saturdays. We’ve had some time to rest and some time to get things done, but at a generally relaxed pace.

5. Hearing all the kids play games together again. One of the things I love about when we’re all together.

It’s been a great week! I hope yours has been as well.

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s been a very full week with both ups and downs. Among the downs, which all happened to occur on Wednesday: not feeling well, hearing that a college friend had passed away, and our dog, Susie, whom we’d had for almost 14 years, dying. I plan to write a post about her next week.

But here are some of the favorite “ups”:

1. A fun family evening making gingerbread houses for the first time.

2. Our 32nd wedding anniversary. Jason and Mittu came over the night before and made dinner, cheesecake, and a giant peanut butter chocolate chip cookie to celebrate. Mittu made this for us:

She took a photo from our 30th anniversary trip, painted a canvas, and applied the photo with Mod Podge so it looks like it has been painted on the canvas. I’ve seen tutorials for this online but haven’t tried it yet. It turned out very nice!

On our actual anniversary, I was having some pretty severe tummy troubles in the afternoon. By dinner time I was feeling better but not sure I was up to dinner out. Jim suggested getting take-out from a nice local restaurant. When he came back with the food, he said the restaurant was so jam-packed he didn’t think we would have enjoyed it there anyway, so we were very happy to have a quiet evening at home with good food (that I enjoyed not cooking!)

3. Jeremy’s home!

4. Time together as a family. Jason and Mittu are going to her mom’s for Christmas, and it’s sad that we won’t all be together, but we do have to share them sometimes. 🙂 I am glad they are able to go, and I’m very glad we got to spend some time all together after Jeremy got here before they had to leave. Our Christmas is going to be in several stages this year: Jason and Mittu exchanged their presents with Jeremy then, and we’ll exchange ours with them after they get back.

5. My second newspaper column ran a couple of Sundays ago. I forgot to mention it last FFF. It contained the hope of the gospel amid the loss of family members during December, and I wasn’t sure how much the editor would let me include, but thankfully he didn’t edit out any of it. I got a number of positive responses from it: I’m thankful it was a help to people.

I hope you all have a wonderful, Christ-centered Christmas!

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

Here are a few highlights from the past week:

1. The children’s Christmas program at church. Even though we don’t have little ones any more and I don’t know half of these little ones in our new church, it’s still so sweet to see all the miniature angels, shepherds, and wise men. They have the very littlest ones in animal costumes — so cute! I hope and pray the message they proclaim takes root in their hearts as well as the listeners.

2. Jesse’s school Christmas program. The seniors do a “reader’s theater” type play and various other classes and groups sing. Jesse was the “mission preacher,” also known as “the man in the suit,” who was able to tell little “Jimmy” how to be saved. The guy who played Jimmy is one of his closest friends at school. The whole evening went very well, and he was so glad to get it over with — though he had a pretty small part, he was nervous about it. There were a few pangs for Mama in realizing this was the last Christmas program I would have a child in…

3. Pink poinsettias. I don’t usually buy poinsettias, but when I saw this pink one in the grocery store I had to get it.

4. Sunshine. The first part of this week was dreary, overcast, rainy, with several areas flooding (thankfully not affecting roads, but we have several spontaneous lakes and ponds in the area when there is a lot of rain). But the sun shone bright yesterday and today, and it was so welcome. Still cold, but the sunshine makes a lot of difference.

5. My garage. I’m pretty sure I have mentioned it before. But after spending twelve winters scraping frost off windshields and bringing groceries in through the rain, it is so nice to bring the car into a dry and relatively warm space! And I am thankful my husband and son are gallant and chivalrous enough to let me have that space even though they leave the house earlier and have to deal with the frost more on their cars.

I don’t know about you all, but for us most of the Christmas “events” have been sandwiched into this week. Besides the pageant and program already mentioned, our ladies’ Christmas party is tonight, Sunday School potluck is this Sunday, open house at my mother-in-law’s assisted living place Sat. night, and the adult Christmas program Sunday night (thankfully I am just an observer for that!) I’ve bought Christmas cards but haven’t addressed them or done hardly any shopping. It’s a busy but enjoyable time! Hope you have a great weekend.

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

Here are a few highlights from the past week:

1. Christmas decorations. Jim doesn’t like to have them up right after Thanksgiving, but we thought we’d go ahead while Jeremy was here so he could participate and so we could get our family picture in front of the Christmas tree for Christmas cards. I kind of like having them up now. 🙂

We did a couple of new things outside. We have one of those big ugly utilities boxes in our yard, and the previous owners planted some little trees around it. I wanted to decorate the trees and Jim wanted to decorate the box itself.

As we were putting the lights up, we saw that the front of the box said not to plant anything around it. Ooops! It’s evidently been like that for a while and they haven’t said anything, so I guess it is ok. I asked Jim what to do  if some utility guy knocked on the door and says he needs to get to the box — he said he guessed we’d just have to unwrap it then. 🙂 😳

2. Christmas light show. Christmas Wonderland in Sevierville, TN has a place you can drive through and watch the Christmas lights blink and shimmer in time to a radio station they have you turn to. Pretty neat!

Most of the music is pretty good, some of it a little raucous for my tastes. But it was fun to see.

3. Christmas music! I like to wait til after Thanksgiving at least so as not to overshadow it. The Christian radio station I listen to started playing all Christmas music Dec. 1. I just got this new CD yesterday and have listened to it multiple times already.

4. Turkey Bone Soup. One of the best things in the days following Thanksgiving.

5. Harvest Loaf Cake— the first of the season! But not the last, as I am planning on making it again for a couple of upcoming Christmas events.

Have a great weekend!

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week. This has been a wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

This is a week with an abundance of favorites, but I’ll try to narrow it down to five!

1. Our church’s Fall Festival. This is the first year we’ve attended (had a scheduling conflict last year). Every year the Saturday before Thanksgiving, the church has a number of festival things set up for kids (bouncy house, petting zoo, games, a fire truck), food, a game for all, then singing and testimonies. The food this year was a chili cook-off, soups, hot dogs, and pies, and the game a version of Minute to Win It. We didn’t go to the early festival parts, but came in time to eat, and enjoyed the whole evening. My favorite part was the testimonies, reflections of God’s faithfulness over the last year.

2. Jeremy’s coming home and having all the family together again.

3. Thanksgiving foods. We tend to be pretty traditional in our Thanksgiving feast, so we look forward to the same dishes each year.

4. Games. Listening to the kids play Settlers of Catan “just like old times” and then joining them for Apples to Apples later in the evening.

5. Time to relax. Though there was a lot of cooking and dishwashing going on the last couple of days, there was time to watch a DVD together and even some time to sit and read. It’s nice when everyone is off and there are not the usual constraints on the schedule.

Though we’re to be thankful all year, it’s nice to have this time set aside specifically to focus on being thankful.

Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! No Black Friday shopping for me, at least not in the malls!