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, 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.

I’ve been trying to hold out until the official first day of autumn to put anything fallish up, but it’s close enough now, I think. 🙂 It’s hard to believe September is 2/3 over when it seems like it just got here. Here are some favorites from the last official week of summer.

1. A hummingbird’s visit. I don’t have a hummingbird feeder, but maybe I should get one – a little hummingbird was fluttering outside my kitchen window the other day.

2. Jesse’s birthday was Monday. Always fun to celebrate a family member and to have everyone here.

3. Lemon cake. Lemon isn’t one of my favorite flavors – I gravitate to chocolate – but Jesse has requested a lemon cake for his last few birthdays, and now I look forward to it that one time each year. I think it’s the glaze that makes it.

4. Take-out dinners. We can’t just go out to eat anymore, with Jim’s Mom here, but I had a hankering for Red Lobster’s popcorn shrimp recently, and Jim indulged me by bringing some home after work one night. Then he had a hankering for Asian food, and Jason and Mittu brought some over from a place near where they live.

5. An easy-going husband who is content with soup and sandwich on a night when I discover right at time to make dinner that I don’t have the chicken I was planning on using. I had thought there was a package near the back of the freezer – but there wasn’t!

Bonus:

I just got some photos from the phone and camera onto the computer this morning. This is one of my favorites, taken on my birthday.

Happy Friday!

Friday’s Fave Five is hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, who invites us to share five of our favorite things from the last week. It’s 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.

Here are some highlights of the last week:

1. Feeling better after feeling pretty awful over the weekend and the first few days of this week. It’s amazing how “just a cold” can wipe you out. It’s good to have some energy again.

2. Light meals. As in light energy required. I’m glad my family is ok with them some nights. 🙂

3. Low-key projects. I have a few tasks that are aren’t urgent, therefore they tend to stay on the to-do list. But they were just right for this week when my energy wasn’t up to par, and it felt good to be productive. I got a desk cleaned out, some computer files tidied up, and some recipes that had been pulled from magazines organized. Those last two still need some work, but it helped to put a dent in them, at least.

4. Triple A. Both my mother-in-law’s caregiver and my oldest son needed their services this week. It’s nice such things are available.

5. Tiny Texas Sheet Cakes. I’m pretty sure I have mentioned them before. I LOVE this cake, but it normally makes a cookie-sheet sized cake, and it would be too much temptation (and too many calories!) for me. I was delighted to find this smaller-sized recipe a few years ago that only makes four servings. With three of us in the house, that automatically keeps me from devouring the whole thing. I’ve been craving it for a while now and splurged on it last night.

Happy Friday!

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Friday’s Fave Five is hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, who invites us to share five of our favorite things from the last week. It’s 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.

I’m running late once again! Here are some highlights of the last week:

1. A visit from a friend of my son and daughter-in-law’s. He stayed with them last weekend and they all came here for dinner after church Sunday. I have this tendency to second-guess myself, and I was thinking maybe going to “the parents'” seemed obligatory and he would rather have spent the time with them at their place, but when he saw us at church he gave me a spontaneous hug and seemed glad to see us, so I was reassured. 🙂

2. A three-day weekend. Labor Day is one of those low-key holidays – not much expectation besides a cook-out (another fave! Grilled burgers!). We even brought Grandma out to the patio for dinner and she seemed to enjoy it though she tuckered out pretty quickly.

3. A relatively quiet week after a few busy ones…although this seemed busy in it’s own way as well and I didn’t get nearly as much done as planned. But at least there weren’t a bunch of deadlines or appointments, etc.

4. Take-out dinner. My dear husband indulged me in a requested night off from the kitchen and brought home take-out Chinese food. He actually didn’t get my text til after he got home, so he had to go back out again to pick it up, poor guy. 🙂

5. Disability aids. I often amazed when we encounter some snag in Grandma’s care and think of what would help, search the Internet, and lo and behold, someone has made it and someone else sells it. 🙂 The latest need was a safety belt for a shower chair. We had been using a gait belt, but it was just short enough to be difficult to attach and didn’t seem very secure. We used the one designed for the shower chair this morning, and it worked perfectly.

Hope you have a great weekend!

Friday’s Fave Five is hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, who invites us to share five of our favorite things from the last week. It’s 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.

I’m late to the party today! Had a deadline to meet this morning. But here’s my first-week-of-school faves:

1. The most low-key start to school ever. My youngest son started his second year of community college on Monday. On the previous Saturday I was at the store, saw some notebook paper, and thought, “Oh! I should probably get some of that.” Got a package of pens, too, for good measure. 🙂 And had to replace a lunchbox later in the week (he had used the old one for years and it finally broke.) He had bought his books before his oral surgery, and he had enough supplies and clothes in good condition (with the exception of tennis shoes – he bought some recently) that we didn’t have to have any big shopping sprees.

2. Recovery. Jesse had four wisdom teeth and two molars removed last Thursday, and the first day was really rough (mainly from nausea), but every day since has been progressively better. He is still chewing a little gingerly, but overall is doing well.

3. Bringing church to Grandma. Our church divided into groups on Sunday night and visited the “at-home” members, mostly elderly folks who can’t come to church often, if at all. We had a pretty sizable group come here to sing and read Scripture for Grandma. There were several children in the group who also stood up together and sang. It was sweet to see Grandma singing along with some of the hymns.

4. Beginning a walking regimen. 20 minutes Monday, 24 minutes Wednesday, 31 minutes today.

5. A lamp I’ve had my eye on for three years but thought was too expensive. The store it was in is going out of business, and yesterday when I was in the area I dropped in to see if the lamp was still there. It was, and the salesperson offered it for half price. I had some money I had kept back from last December when my husband gave me a portion of his Christmas bonus and decided to use it for that.

Happy Labor Day weekend!

As foretold, I haven’t been around online much this week due to Jeremy’s being here for his birthday. I’ve been enjoying having him here and the extra time with all the family together. So here are some favorites from the last week.

1. Having Jeremy here, of course, and celebrating his birthday (lasagna and Boston cream pie!) It’s been a quieter visit since the rest of the family had to work most of the week and we had Grandma here, but we’ve enjoyed talking and eating lots of food! Jim was able to take a couple of days off, and they went to the shooting range one day and bought and installed a new router another. Plus Jeremy helped me figure out a few computer-related issues.

2. Playing games all together as a family.

3. My new iPhone case, found by Googling “iphone 5 rubber case pink floral.” Love it!

4. Grilled steaks and cheesy potatoes. Since we couldn’t easily go to Jason and Mittu’s apartment for dinner one night, since Grandma’s caregiver leaves at 6, they brought dinner here. It was wonderful!

5. Mittu liked the anniversary gift I made for them! They celebrated four years together last week. We don’t usually exchange anniversary gifts, but they’ve done some nice things for ours, and I saw an idea similar to this on Pinterest, so decided to try to do it now. This was what I used my cool hot glue gun for that I mentioned last week. 🙂 I sort of followed this felt rose tutorial but used the hot glue gun instead of stitching.

I have the hanger set so that the flowers are on the bottom left side: I don’t know why I took the picture with them at the bottom.

It has been a lovely week. Hope yours has been, too!

Friday’s Fave Five is hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, who invites us to share five of our favorite things from the last week. It’s 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.

Friday’s Fave Five is hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, who invites us to share five of our favorite things from the last week. It’s 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.

Here are some favorites from the last week or so:

1. Turning calendar pages. I love turning to the fresh, clean pages of a new month.

2. A parking mat.

I had a hard time parking in just the right place in the garage, and this is simple and less obtrusive than other ways to deal with it.

3. Reading 100+ pages in one morning. Jesse got braces this week, and the appointment afforded me time to just sit in the lobby and read. It was kind of a balm (for me, anyway, not for him, poor guy!) to get away from the hecticness of the last couple of weeks and just sit and read.

4. A good aide. I mentioned in yesterday’s update on Grandma that the home health care aide we have working with her Monday through Fridays has been great.

5. A favorable prediction. On the news last night, the weather man said that August was originally predicted to be hotter than normal, but now he is predicting it will be less hot than normal, just like July has been. We’ve had a few very hot days, but nothing like the usual summer heat, and I am delighted that it looks like that trend might continue!

Happy Friday!

Update: Oops! I forgot Susanne was taking a break from the computer! But it’s good to look back over the week and recount it’s blessings anyway.

Another busy week has passed – I’m going to need a break from summer break. 🙂 But I appreciate having the opportunity each Friday to stop and think about the best parts of the week. Without Friday’s Fave Five I might let those blessings sail by without as much thought and thanks as they should generate, and I might forget to look for them in the weeks that are more problematic or heavy. Thanks once again, Susanne, for hosting this!

So here are some of the highlights from this week:

1. Mexican food. We hadn’t had any in a while – out, that is. There are a few dishes I make, but chimichangas aren’t one of my specialties, and that’s what I love to get when we eat at a Mexican food place.

2. My favorite All Meat pizza. There is a little local pizza place that Jesse and I love but my husband doesn’t care for. One night when Jim had an evening meeting, Jesse and I got a pizza from this place. Always nice to have a night “off” from cooking, especially unexpectedly on a week day, and this is one of my favorite things to have on that occasion.

3. Picking up my latest stitching project again. I had laid it aside….oh, I think maybe during Christmastime, and it has been such a busy year since that I just haven’t been inclined to get back into it. But for some reason I was inspired to this week, and once I get going I feel driven to keep at it. Here’s what I have so far:

4. A successful outreach cookout. Our church has been breaking up into small groups on Sunday nights to go through Tim Keller’s Gospel in Life series. Part of the emphasis is that the gospel isn’t just for salvation, but it is supposed to affect every area of life, and part of the emphasis is on community. The cookout was partly for members to get to know each other better but mainly for an opportunity to invite visitors. Rain was forecasted but thankfully did not appear, and the lake view next to the pavilion where we were was beautiful. There was a good ratio of visitors to church folks: if everyone had brought visitors, we each would likely have been taken up with our own visitors, without as much opportunity to interact with each other. As it turned out we sat across from a couple who were neighbors of one of our group and had a thoroughly enjoyable time chatting. I have to admit as an introvert that this kind of thing is intimidating to me, and I was feeling overwhelmed when I first came and saw a lot of people, in particular a lot of people I didn’t know (our “small” group is one of the biggest), but thankfully God gave grace and it went very well.

5. Your warm and thoughtful comments on my post about bringing Grandma home.

Stay tuned over the next couple of weeks for a giveaway to celebrate my 3,000th post and upcoming 7th blog anniversary. I’m not sure what I will do for it yet, but I’m pondering!

Friday’s Fave Five is hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, who invites us to share five of our favorite things from the last week. It’s 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.