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.

Here are a few favorites from this past week:

1. Celebrating my daughter-in-law’s birthday.

2. Seeing the first daffodils in bloom. This winter hasn’t been bad, but those first signs of spring are still uplifting.

3. Working on my recipe book I mentioned a few weeks ago while watching episodes I’ve missed on the computer. There are a few shows that I am interested in but my family isn’t, but it seems a waste of time to just sit and watch them by myself in the daytime, which is my prime work time. But while putting clipped recipes in a notebook at my desk, where I can spread everything out, it’s been enjoyable to catch a few of those shows online while working on it. And a subpoint here: I love those network sites that put their shows online the day after they run rather than waiting a week or even 30 days!

4. The Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge. It’s been so fun to just immerse myself in books by and about her this month. Even while I am looking forward to moving on to other things, I am going to miss stopping the series…but I need to save some for next year. This may be a good way to explore other authors in the future as well.

5. This is a life favorite rather than just a favorite from this week, but recently I’ve had a renewed appreciation for being able to be a stay-at-home mom and homemaker. I’m so grateful.

Overall it has been a pleasant week here. I hope it has been for you as well — and if not, may next week be better.

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.

Here are a few favorites from this past week:

1. Puff’s Plus tissues with lotion. These feel so soothing and help keep my nose from getting all red and chapped when I’ve got a cold (I’m thankfully feeling better now).

2. Fellowship. After not having much going on socially for quite a while, we had our “dinner for six” with our new group and a Sunday School party both this past weekend.

3. Valentine’s Day. One of my favorite holidays though it was a bit more low-key this year.

4. Lindt milk chocolate truffles from both my husband and son and daughter-in-law.

5. Encouraging e-mails from readers of my latest newspaper column, saying they had been or are currently taking care of elderly parents and could identify with and appreciate what I had to say. Once I send the column to the editor, then my mind thinks of several ways people could take something I’ve said the wrong way, so it is very encouraging to hear that someone has gotten something beneficial out of what I wrote.

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.

I’m late to the party — it’s been a busy morning to a busy day. But here are some of my favorite things from the last week:

1. More daylight. I mentioned just after the winter solstice that I was glad the days were beginning to get longer even though I had to take it on faith since I couldn’t really tell it yet. But now I can tell! A couple of days this week I was surprised to look up at the clock and see it was time to start dinner — it still looked like bright outside.

2. New smooth pavement. We have to cross a set of railroad tracks on most of our journeyings, and it has been pretty bumpy. They just paved that area recently and it’s much nicer — hardly any jostling now when we go over them.

3. A good visit with my mother-in-law. Lately it has been kind of sad to go see her: either she’s asleep or too drowsy to really talk, or, even when she’s been awake she just hasn’t been conversant. We weren’t sure if she was just tired or was continuing to decline or what. But this morning she was pretty awake and had that old sparkle back in her eyes, and we had a good visit.

4. Inspired Reads. Lizzie mentioned this last week and an author I follow posts some of their offerings on Facebook. They post “free for a limited time” downloads of Christian books for the Kindle. And these days you can download a Kindle app to read e-books on your computer or other device. I’ve gotten several through them — enough to keep me busy for a good while.

5. Learn Out Loud. They have similar “free for the day” downloads of audiobooks. I’m currently listening to one I downloaded from there by Terri Blackstock, and today’s free download is the Chronicles of Narnia. Good deal!

Off again for a bit — I’ll be back later on to visit with you. 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.

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!