We’ve spent the past week packing and now unpacking, and the result is that we’re eating lots of fast food and prepared meals from the grocery store.
This is not how we usually live. I’m frugal and prefer home cooking (i.e. meals made from scratch), so I’m accustomed to cooking all of our meals. Our transition from old house to new house may have given me a break from cooking, but it’s also shown me how much waste there is in eating this way.
First off, it’s a waste of money. For example, I spent $16 for breakfast for four at McDonald’s our first morning here. All we had was coffee or juice and Egg McMuffins. I could have made that much cheaper at home!
Then there’s the garbage that little breakfast created. Wrappers, paper napkins, plastic and paper cups and lids, cardboard cup holder….we had quite a little mountain of trash to pitch afterwards.
Once I found the paper plates, I did buy some prepared meals that I could just microwave or throw in the oven. They’re cheaper than eating out, but not by all that much. And again, there is waste in all the packaging involved that you then throw out. Tonight’s dinner of Stouffer’s Chicken Alfredo resulted in a large box and a large plastic pan being thrown out.
Finally, whether we eat in a restaurant or buy prepared food at the grocery, I know what we’re eating is not nearly as healthy as eating home-cooked meals. In some ways, it’s a waste of calories. Who knows what’s in the stuff we’ve been eating? At least when I cook, I know what’s in our meals: less fat, less salt, few preservatives……and more nutrition.
It’s good to be back online, even though I have no business doing so since I’m surrounded by boxes and chaos everywhere I look. But sometimes you just have to take a little break here and there to keep your sanity.
If you’ve ordered a book directly from us, bear with us. The printer isn’t hooked up yet (don’t know where it is but it has to be around here somewhere!) so we can’t print invoices and shipping tickets. We’ll get your order out soon, I promise.
Dd18 begins tech college on Monday, and soon after that I’ll start another year of homeschooling, but this time with only one child, our youngest, ds16. What a strange feeling! I’ve been homeschooling at least two children for so long that I can’t remember what it’s like having only one child to work with!
This year we’re homeschooling in a new place. We loved living in Door County, Wisconsin the past two years. While the area we just moved to is not nearly as scenic (not many places in the Midwest can compare to Door County!), it’s three hours closer to friends and family, including our adult children. So that’s a big plus
The house we just moved into was built in 1920. It has only ever had two owners. The first was a school teacher who never married. The second is our landlord, and she’s also a school teacher. I think having homeschoolers in this house will be a nice change of pace! It’s a very pretty house with high ceilings, original woodwork and lots of character.
We’ve never lived in a city before and never lived in a historic district, so this is a continuation of our adventure of living in new places, which began when we left suburbia two years ago for life in a vacation town between a bay and one of the Great Lakes. Once we get settled in, I think we’re going to like it here. But we’ll never get settled in if I don’t go back to unpacking boxes, so offline I go……
We’re in the midst of moving household and businesses beginning tomorrow. For that reason, Cardamom Publisherswill be closed tomorrow and all of next week. Whether you order directly from us online or via snail-mail, your order will not ship until Monday, August 24, 2009.
Today my husband and I celebrate 30 years of marriage
I don’t know where that time went, or how we got old enough to be married 30 years, because when I look at him, he still looks like my boyfriend. But numbers don’t lie.
For me, it’s been a remarkable time, full of fun and challenges and all sorts of things I never expected. Soon after we began dating, I told him I didn’t want to get serious with a guy because I had big plans to be a reporter in New York City, with my own apartment and a baby blue Chevy Camaro (17-year-olds are nothing if not dreamers!) Instead, I’ve spent the bulk of our marriage as a stay-at-home, work-at-home mom. I’m grateful that it worked out this way.
The odds were against us from the beginning. Firstborns aren’t supposed to marry each other because of their perfectionist tendencies, and supposedly people who marry young don’t have good odds for lasting marriages either. I’ve also read that there’s a pretty high divorce rate among parents of special needs kids.
But statistics mean nothing when it comes to God. He brought us together, and kept us together. There’s really no other explanation.
The past 30 years haven’t always been easy, but there have been far more good times than hard times: watching our kids grow and develop, learn to ride bikes, read and write, dance and play basketball, and later, learn to drive, get jobs, and become independent. Over the course of a few exciting weeks we saw our son graduate from college with honors and marry a nice girl from a Christian family. We pray for happy Christian marriages (if God intends for them to marry) and blessed futures for our daughters, one of whom begins college in a few weeks. And we’re enjoying each sometimes-slow-moving stage of development of our youngest son, who did indeed have Down syndrome and who has brought more joy to our lives than we could ever have imagined.
We look forward to watching our family expand with new family members in the future. Maybe someday someone will call us Grandpa and Grandma. Maybe we’ll even call each other Grandpa and Grandma (grandparents tend to do that, I’ve noticed). But no matter how old we’re allowed to become together, my husband will always be the calm, quiet, stable person in this marriage, my beloved best friend and yes, still my boyfriend.
We have a couple of medical issues in our family lately, plus we’re having trouble finding a house (we’re supposed to be moving in a month!) So please pray for us, if you feel led to do so. (Thanks!)
In the meantime, I’m looking for smiles wherever I can find them. Here’s something that made me smile, and I want to share it with you:
“First Lady Michelle Obama took a second swipe at David Letterman on Wednesday, calling the CBS “Late Show” host’s jokes about one of her daughters “disgusting” and “sexually perverted.”
In an e-mailed statement, Obama said: “Laughter incited by sexually perverted comments made by a 62-year-old male celebrity aimed at a 12-year-old girl is not only disgusting, but it reminds us some Hollywood/N.Y. entertainers have a long way to go in understanding what the rest of America understands – that acceptance of inappropriate sexual comments about an underage girl, who could be anyone’s daughter, contributes to the atrociously high rate of sexual exploitation of minors by older men who use and abuse others.”
Riffing on Obama’s trip to New York last weekend, Letterman joked Monday night that during the seventh inning of the Yankees game “her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.”
Letterman followed up on the line Tuesday night, joking that “the toughest part of her visit was keeping [former New York Gov.] Eliot Spitzer away from her daughter.”
“I doubt he’d ever dare make such comments about anyone else’s daughter,” the first lady added in her statement.
She responded to another Letterman line during a radio interview Tuesday, calling him “pathetic” for joking that she made a stop during her trip and “bought makeup at Bloomingdale’s to update her ’slutty flight attendant look.’”
What do you think? Awful, isn’t it? What’s wrong with a man who publicly makes sexual references about the young daughter of a public figure? He should be fired.
Surprisingly, this hasn’t gotten much media coverage. You’d think it would. But maybe it’s because of who it happened to.
You see, David Letterman did do this on network television the past two nights, but not to Michelle Obama. He did itto Sarah Palin.
I used to be a grief support volunteer at our church. It wasn’t a job I sought out, but one I was asked to do; I only agreed to it after praying about it and feeling prompted to say yes.
Like so many service opportunities, it turned out to be a good experience. I met some awesome people who, despite suffering great emotional pain, taught me an awful lot, even as I sought to help them.
One of the things I learned about grief is that it’s important for the grieving person to keep busy. Grief can be so overwhelming, even for Christians, that it can knock you down. It’s important to get back up and keep moving so you can keep living.
Rosie was one of those people knocked down by grief. Her beloved husband died, and she didn’t know how to live without him. But she did know that she wanted to call attention to prostate cancer, the cause of his death, and she decided that instead of letting her grief knock her down, she would get up and run, literally, to bring attention to the need for a cure for prostate cancer.
She decided to run around the world. It took her five years; she covered 20,000 miles. During the course of her travels, she would be stalked by wolves, meet up with two murderers, be hit by a bus and nearly freeze to death. Oh, did I mention that Rosie was a 57-year-old grandmother when she set out on her journey?
