Relay For Life

Stacey, one of my best friends back home, works for the American Cancer Society and has always been passionate about the Relay For Life. She actually lost her dad to cancer this last year and that has not stopped her desire to help search for a cure for this crazy disease. She contacted me last week and asked if I'd be interested in making bracelets for her team to sell as a fund raiser. Each bead represents a different kind of cancer. I love the idea and went to town on it so I thought I'd share what we came up with and offer you a chance to pre-order one! They will be $20 and will come with a business card size list of what each color represents. They are 7 1/2 inches and on stretchy string, we can easily make them bigger or smaller if you want. You can contact her by email at stacey.dutton@cancer.org to place your order (you'll have to cut and paste it because I don't know how to link it). All of the proceeds go directly to the American Cancer Society/Relay For Life. This is just a test run so they may change somewhat from this design but you get the picture. If you'd like to pay by PayPal, let her know that too and we will set that up. Thanks everybody!

Purple – General, Thyroid, Pancreatic
Black – Melanoma
Teal – Ovarian
Orange – Leukemia
Gray – Brain
Periwinkle – Esophageal, Stomach
Green – Kidney
Brown – Colon
Pink – Breast
Light Blue – Prostate
Lime Green – Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma
Peach – Endometrial
Orchid – Testicular, Gynecological
White – Bone, Lung
Gold – Childhood
Yellow – Bladder, Liver, Sarcoma

Happy Mother's Day

A few years ago I heard a speaker say that the average age of children when they move out of the house for good is 25... are you kidding me? She said that what we need to do as parents is start to train our kids with our language so they understand that, at some point, they need to leave. Like, "Today you are going to learn to cook a pizza... so when you graduate from high school - and move out - you'll know how to cook something." or, "Today you are going to learn to do laundry...so when you graduate from high school - and move out - you'll know how to do laundry!" and so on, and so on. So, I have started slowly incorporating some of these things into our daily routine. A few years ago when I broke my leg, all of the kids learned a lot of things like running the microwave, unloading the dishwasher, etc. But a couple of years ago for Christmas we decided it was time for Kurt to learn to do his laundry. It was awesome, I bought him a huge basket and filled it with laundry soap and laminated directions on what to do. He gloated for weeks with it being the biggest gift under the tree. Not exactly happy when he opened it up!

A couple of weeks go by and I go downstairs to put a load of clothes in the dryer only to find it screaming at me! And guess who had just done his laundry??? Days go by and Tim has no opportunity to check it out and finally caves and lets me call the repair guy. He walks in, takes the back off of the dryer only to find a pencil stuck in the back = $80. Poor kid did feel terrible and after threatening his life, has done pretty well all in all with the whole laundry thing. Until this week. I had hair day (another post for another day) on Tuesday and had asked Kurt to get some laundry going. Not sure what exactly happened after that but Tim came home and told me that apparently Kurt had tried to cram every piece of clothing he owns into the machine - hey, gotta commend him for trying to get it all done, right!? Well, it busted the piece in the machine that makes it spin and left all of the clothes dripping wet and the machine not working.

I guess the good news is that we needed to call the repair guy anyway as my oven crapped out last weekend too - in the middle of baking brownies no less! Good thing they were in a glass dish and I could zap them in the microwave! Needless to say, over $200 later we have our washing machine and oven working again. Lucky me. Did someone say "Happy Mother's Day"?