Love the weekends! Teaching school is very tiring. Most teachers put in many more hours than some people realize. It’s tiring physically, mentally, and sometimes emotionally. If one teacher tells another teacher that they came home and were exhausted, the other teacher will understand exactly what they mean! And there are other professions plus being a stay-at-home mom that understand exactly what is meant too!
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So how does the working mom, stay-at-home mom, or working girl eat healthy and spend minimum time in the kitchen? Processed foods are not that great for us with all the additives (sometimes wonder if they came from Mars) and artificial stuff put in them. One thing that helps is to go to the store on the weekend and stock up on fresh veggies and fruits. With these you can have:.
.Here’s an example of something I fixed up last week, quick & easy:
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So…here’s our menu for this week:
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Monday: Sauteed okra with fresh mushrooms & onions (cooked in olive oil with corn meal, salt & pepper), chicken (note the fresh veggies still have top priority)
Tuesday: Italian Chicken Pasta (Barilla Plus Pasta) and salad
Wednesday: Chef Salad with fresh veggies and turkey
Thursday: Some type of fish, sauteed okra with fresh mushrooms & onions
Friday: Pizza, salad
Most people will never forget what they were doing ten years ago today. Some of us watched in disbelief! It was surreal, like watching a horrible scene in a movie…only it wasn’t a movie! One thing that seemed so strange that day was that we did not see one plane in the sky, nor for many days to come.
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We took our son out of school (5th grade then) and drove a couple of hours to where our daughter was in college. My husband was planning to drive there anyway that day to take something to our daughter, so we all went. We didn’t talk much. I think we prayed silently most of the way there. When we got to our daughter’s apartment, we all hugged and were so thankful to all be alive and together. But there was a sadness, too, because we knew many, many families were hurting terribly.
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The scenes we saw on TV kept replaying through my mind like some nightmare, only I couldn’t wake up and say that it was only a dream. I, like many others, feared another attack. We all knew that our world had changed. Although I grew up during a time when we had air raid drills in school and feared being bombed, since then our country had developed a false sense of safety and ease that we had grown accustomed to. 9-11 was a wake-up call!
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So how are our lives different now from ten years ago? Mine has changed! I don’t worry like I did back then. Today, I have a friend who married and moved to the states 20 years ago, and a couple of years ago she converted from her Muslim faith to Christianity. Ten years ago, I would have been too scared to be around her. But God has helped me with my fears (and in many more ways than this)!
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I don’t know exactly why, but this song, “I Will Rise,” came to mind to share in this post. Back then, my prayers joined the thousands of prayers for God to ease the pain in the way that only He can! This song maybe sums up those prayers. It talks about peace, victory, overcoming, and no more sorrow or pain for those who are in Christ. Some day, we will all have a wake-up call when our life is over. Hopefully, everyone will have this peace and victory!
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(By the way, Chris Tomlin sang this song at the 2009 Dove Awards.)
Seems like the weeks are passing by so fast! October is three weeks away, and soon we will be seeing outdoor halloween decorations in abundance. Some years, there are more decorations than other years, and I think weather has a lot to do with it. If the weather is nicer, more people tend to put out more decorations.
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We used to decorate when our kids were at home, but now we don’t really put out anything at all where we live. We do go help with a Fall Festival where we go to church which is held on Halloween eve. We take decorations such as a fiber-optic pumpkin and other friendly pumpkins to help decorate there. I tend to like the friendlier Halloween decorations, not the scary ones, and the majority of our decorations are fall related. Those are fun!
Just for fun this summer, we visited an RV sales lot and looked through some of the RV homes for sale. I was amazed at some of them! They were just like a miniature home, some of them with a full modern kitchen and stainless steel appliances. One even had a washer/dryer combo, and when I say combo that is exactly what I mean. It was one unit where you simply pushed a button for wash and then dry. That one unit did it all. Very impressive!
Now, if someone were traveling and had a breakdown, I guess they would have to get rv towing, but while they were waiting to be towed they could relax on their sofa and watch TV, cook a full meal in their full-size kitchen, take a shower in their full-size shower, wash their laundry, sleep in their queen-size bed, etc. They could do just about everything that they could do in a regular house…except maybe host a family reunion. And I guess that wouldn’t be hard if most people brought their lawn chairs and sat outside.
Welcome to Friendly Friday!
Please note – we’ve started having Friendly Friday begin at 8pm Central Thursday nights. This will give you early-to-bed people time to enter too!
Remember, YOU can host the link list on your blog, too! Just get the InLinkz code and copy it directly into your post. The code is different every week, so be sure to get the new code when hosting Friendly Friday on your blog. Hosting the list is a great way to get even more traffic to your blog and make Friendly Friday more beneficial for everyone.
Thanks for joining the Friendly Friday celebration hosted by Christi at Frugal Novice, Xenia at Thanks, Mail Carrier and Charla at Healthy Home Blog! We invite you to join us every Friday to make more friends in blogville, get more blog followers and follow other great blogs out there.
To join in the Friendly Friday celebration, include your family-friendly link in our list, follow the hostesses in the first 3 spots and then start blog hopping! Visit other blogs on the list and comment to give them some blog love. Then take a minute to follow them through Google Friend Connect – this is a good way to keep up with other blogs, but also lets us show support to each other! Please DO NOT list your giveaways here, links must be to either your homepage or your Friday posting with your blog title. All others will be deleted.
Create With Joy is an inspirational blog that celebrates creativity! You’ll find art and crafts, mouth-watering recipes, books and resources and so much more! The author behind this great blog says she hopes you’ll be inspired to live each day to the fullest, and infuse creativity in all you do. If you want to get ideas for books to read, crafts to make and food to create, this is the blog for you. There is such a variety to the topics covered that there’s something for almost everyone!Love these three day weekends! And I also love my special needs students who I teach, and I feel so blessed to be their teacher. But…it is a very tiring job and I’m very thankful to have three days to rest up! It’s going to be a long stretch between now and the Thanksgiving holidays! I think I voice the opinion of most teachers. 🙂 With that said, here’s our menu for this week:
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Monday: Eat at Qdoba – use Labor Day coupon for “Buy one entree, get one free” Yay!! We really like Qdoba’s food. (Wish our kids could all be here to eat with us! They really like Qdoba, too, and their salad and chicken would fit in with Christi’s Freshology meals.)
Tuesday: Sauteed yellow squash with fresh mushrooms & green beans (cooked in olive oil with salt & pepper and garlic powder), chicken (note the veggies have top priority)
Wednesday: Chef Salad with fresh veggies and turkey
Thursday: Salmon Patties, corn, green beans
Friday: Pizza, salad
Losing weight is a struggle for so many people. I want to lose ten pounds, but right now I’m having a hard time eating as healthy as I want to. It’s not like I need apidexin or any type of diet pill, but I do need to cut out the sweets we’ve been having the past week while celebrating my husband’s birthday. And I need to exercise more which is hard to fit in with a busy beginning of school schedule.
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Here’s part of my problem. My husband received a birthday coupon from Cold Stone Creamery, and we discovered their “Founder’s Favorite Signature Creation.” That was so delicious! Then I got an email coupon from them to celebrate the Labor Day holiday weekend: “Buy One, Get One Free.” Guess where we went last night. You’re right!
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I am not going to lose ten pounds if we keep going to get ice cream, which we honestly rarely do. With my husband’s birthday past and one birthday left to celebrate the end of this month (our daughter’s), I hope I can stay off most sweets…until the Thanksgiving holidays get here anyway.
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One good thing about our daughter’s birthday is that she has been sticking to healthy eating for the past month while reviewing Freshology meals on her blog (Frugal Novice). And she’s going to be doing it (Freshology meals) for one more month. So, I’m thinking about maybe an angel food birthday cake for her birthday, topped with low-fat frozen yogurt plus fresh fruit to decorate the top of the cake.
A lot of people are wanting to buy xbox games. What’s so cool about them? Well, Xbox is developed by Microsoft and uses a camera to track the player’s motion through the Kinect Peripheral. It has high definition and better graphics than the Wii, can play DVDs, and you can watch Netflix on it. It recently underwent a price drop, and Dell recently offered free Xbox consoles to students buying laptops. That’s pretty cool! (Thanks to our college-age son for supplying me with the info!)
Welcome to Friendly Friday!
Please note – we’ve started having Friendly Friday begin at 8pm Central Thursday nights. This will give you early-to-bed people time to enter too!
Remember, YOU can host the link list on your blog, too! Just get the InLinkz code and copy it directly into your post. The code is different every week, so be sure to get the new code when hosting Friendly Friday on your blog. Hosting the list is a great way to get even more traffic to your blog and make Friendly Friday more beneficial for everyone.
Thanks for joining the Friendly Friday celebration hosted by Christi at Frugal Novice, Xenia at Thanks, Mail Carrier and Charla at Healthy Home Blog! We invite you to join us every Friday to make more friends in blogville, get more blog followers and follow other great blogs out there.
To join in the Friendly Friday celebration, include your family-friendly link in our list, follow the hostesses in the first 3 spots and then start blog hopping! Visit other blogs on the list and comment to give them some blog love. Then take a minute to follow them through Google Friend Connect – this is a good way to keep up with other blogs, but also lets us show support to each other! Please DO NOT list your giveaways here, links must be to either your homepage or your Friday posting with your blog title. All others will be deleted.
Aleisha (known to her zany and adorable nearly-five-year-old as “Mama Leisha”) is a wife and mother of two who has to depend on Diet Coke with a slice of lime to get through the “crayon on the walls, apple juice spilled on the floors, laundry piled as tall as Everest, toilet clogged with Fisher Price ‘Little People'” kind of days. But even so? She knows she is completely blessed to have the life that she does and is happy to share it with her readers. Stop by She Calls Me “Mama Leisha” and say hello… and be sure to check out the Quips tab – her daughter will crack you up!
Yay!! We all survived the first week of school. Most of us teachers were exhausted by this past Friday. The past two weeks, I did two 50 hour work weeks back to back plus my blogging job opps. This past Saturday, I stayed in my PJ’s most of the day and didn’t venture out of the house. We had good leftovers to eat so we didn’t really have to cook. It was a restful day! With that said, here’s our menu for this week:
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Monday: Eat out! Yay!
Tuesday: Chicken Italian Pasta, salad, sauteed yellow squash
Wednesday: Chef Salad with fresh veggies and easy homemade turkey bacon (free of nitrates,nitrites, etc.)
Thursday: Salmon Patties (we really like Salmon Patties, can you tell?), corn, green beans
Friday: Pizza, salad
“I won’t be shaken by drought or storm” are words from this fairly new song, “My Hope is in You,” which shares the hope we have in God to take care of us. No matter what storm we’re going through (loss from an actual storm or drought, illness, loss of job and income, family problems, and the list goes on), God is the only solid rock we have. Circumstances can change, people can change, but God never changes. He is our fortress in any storm!
Isaiah 40:28-31
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.
29 He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.
30 Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
31 but those who hope in the LORD
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.