creative sunday

started off the weekend with a gift sent by a family friend in atlanta. my mom & lutricia were high school science teachers together. she sent a box of these greeting cards to each one of my mom's four daughters (my three sisters & i, in other words.)



it wasn't until i got into the box that i realized what a bounty this is!! every single card is a 3 dimensional collage of goodness. oh, i am itching to send some good mail (it's a good thing there's no mail today, because i would have put card-writing on my already long list of sunday to-dos!)

we threw together some of these treats for the sunday school gathering after church. i must have gotten this idea from someone's blog, because i surely wouldn't have thought of it myself!! thank you to "you" for blogging this awesome idea. they are always such a big hit (for almost no effort...)



i had planned to do a valentine color scheme, but did i miss out on the valentine m & ms this year, or what?!? so, on to plan B (thanks carlo, for challenging me to think up plan Bs!). i went with a mardi gras color scheme. i wish there had been purple m & ms, but i settled for blue. if we ever vote again for new m & m colors, i vote purple!

we had a tee shirt hanging around the hotel (leftover from a training class we held recently.) i coupled that with a pillow from the lost and found, and voila...



now we have this cute little pillow in the office to remind the team about their training. somebody stop me! i'm being creative at work!

sunday was long. i am really enjoying going to church, but i am not used to the schedule at all. unfortunately, matty works on sundays, so jack and i are on our own. before we even left the house, jack and i were at it. this morning, it was over a red sweatshirt. jack said he would be 'embarrassed' to wear it. wha?!? WHY is my 6 y.o. son so weird about clothes?? this is not the first time we have butted heads over clothes/shoes, etc.

anyway, i was soooo stressed out - throwing clothes all over his bedroom and rattling on and on about why i won't let him go out in clothes that are too small, or why he can't wear a hockey jersey to church, and on and on and soforth. ugh! i totally lost it. the whole drive to church, we were basically sitting in our respective corners of the car miserable. i just freak out sometimes, at the tiniest provocation!! and poor kid, when he's the only other person around, he really gets the brunt of it...

this week, the service was about 40 minutes longer than usual, with the kid's puppet show and a special annointing they offered. since the kids had already had 45 minutes of sunday school before church, it was little much for them. they just wanted to go to their party afterwards, anyway!! jack got very squirmy, and we had another round of "WHY does my child insist that the floor is an O.K. place to be?!?" seriously, church, grocery store, theatre, you name it. this kid spends more time on more floors than i will ever be comfortable with!!

as we were driving home (finally), jack was commenting about the amount of trash along the sides of the roads. he said, "this town is built with litter. this town should be built with love." out of the mouths of babes, my friends...

the afternoon mellowed out, thank goodness! my sister & brother-in-law took jack to the playground with their son so that i could get my walk in. (on my walk, i saw two otters playing in one of our lakes! i wish i had had my camera with me, because i wanted to show jack that there really is love in this town).

as i was getting back from my walk, matty was just getting home from work. he had to change his clothes and head back out the door for play practice. he didn't get home until 7 pm. he was literally gone from sun-up to sun-down. while he was at play practice, jack and i made a yummy white chicken chili, and got all of the laundry folded AND put away! THAT is a success in my book!!