Ethan’s usually not my groggy child. Typically I wake him up first and send him on his way to get ready, then go work on waking up his sister, which can take a while. Not so this morning.

“Goooood morning Ethan! How’s my boy today?”
“…. dessert.”
“Did you say ‘blert’ or ‘dessert’?”
(smiling sheepishly as he realizes he was sleep talking) “Dessert.”
“So you’re dessert eh? Should I just eat you up??”
And by the time I’d nibbled his arm, he was awake enough for me to move on to Mary.

“Goooood morning, my Mary! Are you desert too?”
(sigh and stretch) “No, but you ARE sweet, Momma.”

Ah, how I love my kids.

I’ve decided against banners at the bottom and switched to automated contextual links, but for a while there it was hard to differentiate between ads to sites I was recommending and the automated ads. Which could be annoying if you were expecting something else. Sorry about that.

I’ve fixed it so that the automated ad links display in a different color and show a little disclaimer when you mouse over them, stating that they are an ad. Again, they’re not making me rich or anything, and I hate to defile my little blog with advertisements, but every little ‘extra’ bit is a huge blessing for us as I’m going back to school full time & supporting my family alone. Thanks for understanding!

Since I’ve started going back to school, my grocery budget has shrunk significantly. The result? I can’t afford to feed picky eaters. We need the most bang for our buck, which means we eat lots of vegetables, cereals, and leftovers. Luckily the kids are adjusting. Here are a few tips that seem to have helped over the years. I’ll be kicking them into full gear now Read the rest of this entry »

Ethan was baptized on June 25th in a simple but very sweet and well-attended ceremony. Thank you to those of you who were able to come to support him, as well as for those of you who prayed it would go well for us. The spirit there was beautiful, and I hope Ethan will remember that throughout his life.

Many of you asked for a copy of the talk Mary gave. As promised, here it is. Enjoy.

Mary’s talk on Repentance, Baptism, and the Atonement

Remember my article on Lenovo Y510 woes? The summary – Lenovo makes excellent laptops and has great customer service, but the Lenovo IdeaPad Y510 (And perhaps some other laptops of theirs) come pre-configured with a tiny, easily revertible C partition for Vista and a large D partition for data. The problem is that all the windows user data.. favorites, desktop, documents, music, etc… are all also configured by default to sit on that tiny C partition. As is the swap file. So you end up crashing Vista fairly quickly.

Well, a few people have written in wondering how on earth they should move their default user data locations to D. Here’s my how-to… Read the rest of this entry »