This morning I got on the scale and decided it was time to have a go at anorexia. By 9:30 a.m. I’d eaten a cup of Special K Blueberry, so, you know, big fail on that goal. Now that I’ve consoled myself with a chicken sandwich and some canned pumpkin mixed with cool whip (don’t judge me), I have developed a new goal. A better goal. A real goal.
Okay, maybe not a goal so much as an idea.
And here is my idea:
Every year don’t you always have somebody on your Christmas gift-giving list that just leaves you completely stumped? You have no idea what to give that person or those persons because: 1. They already have everything they want;
2. They don’t have everything they want, but you really can’t afford those things they don’t have;
3. They are grumpy and don’t like anything you give them no matter what it is; or
4. They tell you the gift you got them is fabulous, no matter what it is, but you know they will toss it out in a year or two because that is what they do with everything, even your wedding portrait.
So you trudge to the store, to many stores even, and shop online until your fingers bleed, trying in vain to find something that will be appreciated in some way, all the while knowing that, in the end, you will wind up buying something, anything, and spending money just to spend money and be able to say you were thinking of them and got them a gift.
Well, if you are going to wind up doing that anyway, why not give gifts that will help make a difference?
For instance, as many of you know, you can purchase a variety of items from the Bykota House Zazzle Store that will help support orphaned children in Cambodia.
Then there are these beautiful bracelets that will help a family bring home the little girl they have been working to adopt for so long.
And, of course, you could always buy another copy of Meant to Be: Stories of International Adoption to give away and help support children around the world.
Now, I’m not advocating total thoughtlessness here. I mean, if you know the curmudgeon you’re buying for likes to garden, you could get the flower tote from Bykota and put several seed packets and/or bulbs in it. If that person who has everything is perpetually cold and/or a chocolate lover/caffeine addict, you can get Bykota’s Let It Snow mug and fill it with some gourmet hot cocoa mix or specialty coffee . . . stuff. Grounds? I’m Mormon, people, I don’t drink coffee.
Anyway, you get the picture.
So now here is where you can help the rest of us. What else is out there? What other gifty type items with proceeds that go to benefit . . . someone . . . do you know about? Please share in the comments section and I will updated this post with links (yes, provide me with links, people!) to said gifty type items so that we can all share the love, and the giving, and the frustration of shopping for Aunt Marge.
Chop chop! Not much time left to shop (online . . . shipping you know).
Updates:
Give the gift of self reliance
Chocolate and life. Support the Children’s Organ Transplant Association.
And by Christmas, I do mean Christmas.
And by half decorated, I do mean 90% of the decorations are up, but many of the red and green decoration containers are still sitting around the house, the ladder is blocking the front door for the third day in a row, and other decorating sundries are strewn haphazardly about our abode, waiting to either be hung up or put back in the attic because we don’t know where to put them in this house/don’t like them anymore/don’t have enough energy to care at this point.
My plan was to be 99.9% decorated by the end of today, but as it turned out McH and A~ had some evening church meetings and I, of course, got a headache. At least it wasn’t a migraine, but still . . . I’m beginning to feel a tad more than defective and useless.
But enough of the whining, and on to the unrestrained parental bragging.
Today A~ gave her first talk in church. Not in primary, but in Sacrament meeting. For my non-LDS readers, we don’t have a minister/pastor/whatever who gives a sermon each week (though if you’ve been reading here for any length of time you’ve probably already figured that out). Instead, we usually have three people speak on any given Sunday (speakers are chosen from week to week by the bishopric/branch presidency), and one of the three people is usually a youth speaker. To qualify as a youth speaker, one must be 12-18 years old and, you know, assigned by a member of the bishopric/branch presidency to speak in church.
So today was A~ first talk. Ohmygoodness! She did so great. Of course I’m not biased or anything, but my heart just about burst out of my chest. She wrote the whole talk herself and, seriously? I’ve heard adult talks that weren’t so cohesive and well thought out and supported with quotes from the scriptures. And her delivery? Perfect. Not too fast, not too slow, no mumbling, plenty of eye contact with the audience, the whole shebang. She was asked to speak for five minutes and spoke for just a smidge longer than that (more than five, less than ten, but I wasn’t paying attention to the clock too closely). There is no way I could have done that when I was twelve. I would have died first.
I almost died when I was fourteen and had to give my first church talk. Did you know lips can tremble? I mean, we all know about knocking knees, and believe me, mine were, but I had no idea one could be so nervous that one’s lips would would shake. Mine did.
But this isn’t about me and how I was so terrified that I way over prepared and my first five minute youth talk was twenty minutes long (I’m sure my bishop was on the verge of escorting me away from the microphone by the time I finished). This is about A~ and what a great, smart, talented, faithful kid she is.
As I said, I am not biased at all, of course.
We did get several compliments from other members of the congregation after church today. Things along the lines of, “It’s so nice to have a youth speaker who doesn’t just mumble their way through an article from The Friend.” Again, for the non-LDS readers, The Friend is a church magazine designed for children ages 3-11. You would be amazed, or maybe not, at how many fifteen and sixteen-year-old youth speakers just “read” (and I put it in quotes because by read I mean “mumble unintelligibly in sixty seconds or less”) an article from said magazine for their talk and call it good.
Not to be critical or anything, it’s just that if I want to be mumbled at I’ll go see New Moon, because that Edward guy is very mumbly and that Jacob guy is very half naked, and the mumbling is all so much more tolerable when it’s balanced by strong biceps and washboard abs.
Anyway, A~ did not mumble. Have I mentioned that fifty-seven times now? And at the end she challenged the congregation to pay their tithing. Hmm . . . typing that out makes it sound like my child is all haughty or something, but that’s really not how she did it. She did say, “My challenge to you is . . .” but she wasn’t all snotty and pious about it.
She was the single most traumatizingly challenging baby I have ever known personally (though I know some of you have had similar experiences with some of your babies – oh how I wish I had bloggy friends back then to commiserate with and help keep me sane) but she is making up for it in spades now. She is just an amazing kid.
You know, when she’s not being all angsty and oppressed twelve-year-old girlish.
So now I’m just sitting here staring at my screen trying to figure out how to end this post and . . . I’ve got nothing. On the up side, I also no longer have a headache. So maybe I’ll go trip over some red and green boxes and do some decorating. Or maybe I’ll work on some church stuff I need to do.
Like write that last part for the Christmas program . . .
And George, if you’re out there, Tewt the Newt hopes you had a good Thanksgiving.
That would be Missing In Blogging, of course.
I mean, obviously I’m still writing on my own blog, because I am just that self-absorbed; but I think I’ve read, like, two blog posts written by other people in the last five days or so, and only commented on one of them. Or something very much like that, anyway.
In my defense, A LOT has been going on around here.
First, there was the great computer catastrophe of ‘09:
I think we can all agree that one’s screen should not look like that upon rebooting (actually it didn’t – it started out pretty blank and kept gradually getting darker). I won’t bore you with all the travails of getting me back online quickly, but it does involve a new laptop. This is both good and bad. Again, I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say: My iTunes is completely screwed and, therefore, so is my iTouch (even though we put the old hard drive in an external case and plugged it in to the new laptop). I have lost music. I have lost all but one playlist (what the frap, really?) and I have seven copies of Brad Paisley’s Time Well Wasted album on my mp3 player. Don’t ask. Because? I. Don’t. Know. Anyway, getting all that fixed is going to take gobs of time (time well wasted, even). Maybe I’ll work on it during our Thanksgiving Day voyage.
In the meantime, I also had the whole New Moon weekend (see review in last post) which taught me three things:
1. I am way too old to stay out until four a.m. one night and 2 a.m. the next night. My body just doesn’t rebound the way it used to.
2. I have the greatest husband in the world. He took Friday off so I could sleep in until I needed to get up, pack, and leave for 24+ hours to go to a party and see the same movie I’d just seen again.
3. Even when it is not a wedding cake, making a cake and then having to drive it over two hours to its final destination STRESSES ME OUT. But the cake arrived unscathed and I was relatively happy with how it turned out.
Granted, it’s not a perfect replica of Bella’s birthday cake (movie version, since every Twi-hard worth her salt knows the book version was pink), but it isn’t too bad. And see the paper bag in the background? We served cans of warm soda out of it. Yes, we pay great attention to detail for these Twilight parties, don’t we (though somehow I doubt that Billy and Jacob Black shopped at Trader Joe’s)? No need to point out that I am almost 40, thankyouverymuch. The clerk at FYE already gave me that look when I bought Edward Cullen bandaids and candy for the gift exchange. I told him I am apparently 15 on the inside.
Finally, L~ and I have been working on her social studies project. I We finished it tonight. She was supposed to make a model of a Plains Indian teepee and write a few paragraphs about the generalities of said dwellings. Sh
e wrote a few pages about them and I we made this:
Please ignore the huge, ginormous mess that is my kitchen there in the background. I’ve been busy . . . helping L~ make her teepee (or tipi, depending on which book/website you read). She did all the drawing and . . . much of the painting. We left the pole gathering to the McHster. I may, or may not, have done the vast majority of the sewing, fitting, tying. It isn’t perfect, but I blame that on the fabric store for not cutting the fabric to the correct length to begin with, which threw the whole plan off. Or something like that. I don’t even care. The Plains Indians kept the teepee covering rolled up a bit in the summer months anyway, for ventilation I’m assuming, so we’ll just say it’s August. I got a fake mink throw for $15 today at Odd Lots, so we’ll throw that in there and say it’s imitation buffalo hide, and hopefully that will suffice. L~ also has a paper birch bark basket that she made a few years ago for a lesson we did at home, so she’ll include that as well (she should get bonus points for recycling, no?). The teacher only said a model anyway, so I really think the tipi’s size should count for some major grade-age. L~ might give it to Quinn for Christmas.
And that last sentence was totally random.
Must go sleep so I can get up and get myself pulled together enough to drive the kids to school and walk into the building myself. Because there is no way L~ is lugging that thing in on her own.
Anyway, with a little luck I’ll be back to reading and commenting on all your blogs soon. After I finish writing a Christmas program, and planning two or three Christmas parties, and participating in a fudge-off (you know, like a bake off but with fudge), and baking pies for Thanksgiving (which is actually before all that Christmas and fudge stuff), and coming up with a gift exchange gift that fits in with the theme Evergreen. Hmm . . . Christmas boogers, anyone?
And George, if you’re out there, Tewt the Newt says . . . hmmm . . . that is probably considered politically incorrect these days, so let’s just stick with Hello.
