7 Quick Takes

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I don’t often get to share my paid writing with you lovely people, but this week CCL sent out a “sneak peek” of the new issue…which turned out to be an essay I wrote about Julianna’s zest for life…illustrated by her plunge into the full-immersion baptismal font last summer. Hope you enjoy!

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Lately we’ve been having the neighbor girls over to play in the mornings. They all run around until Julianna’s bus pulls up, and I keep wondering if the bus driver ever thinks, “How many kids does that woman HAVE???” But then, the neighbor girls are platinum blondes, so surely there can’t be any confusion there–even if there are FIVE children getting on the bus to make sure the one among their number who actually belongs on it gets properly belted and hugged.

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This week, the girls decided to help Alex with his daily chore (more about that next week). That particular day, the chore was weeding the flower bed while I mowed. We had any number of close calls with hand-held instruments of torture garden hoes and shovels, and lots of shoving, as you might expect when four children (Julianna was already gone) try to weed the same three square feet of garden space. But how do you squelch such enthusiasm?

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“This house is like A HUNDRED YEARS OLD,” announced Alex’s friend.

“We-ell, not quite that long,” I said, “more like seven.”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean! You guys have lived here for A HUNDRED YEARS!”

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For those whose interests run toward writing, here’s an article I wrote for WOW! Women on Writing. It’s called “Getting It Done When There’s No Time To Do it.”

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We’ve been having escalating computer troubles this week. Finale suddenly decided it doesn’t feel like converting to .pdf anymore…the printer randomly decided that occasionally it’s going on strike because it doesn’t like the color cartidge…I can’t even access the Yahoo Groups page now, much less my Yahoo mail account…ran a defrag today and in the process discovered that we are using 75% of our memory. Maybe THAT’S the problem. I went through and deleted a gigabyte of photos. I don’t know if that will help. We’ll see.

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Finally, yesterday I took the kids on a field trip. Literally: we went to ride the tractor & combine with Grandpa on the farm. I put up a bit of a photo essay on Facebook. I hope the link works; I have it set to public, so crossing my fingers!