I have a Face­book friend who often updates her sta­tus. She’s a home­school­ing mom, and often her sta­tus will say things like, “Help­ing the older ones with a project on Mesopotamia” or some­thing like that. How­ever, it also says things like, “Thank­ful for the legos on the floor, the crayons on the wall, and all my bless­ings.” It seems like the days she writes those things are the days I most need to read them.

Is there some­one in your life who helps you keep your per­spec­tive from becom­ing skewed?

With Thanks­giv­ing com­ing up and hav­ing two chil­dren, I have started think­ing again about tra­di­tions for our fam­ily. When I was younger, my fam­ily wasn’t huge on tra­di­tion other than get­ting together. THAT was our tra­di­tion. Spend­ing time with fam­ily was the most impor­tant thing. That is still impor­tant to me. I still want our extended fam­i­lies to be a big part of our kids’ lives and our lives, too, of course. I also want some­thing of our own though. What do other peo­ple do for fam­ily tra­di­tions? How do you start one? Do you just ask around and try some­thing that sounds good? Do you just hap­pen upon it and keep doing it once you decide you liked it?

A cou­ple things I’ve heard of doing are to put the Christ­mas tree up on Thanks­giv­ing as a fam­ily. Get a table cloth and use it every year at Thanks­giv­ing (or Christ­mas or another hol­i­day) and write one thing that you are thank­ful for on it. A friend of mine told me that she had 24 Christ­mas books. She wrapped them up, and start­ing Decem­ber 1st, she read one of them each night with her kids while they all had hot choco­late. I think that’s a great idea, by the way. I just don’t have 24 Christ­mas books yet.

Are there any other great ideas float­ing around out there? Now that this is becom­ing more impor­tant to me, I’m actu­ally feel­ing pres­sure to make my tra­di­tions great. I know that mak­ing them tra­di­tions is really what makes them great, but I just really want them to be meaningful.

Sorry, today’s post is lack­lus­ter. I have a mid-month rut to get myself past. Instead of a really inter­est­ing post, how about some semi-interesting facts about me and my life:

–I saw two of my super cute nephews today. I will miss them between now and Christmas.

–I have a great hus­band. While I was at a Mom’s Night Out, he did laun­dry, dishes, put the kids to bed, and cleaned the liv­ing room. Um, what else is there to say???

–I am not made for winter.

–There are too many good books in the world and too lit­tle time for reading.

–Mud pie and onion petals go sur­pris­ingly well together.

I’ve writ­ten a few times in the last month about my annoy­ing, per­sis­tent cough. It usu­ally comes on like a cold, and then it hangs on just about for­ever it seems. I often can’t sleep well. I feel tired dur­ing the day. I decided that it was time to do some­thing about it. Yep, I wrote all this yes­ter­day and prob­a­bly a cou­ple other times. What’s new, you’re wondering?

Noth­ing new, but I do have a reminder as to why I need to con­tinue pur­su­ing a cause and/or treat­ment. K. Poor guy is cough­ing tonight. Last night, he woke up a cou­ple times cough­ing. As hard as it is for me to deal with the cough, it’s even harder for me to hear him deal­ing with it. I feel guilty, because I know that he coughs because I cough, and he has half of my chro­mo­somes. I feel like I caused this prob­lem for him. Right now, he’s barely 3, and he has had this cough way too many times in his life. It seems like his whatever-this-is is worse than mine was at his age. Is it aller­gies? Asthma? Some­thing else? What causes this and who can help us fig­ure this out???

The poor kid is only three, and he’s already had allergy test­ing done. He’s tried clar­itin and zyrtec. He’s cur­rently try­ing an asthma inhaler. I just wish I could take it away for him, but I can’t. After deal­ing with the same sort of cough for the last three weeks (plus a cou­ple days), it hurts my heart to hear him going through the same thing.

I’ve done a cou­ple posts on what books I’m read­ing, but now I’m won­der­ing what blogs you are read­ing.  I’m always look­ing for a few good blogs to read.

You can see my blogroll on the side of my blog.  I cur­rently have 61 blogs in my reader rang­ing from recipe blogs to blogs about healthy eat­ing to moth­er­ing to breast­feed­ing to regional blogs.  I’m really up for a lit­tle of any­thing as long as it’s interesting.

Here are a few blogs that I read:

5 Min­utes for Spe­cial Needs

5 Min­utes for Mom

A Life Less Sweet

Not a DIY Life

Post Secret

What are 5 blogs you read?

Today is K’s 3rd birth­day!  He had a “mean car” party on Sat­ur­day with some of our fam­ily.  Today, we’re just relax­ing and play­ing.  In fact, right now, he’s tak­ing a nap after his big week­end.  I’m hop­ing that Jason will get some pic­tures off our cam­era from Sat­ur­day.  If he does, I’ll post some later tonight!  And, yes, he’s still nursing.

That is what some­one told us that we should buy for K. He LOVES music. He likes to lis­ten to music. He loves wed­ding dances. (Remem­ber Michaela’s dance?) He often breaks out into song or requests that Jason or I sing to him. When he was younger, I found him one day danc­ing to a radio com­mer­cial that had no music only talking.

At church, he adores our wor­ship leader. Z is a younger man. He is a bit older than college-aged, and K loves him. One time, we went to church out of town with my in-laws, and before church started, K stood up on my lap and looked around. “Where Z go? Music???” He wanted to know how in the world a church could have music with­out Z. K gen­er­ally comes to the church ser­vice with us for either the begin­ning or clos­ing wor­ship. Last week, he came, and as I was hold­ing him, he started singing along with one of the songs. He was singing dif­fer­ent words than every­one else in the sanc­tu­ary, but it didn’t mat­ter to him, to us, or to God. It was adorable.

Get­ting back to the title of the post, gui­tar, drums, and a piano. Well, we have 2/3 of those, and what we don’t have K is tak­ing care of on his own. I have a piano from my years of piano lessons as an ele­men­tary, junior high, and high schooler. A cou­ple years ago, Jason showed some inter­est in learn­ing to play gui­tar, so I bought him one for Christ­mas. K has taken the drums into his own hands. This is a video I took on my phone ear­lier today.

I’ve been count­ing down in my head to my 100th post for a while now. Then, I real­ized that I missed it! Whoops. So, for my 101st post on this blog, I decided to do a list of 101 things about me (and my fam­ily). Here it is:

1. My mom and I shared a hos­pi­tal room with my high school best friend and her mom when we were born (2 days apart).
2. We didn’t find out about that until we were 17 years old, because we weren’t from the same town until her fam­ily moved at age 14.
3. When I was younger, I thought I would become a nurse, a teacher, and a pet store employee when I grew up.
4. When I was around 7 or 8 years old, I started putting the same 3 items on my Christ­mas list every year: a phone in my room, a pet, and another brother or sister.
5. I have one sibling.
6. I never got any of those things.
7. Before I could read (well), my par­ents used to give me the mail addressed to “Cur­rent Res­i­dent” and tell me it was for me.
8. They gave me mail­ings from Byron Dor­gan and told me he was send­ing me mail.
9. I believed them until I was far too old to believe that sort of thing.
10. I had a great childhood.
11. I have great parents.
12. Most of my child­hood mem­o­ries revolve around play­ing at the neigh­bor hood park, play­ing with friends in my yard, or being with my extended family.
13. I learned to read before kindergarten.
14. I have loved to read for as long as I can remember.
15. When my brother had bowl­ing league, I spent the time at the library
16. I’m not sure he’d appre­ci­ate me remind­ing peo­ple he was in a bowl­ing league.
17. Fourth grade was my favorite year of ele­men­tary school. Thanks, Mrs. Becker!
18. By 6th grade, I had read nearly all the children/youth books in our library and checked out a Stephen King novel.
19. My sixth grade teacher called my par­ents to see what they thought about me hav­ing that book.
20. I didn’t actu­ally read it. It was a lit­tle too creepy for my age.
21. When I was in sev­enth grade, I had my first sort-of-real boyfriend.
22. We didn’t date or call each other or any­thing, but we were “together.”
23. When I was a junior in high school, I had two teach­ers tell me that he still “had the hots” for me.
24. I doubt the truth of #22.
25. I have been a North Dakota res­i­dent my entire life.
26. I flew on an air­plane for the first time when I was 16. I went to St. Louis, Mis­souri with 3 class­mates and a teacher from my school.
27. FHA (now known as FCCLA) was respon­si­ble for most of my travel prior to turn­ing 18.
28. Because of FCCLA, I was able to go to St. Louis, MO, New Orleans, LA, and Tokyo, Japan.
29. I spent 6 weeks in Japan with a host fam­ily the sum­mer I was 17.
30. I climbed (part of) Mt. Fuji.
31. I lived in cen­tral Tokyo when I was in Japan.
32. My Japan­ese fam­ily drove a Ford minivan.
33. When I was in Tokyo, I felt like I could not breathe because there were so many peo­ple and build­ings all around.
34. When I came home from Japan, I remem­ber what North Dakota air smelled like as I stepped off the airplane.
35. The only rea­son I needed to attend 4 years of high school was for my senior eng­lish and my senior social stud­ies class. I had enough classes/credits to grad­u­ate after 3 years.
36. I wanted to be a marine biol­o­gist when I was in high school.
37. That is not very likely when you live in North Dakota.
38. When I wrote my senior eng­lish paper about my future career, I chose civil engineering.
39. I was an engi­neer­ing major for 3 days in college.
40. I also majored in speech lan­guage pathology.
41. and ath­letic training
42. and ele­men­tary education
43. and mid­dle school education.
44. I stuck with the last two.
45. I have a dual major in ele­men­tary and mid­dle level education.
46. I have a mas­ters in spe­cial education.
47. I met my hus­band, Jason, in my first semes­ter of college.
48. I knew who he was in a class of 150ish people.
49. He didn’t know me, but it all worked out in the end.
50. We offi­cially met at a Cam­pus Cru­sade for Christ Christ­mas Conference.
51. We dated for 10 months
52. and broke up for a year and a half.
53. Then, we dated for 8 months,
54. were engaged for 8 moths,
55. and got mar­ried in June of 2002.
56. Jason says that he knew we would get mar­ried the night we first met.
57. It took me another 3 years to fig­ure that out.
58. I don’t like the ends of chicken strips.
59. I don’t really like most meat at all.
60. If I had my choice, I would be vegetarian.
61. I have two sons.
62. I had two unmed­icated labors.
63. I am breast­feed­ing both my 15 month old and my almost 3 year old (will be 3 on Nov 3).
64. I am mar­ried to an early adopter (some­one who jumps onto new trends early).
65. I am not an early adopter.
66. Jason has intro­duced me to blogging,
67. NPR/MPR,
68. and being polit­i­cally moderate.
69. I’m no good at mod­er­a­tion. I like all or nothing.
70. I used to teach spe­cial edu­ca­tion before I had K.
71. When I tell peo­ple that, they say, “you must be really patient.”
72. I laugh when they say that.
73. I am a very emo­tional person.
74. I am eas­ily moved to cry.
75. There is a CVS com­mer­cial that makes me cry.
76. I like the Pixar movie Cars more than my son, I think.
77. I am plan­ning to run a half marathon in May of 2009.
78. I used to think that I wanted to have six children.
79. Now, I’m not sure how many I want.
80. For the first two years of our mar­riage, I did almost no cooking.
81. We had a rota­tion of about 4 meals that we used to space out meals in restaurants.
82. In the sum­mer of 2004, I decided to start try­ing one new meal a week.
83. Now we usu­ally eat 2–4 new meals a week.
84. I am try­ing to get rid of high fruc­tose corn syrup in our house.
85. I love cin­na­mon rolls.
86. I love caramel rolls.
87. I once found (what I think was) a cock­roach in the base­ment of the apart­ment building/house we were liv­ing it.
88. I put it in a sand­wich bag and left it on the kitchen table to show to Jason when he got home from work.
89. Think­ing about that now still gives me the creeps.
90. I some­times get the urge to move some­where far away from North Dakota.
91. I will prob­a­bly never move all that far from North Dakota…maybe Moor­head or East Grand Forks?
92. I am pas­sion­ate about breast­feed­ing and the ben­e­fits of breast­milk for moms and babies.
93. I am becom­ing more and more inter­ested and pas­sion­ate about con­ser­va­tion, green liv­ing, fair trade, and organic food.
94. I want to learn to knit
95. I have started play­ing the piano again, but our piano badly needs to be tuned.
96. I am pleased with where my life is 10 years after high school graduation.
97. I miss my brother and sister-in-law and wish they lived closer.
98. I love to watch football
99. and hockey.
100. Hav­ing kids has sig­nif­i­cantly reduced my sports watch­ing time.
101. Ide­ally, if I have more chil­dren, I would love to give birth to them at The Farm.

There you have it! Those are my 101 things. If you got all the way to the end, I’m impressed!

I think over the course of the next sev­eral months, I will prob­a­bly be chang­ing my blog top­ics up a lit­tle. When I was breast­feed­ing K fre­quently or when A was born and I was feed­ing both boys fre­quently, I felt like I had a lot more to say about nurs­ing specif­i­cally. Now that they’re get­ting older, it’s just some­thing that’s an every day part of our lives. It just is. I don’t think or worry about it too much. We’ve got­ten over most of the hur­dles and pit­falls. A is sleep­ing bet­ter, and K has kept up his 2 a day nurs­ing rou­tine for the past few weeks.

Some of the top­ics that I have become more inter­ested in lately are healthy eat­ing, green liv­ing, cook­ing, exer­cise, and expand­ing my read­ing reper­toire. Maybe I’ll fin­ish a book (with­out read­ing the end­ing ahead of time) and do a review of it. Who knows?

A while ago, I wrote about our new com­post bin that Jason and his dad had made. I was a lit­tle skep­ti­cal that we would be able to fill it all up. Who throws that much food? Well, it’s pretty much full. We have some of our lawn clip­pings in there and some food with it, too. Jason goes out once in a while, and he moves it around and turns it. I guess he waters it, too.

When we first started the project, I thought it was just some­thing fun to do. I also thought it would be nice to even­tu­ally have the com­post for our gar­den. I didn’t real­ize until today when I was read­ing on 5 Min­utes for Going Green (a fab­u­lous blog, by the way), that com­post­ing has another ben­e­fit. Food that is thrown away is the largest com­po­nent of land­fill waste. When food is thrown away, it does not become com­post. The con­di­tions in the land­fill are anaer­o­bic (oxygen-free), and instead of becom­ing fab­u­lous fer­til­izer, it breaks down to become methane gas. Methane gas is a green­house gas, and it is three times more potent than car­bon diox­ide. In an era where global warm­ing has become an every­day con­ver­sa­tion, it seems like com­post­ing is one small thing that the aver­age per­son can do with lit­tle extra effort and expense.