It’s pretty sad when your six year old points out your housecleaning shortcomings. See, I know how this feels, because it happens to me a lot.
Mommy! Mommy! There’s a cobweb! Please get it! Hurry! Mommy a cobweb! It’s hanging down and its moving.
Nothing gets past M. For the past couple of days, the television screen has been bothering her.
M: Mommy, there’s something on the TV.
ME: What is it?
M: I don’t know. Something smeary.
ME: Well, that probably happened when you and E were rubbing your hands on it. I’ll clean it soon.
That whole conversation and the one to follow were not spoken rudely. She was very polite about it, but clearly concerned. Today she brought it up again:
M: Mommy, how do you clean the TV?
ME: With glass cleaner.
M: Can you please do that, because it’s really been bothering me for the past couple of days. When we watch it, I can see those dirty spots.
ME: OK, I can do that.
As I cleaned the glass, which did have some smears, she stood right at my elbow.
ME: Can you move back just a little bit?
M: I’m watching to make sure it’s perfect.
ME: How does it look?
M: I think you missed a spot there.
She was right. I cleaned that spot a little more.
M: And there’s something right there.
ME: Oh, that’s actually a little scratch. I can’t fix that.
She steps back and moves to the other side for another look.
M: Well, I think that will be OK. Thank you.
She has such a quest for excellence…she even encourages her mommy to do better. As long as she is polite and respectful about it, I don’t mind.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe she’s only six…
It’s not fun to say goodbye.
In the nine and a half years that Phil and I have been married, goodbyes have been rare. As we arrived at the airport to drop him off for a recent business trip, I found myself feeling a little sad. And tired. Getting up at 3:15 in the morning tends to produce a weary sort of sadness.
As we pulled up to the curb at the terminal, another car was parked in front of us. A couple stood next to it saying goodbye. As I prepared myself to say goodbye to my husband for two whole days, the man’s camouflage caught my eye. Instantly I felt very, very small.
That was a different sort of goodbye.
The woman saying goodbye to her soldier was filled with emotion. I have never experienced what she was feeling, but I can imagine…
I don’t know where he was going. It could be anywhere… But I am sure that their uncertain goodbye was hard. Painful.
Then he stepped aside, and I saw her pregnant belly.
And I don’t know what to say, other than…thank you.
To all of the men and women who serve and defend our nation, and to their families, thank you.
Because, really, I don’t have a clue about saying goodbye.
Hello, and welcome to Closing Time! My name is Erin, and I’m so glad you stopped by! If you were here, I’d offer you a cozy cup of coffee!! It’s a chilly, rainy day here in Middle Tennessee…the perfect kind of day to stay inside and meet some new bloggy friends!
My blogging journey began almost a year ago. When I started Closing Time, I didn’t have much of a direction or plan. I just knew that I wanted a place to write and share my heart. You’ll find quite a bit of variety here, including my random musings, my thoughts on life as a SAHM, our adventures in home education, my relationship with God, and more. My hope is that this blog is a place you can come and be encouraged!
My husband, Phil, and I will celebrate our 10th anniversary this summer, and we have been blessed with two very special little girls, M (age 6) and E (age 4). If you’d like to know more about who I am, the best place to go is here.
I know you have a lot more blogs to visit today, so I’ll close for now. Please be sure to leave me a comment and let me know you stopped by. I’d love to visit you as well!
If you would like to follow Closing Time by RSS feed or email, click here!
You can also follow me on Twitter and Facebook.
For my regular readers, Friday Favorites will resume next week. You can read my previous Friday Favorites posts here.
And now, I hope you’ll hop over to Household 6 Diva for the rest of the Blizzard Bloghop!
Today’s Works for Me Wednesday is a themed edition, and I’m supposed to give you my best blogging tip…
I’ve been blogging for almost a year now, and while I’m certainly no expert, I have learned a lot! Here’s some of what has worked for me, and some of what I’m still working on:
Be yourself! You are unique, and you have something to offer that no one else does!
Create community with your readers! I know it always means a lot to me when I comment on a blog and get a reply. This is probably one of my weakest points, and one of my goals for this year is to improve in this area!
Participate in blog hops whenever you can! It’s a great way to find new blogs and helps others find you too! The Blizzard Bloghop, hosted by Household 6 Diva, starts this Thursday…read about it here and join in!
Use Twitter and Facebook. They’re both great ways to find other bloggers and to direct traffic to your blog.
Make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog via RSS feed and email. It’s always frustrating to me when I find a good blog and then can’t locate (or have to hunt for) the subscribe button!
Manage your blogging time wisely! If you’re anything like me, you can get super distracted by things like Twitter and Facebook. They are great ways to connect, but not so great for focusing when you’re trying to write! I can actually write a lot better if I just shut all these other things down while I write. And to be honest, I need to do that a lot more often than I do!
Set boundaries! This can be about the amount of time you spend online, or what level of privacy you choose, or anything else. This looks different for everyone…only you know what you can manage and feel comfortable with.
Most of all…find out what works for you! This applies to time, blogging platform, style, and your niche. You’re much more likely to stick with it if you enjoy what you’re doing!
For more blogging tips, visit We Are THAT Family!
If you haven’t subscribed to Closing Time yet, click here!
You can also follow me on Twitter and Facebook.
- Erin
It’s taken me a full month, but I feel like I’m finally getting into a routine for this year. Thanks to my reorganized Google Reader, I’m finding it so much easier to keep up with my blog reading, and therefore have more to share with you this week! 
For Moms:
Perfect Mothers vs. Balanced Mothers from Inspired to Action
Little Escapes from Homegrown Mom – Even 15 minutes can be refreshing!Your Family: the Best Company to Work for from
How to Become a Passionate, Balanced Mother from Steady Mom
Activities/Crafts/Homeschool:
5 Senses: Touch Activity from No Time for Flash Cards - Finally, a way to put those old baby wipe containers to good use!
Forts and the Art of Learning from The Homeschool Classroom – Sometimes we have to step back and allow our kids to discover on their own.
Recipes:
I’m putting these on my list to try!
Spicy Black Bean Eggplant from The Chow Review
Pesto Tomato Ravioli from Eat at Home
Mom’s Homemade Granola from How Does She
Restaurant Style Salsa from The Pioneer Woman
Blogging/Twitter:
Do You Make These 8 Mistakes When You Twitter? from Michael Hyatt – I’m guilty…are you?
How to Be a More Relational Blogger [Tips for New and Established Bloggers] from Problogger – This is something I’m trying to work on.
Three Quick Steps to Clear Writing from Copyblogger
Spiritual Growth:
Sunday Starts Saturday Night from A Quiet Heart – If your family struggles to have a peaceful Sunday morning in the midst of trying to get to church on time, this post is for you!
Being Barnabas from Be Thou Exalted – Practical thoughts on being an encouragement.
The books I list on Fridays are always the highlights from the huge pile of library books we have checked out, but this week, I am HIGHLY recommending these selections. Some of you may recognize them from the Sonlight Core P4/5 curriculum. Since we are seriously considering using Sonlight next year for our Read Alouds and History, I thought we would see if our local library had any of the selections for the grade below what we’d be using. I was amazed at how many of the books were available at the library, and I am incredibly impressed with Sonlight’s selections so far.
The Milly-Molly-Mandy Storybook by Joyce Lankester Brisley
The Bee Tree by Patricia Polacco
Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is? and What’s Smaller Than a Pygmy Shrew? by Robert E. Wells
Things People Do by Anne Civardi
And, just for fun, since Groundhog Day is coming up next week…
Groundhog Day (Rookie Read-About Holidays) by Michelle Aki Becker
For more Friday Favorites, visit Hoosier Homemade! I hope you all have a great weekend!
What was your favorite thing about this week?
After reading the title of this post, you may be wondering if I’m in some kind of trouble. Thankfully, I’m not! The kind of time out I’m talking about is the good kind. You know, the kind we mom’s crave but get very little of?
When school started last fall, I realized quickly that I needed to find some alone time, and that I needed it regularly. I had a spectacular outing to Starbucks, where I sipped coffee and a free vanilla frappucino and cranked out three blog posts in an hour. I promptly pledged to do that every week…every Friday afternoon to be exact.
Alone time fail.
How many times have I been back to Starbucks since that delightful Friday afternoon in August? I’m ashamed to tell you…
Zero.
In the words of the Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything…
“Nothing. Zilch. Nada.”
If it’s anyone’s fault, it is my own. I have a hard time walking away and leaving things undone. If I could just catch up around here, then I would go have some “me time.” But I don’t ever get to that point. There are always a zillion things that still need to happen…more laundry to wash, more floors to vacuum, more piles of paper to file, more meals to cook. And there are two little girls who always need or want something.
But, as I remind my girls from time to time, “Mommy is a person too.” And I am sure I would be more productive and relaxed in general if I did take my wonderful husband up on his offer to watch the kids while I go. Because he is totally willing.
The other day I read that Theta Mom is doing her Theta Mom Thursday meme on a monthly basis beginning today. Surely I can take one hour a month (at least) and then blog about it! That is my goal…baby steps, right?
This month, my alone time was right here at home, but I was sequestered in my bedroom with a good cup of coffee. This was almost better than Starbucks, because I didn’t have to listen to the manager being completely, over-the-top friendly to every single customer who came in the door!
Anyway, I spent my alone time reorganizing my Google reader. Exciting, I know! But when you’ve been overwhelmed with 1000+ unread posts, then switched to Bloglines to try something different, only to discover that for some reason there is a delay (of many, many hours) before some posts are updated in Bloglines, resulting in your returning to your good ole Google Reader…
….in that case, spending an afternoon alone working on putting your blog subscriptions into categories and folders, while also catching up on a lot of blog reading, is a wonderful thing indeed!
And did I mention that there was also chocolate involved?
To read what other moms are doing with their time out, visit Theta Mom!
If you’re a new visitor here, or if you’ve been around for a while, I hope you’ll subscribe and join me regularly here at Closing Time! And I’d love it if you left me a comment to let me know you’ve stopped by…I’ll be sure to visit you too!
Today, I’m combining my Works for Me Wednesday post (a fun activity for the kids) with our family’s Australia Day celebrations. Please note that the activity is not limited to an Australia Day theme!
Since my husband, Phil, is from Australia, today was a holiday for our family. Australia Day is similar to our 4th of July celebrations, except that it celebrates the arrival of the first fleet of settlers in Australia. If we were there, it would be the middle of summer, and we would probably have had a day filled with a picnic, swimming, and fireworks.
Instead, we had our own version! We had an indoor picnic, watched the Koala Brothers on DVD, and had an Australian Animal Safari Hunt. To be technically correct, they don’t have safaris in Australia, but it sounds good anyway!
To start, I gathered all the necessary supplies: various Australian animal toys (I stretched that a little to increase the quantity), plastic eggs, and scraps of paper with clues written on them. The hunt began with a trail of eggs leading to the first clue. The girls then followed the clues to find all the animals, with each new location having both an animal and a clue to the next spot. M did a great job of reading the clues almost all by herself (I love adding extra reading practice into a game)! After they had followed all the clues and gathered all the animals in a basket, the final clue told them to go upstairs (all the other clues had been downstairs). When they got to the top of the stairs, there was another trail of eggs, leading them to the final item.
The final item was some coloring pages that we printed from the official Australia Day website. They have some cute ones! The girls then had a great time coloring their pictures.
In case you’re wondering, plastic eggs have nothing at all to do with Australia Day. Our girls just love to have “egg hunts” on a regular basis around the house, and they had requested one today.
This was such a simple activity (and not really original), but the girls loved every minute of it. The great thing about it is that it can be tweaked to any theme you want (or no theme at all)!
And for a special snack, we had brownies, which are certainly not Australian, but we added flags just for fun! It wasn’t exactly a traditional Australia Day, but we had a great time as a family!
For more Works for Me Wednesday posts, visit We Are THAT Family.
If you enjoy reading Closing Time, click here to subscribe!
- Erin
When I started blogging last year, one of the first things I heard about was a blog hop. I jumped in over at 5 Minutes for Mom’s Ultimate Blog Party and connected with lots of great bloggers. It was a wonderful start to my blogging journey!
Next week, hundreds of bloggers will be attending Blissdom in Nashville. Unfortunately, I will not be going. For those of you who want to connect, but can’t make it to Blissdom either, there’s a great alternative! Household6 Diva will be hosting the 2010 Blizzard Bloghop!! For more details on how to participate, please click on the button above!
I can’t wait to take part! I’m working on my post and getting ready to hop! Hope to see you there!!
- Erin
“The LORD your God is with you,
he is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
he will quiet you with his love,
he will rejoice over you with singing.”
Zephaniah 3:17
I hope you’ve had a great week! Here are some of the highlights of the great blog posts I’ve been reading:
Recipes:
Creamy Black Bean Soup from Girls to Grow
Corn Salsa from The Finer Things in Life
Blogging:
The Power of Uniqueness [19 Starting Points for Being a Unique Blogger] from Problogger
Perform a Landing Page Analysis on Your Blog from Problogger
Spiritual Growth:
Listening from Team Babetz
Home:
Setting the Stage from (In)Courage by The Nester
Homeschooling:
Letting Go of Curriculum Guilt from The Homeschool Classroom
Choosing Good Books for Your Children from Simple Homeschool
If you missed any of the Fresh Year, Fresh start series, you can find links to every single post here!
Here are the highlights of the library books we are reading this week:
Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey
Are You My Mother? and The Best Nest by P. D. Eastman
Dick and Jane: We Play and Pretend and Small Pig by Arnold Lobel – (For M to read all by herself!)
For more Friday Favorites, visit Daily Dwelling.
Have a great weekend!
- Erin
