Some volunteer activities

I've gotten involved with several volunteer activities and thought I'd list them here:

Box Tops for Education coordinator for the girls' elementary school. The kids collect and turn in the printed coupons from General Mills packaging and the school gets 10 cents for each one. This involves sending out flyers promoting the project, collecting the coupons from each classroom, counting them, and submitting them on schedule at least twice a year.

Family History consultant for my ward in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I help church members with their family history and genealogy. Depending on need, I may go to their house or help them on Sundays at church. I use Ancestry.com a lot. I have fun teasing apart my family history puzzles using that site.

I'm a co-leader for a semi-monthly activity day for 8-11 year old girls (and their friends) at my church. My church has Cub Scouts for the boys, and a church-grown program for the girls.

I'm a moderator for a parenting site. I moderate a sewing board, a home and garden board, and a Mormon board.

I'm a moderator for a couponing site called A Full Cup. Every week I enter data on the sales at a local grocery store and promote discussion of the best deals available. I love this site because it helps me feed my family for less.

I sing in my church choir. I wish it were a little more rigorous because although I'm not a great singer, I like to sing things that are a little more complicated. However, I'm grateful to the conductor and the time and enthusiasm he brings to the choir.

I think that's it for volunteering. I just started an ASL class that meets once a week. I used to know a bit of ASL and am hoping to remember it again.

In with the new and out with the old

I have a new car! It's a silver 2011 Honda Accord with black leather seats and it's really nice. The old car was a white 2000 Ford Windstar that looked like this except it had a sliding door behind the driver's door:The minivan was sold today, so we had about three weeks of being a three-car household. That's one more than we need, so we were glad to say good bye to the van.

I've driven a minivan for 21 years. Yes, 21. I had a 1989 Dodge Caravan for 14 years and this one for 7. After three weeks I'm getting accustomed to being so much lower on the road and having great maneuverability (sp?), but it was very, very strange at first.

The girls' three booster seats just baaaaaaaaaaaaarely fit in the rear seat. It's a squeeze and it's going to be a hassle until one of them is big enough to not need a booster. That should be about the time they graduate from high school, they are such slender little things. :-)

As you can see by the number of cars I've had in the past 21 years, I'm a buy-and-hold kind of gal and having this new car has thrown me for a loop. A pleasant one, but a loop nevertheless.

Sister Wives

TLC network has a new show called Sister Wives. Yes, it's about a polygamous family. Right at the beginning the husband makes it clear they are not part of the LDS Mormons and points out that the relationship between their group and the LDS Church is like that of Catholics and Protestants. What I'm finding interesting is how some of their practices ARE like LDS Mormon practices. When they say prayers together as a family at night or before meals, they sound exactly like the prayers my own family says. I saw on the wall of one of the wives' apartment The Family: A Proclamation to the World, which was written and is distributed by my LDS Church.

A number of years ago when I was going to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, one of my classmates belonged to the same group the Sister Wives belong to. She told me they had most of the same programs our church did, and in fact, bought many of the church instruction manuals they used from MY church. I was really surprised! The FLDS Church you see on TV has a different doctrine all together and really has no connection at all to my church, and that was what I was more familiar with.

So it was weird to have this other polygamous church actually share some of our doctrine with us--but definitely NOT the doctrine on polygamy! No polygamy now or in the future, thank you very much! And dh agrees with that 1000%!

Bountiful Baskets

Due to a snafu two weeks ago, this is my first fruit and veggie co-op basket in nearly a month. I actually had to buy produce at the store last week!

From back to front and left to right, this is what I got for $16.50:
5 lbs Idaho Russet Burbank potatoes
2 cantaloupes
2 1 lb boxes of strawberries
1 head of cauliflower
5 red peppers
3 artichokes
6 bananas
2.5 lbs of green grapes
5 tomatoes
8 Gala apples
7 plums
1 head of lettuce, not shown

I added up what these items would have cost had I bought them at the store this week, based on what I saw in the sale ads and in the produce department and the value of the fruits and veggies I picked up today would be about $44.35. Two items, one cantaloupe and one artichoke were extra because I helped with the distribution. See why I was a bit annoyed with myself last time when I missed the distribution?

Oh, and no offense to any Australian or Canadian readers ;-) but I'm delighted that with the exception of the bananas, every.single.item was grown in the United States of America!!! Just as an aside, did you know the USA has 5% of the world's population, but 20% of the arable land? No wonder we have such great food production and spend less on food as a percentage of our income as compared to citizens of almost every other country.

Our family addition x 4

Here are half our new family members. To tell the truth, I'm scared to death to have them! I've never really had a pet (only a dog for a couple of teenage years that I didn't have to take care of) and although I have lots of children, I know how to care for them. I don't know how to care for pets, chickens specifically.

I don't know if these are pets or food-producers. Probably both, as I hear the hens will be friendly and have their own little personalities as they get older. I can already see the Rhode Island Red (the one here, which belongs to E) is kind of a bossy one and likes to hog the food bowl. The Barred Rocks are supposed to be friendly and accomodating, so I hope they get their share.
The gray Barred Rocks are about three weeks old and the RIR and the one I'm not sure about (C's, pictured here) are about a week old. They have to grow quite a bit before we can expect to see any eggs. They say 18-20 weeks is about average. If so, that means we should be starting to see eggs around the first day of Spring.
S's chick is the same variety as mine--Barred Rock. She went to see a stage production of Charlotte's Web today, so her chick is named Charlotte. I'm going to find out how to say "chicken" in Korean, and if it is pronounceable to me, that's going to be my chick's name.Here are all the ladies eating dinner.

Oh what shall we do in the morning time?

I took these pictures of S at 7:00 am today. I knew she had gone out to ride her bike, but I was alerted by her loud singing as she cycled up and down the street. I felt like I had my own little cheerful, twittering song bird.