Corny Obama Joke

Ok, here's a corny Obama joke for ya -
It was once said that a black man would be president "when pigs fly"...indeed 100 days into Obama's presidency............

Image via Wikipedia

Swine Flu
**This was not meant to offend anyone and I apologize in advance if anyone takes offense to this.

Habitat for Humanity

When I was in GA last week, we drove over to Americus, GA to the Global Village & Discovery Center sponsored by Habitat for Humanity. This was an afternoon well-spent! It was free, educational and humbling to walk through the village and be reminded how people in other parts of the world live on so little.


I was not aware that Habitat for Humanity built homes outside of the United States. That's what this entire Village was set up for - to bring awareness of the needs both here in the USA and abroad. We began the day by watching a 10 minute film on how Habitat for Humanity got started and how it has grown. To date they have built a little over 200,000 homes! The goal by 2011 is to build 400,000.

Once we finished with the film we began our journey by walking through the Poverty Housing.








This area was set up just like a small village with a tiny grocery store, barber shop, school house, homes, etc. All of it was in a horrible condition and there were pictures showing people actually living in these conditions so everyone who visits this area knows and understands that this is real life for people.

Once we got through this area, we started walking from one country to the next where actual houses were built that Habitat builds in those particular countries. They were decorated inside and we could walk around and look at them. There were pictures set up inside showing families actually living in the "new" Habitat houses.

There were so many houses we looked at, I can't show them all to you - this post would go on forever. But here are a few....a house in Guatemala

On a side note: Bailee was so good this whole day!! She enjoyed going from house to house and sitting at a desk or table or laying on a bed. She didn't touch things when we told her not to touch and she was eager to move on to the next house when we were ready to move on. I couldn't believe how well she held up with all the walking we had to do!

This woman in Guatemala in her new home....

How is this for a kitchen??


Home in Botswana


Home in Malawi


Family in Malawi


As we walked around from home to home, we carried passports. Dakota and I shared one. Each home there was a stamp station where you could get your passport stamped and learn a fact about each country. Dakota was in charge of stamping our passport.


This is the bathroom and kitchen in Ghana


Home in Haiti


How blocks are made...


A home in Uganda


A family in Uganda - it's amazing to me that THIS MANY people live in this house!

Dakota was a little disgusted by this "toilet" in a house in India....lol. Of everything he saw, this is what he couldn't take! Haha


Bailee in a home in Sri Lanka - she likes the dolly


Me outside the home built in Papua New Guinea - it's built on stilts because of monsoons.

Wordless Wednesday - Bailee's Prize - Lipstick

For more Wordless Wednesday posts, visit 5 Minutes for Mom

Works For Me Wednesday: Diaper boxes turned storage boxes

Update: I am reposting this this week because I forgot to link it with WFMW last week!

I am in GA this week visiting my daughter and 2-yr-old granddaughter. When I arrived here yesterday, my daughter Tina was showing me Bailee's room and how Tina had rearranged it recently. She had purchased one of the Closetmaid cubicle shelves awhile back but never bought any of the fabric storage boxes they sell to go inside the little cubicles.

She showed me what she had decided to do and I was so impressed I immediately thought about sharing it on my blog for Works for Me Wednesday (although it works for HER, not ME!) She buys diapers in the large boxes. She decided to use several of those boxes to separate Bailee's toys into because they are the perfect size to fit in the cubicles.

In order to help Bailee remember which toy goes in which box she laid out all the toys from each box on her scanner and scanned a picture of them, printed it out and made a collage on the box! Now all Bailee's toys are pictured on the outside of each box and she knows which toy goes in which box...and the Pampers logo/color is covered up. Such a neat idea!

For more Works for Me Wednesday tips, check out Kristen's blog

Georgia on my mind...

My son-in-law, who is in the Marines and stationed in GA, had to travel to San Antonio last week. My daughter asked me to come visit her while he was away so Dakota and I headed up there last Tuesday. Mom drove us up on Tuesday and she stayed one night before driving back home on Wednesday. That was her first visit up there.

Tina's next door neighbor has 6 or 7 dogs. They just got a new miniature dauschund (I think that's what this dog is) and Bailee absolutely adores this dog. She asks her mom to go get "baby doggie" all the time.
She is a little excited watching Dakota roll around on the ground with the dogs....
The next day, after mom left to travel back home, we drove to downtown Albany and visited the Flint RiverQuarium and surrounding park area. The weather was perfect outside!
In Pensacola where I live, we have large Pelicans (painted like this) all over our downtown area. I love turtles!! I've collected them forever. I thought this was pretty cool to see these painted turtles all over downtown Albany.Bailee talked me into climbing around in the tunnels with her - oh man, I am way too old for this! But I can't resist those precious eyes of her!Could you resist those eyes?? "Pweeaassee YaYa??? Come wif me!"
When I was in Hawaii last month, Felicia ordered a picture for Tina as a surprise from Kodak Gallery. The picture was from when Tina and Bailee had visited Felicia in Hawaii in 2007 and Felicia snapped a picture of Bailee. She enlarged the picture and had it shipped directly to Tina - she wasn't sure how it had turned out. Tina loved it! When I saw it, I was amazed at how beautiful it was and how big it was - I had Bailee sit next to it and took a picture of the picture so Felicia could see it framed.Bailee was watching me pull my hair back and I asked her if she wanted me to fix her hair too. After I pulled her hair back she wanted to see herself in the mirror and then she happily posed for a picture.On Friday we went to Chuckee Cheese for lunch (Bailee's favorite place to eat) and she is happily turning in her tickets to see how many she has and what prizes she can get...
The prize? Lovely purple lipstick, fake earrings and necklace set - she's a happy little lady. She looks sad in this picture but she is actually falling asleep....she's in the "zone" - ya know halfway between awake and asleep. LOL

Toon-ful Tuesday

To the world, the cross of Jesus may seem like a foolish thing to put their faith in. But if they did, they would find that the cross has the power to save them from this fallen, sinful world.

Rescue Me

We sing this song in church quite often...one of my favorites - hope you enjoy it and take it to heart as much as I do.

Homeschooling: Spelling Websites

Image by lauradahl via Flickr

I homeschool my 12-yr-old. He has grown up in the computer age and is extremely electronically intelligent as are most children his age. He would rather spend hours researching and looking up topical information on the internet then sitting down listening to me lecture him and trying to "teach" him.

One of my blog friends (and I apologize now because I don't remember which one it was so I can't give you credit) - anywho, she posted about a couple of spelling programs she uses online. I took a look at those several months ago and introduced them to Dakota and they have worked wonderful for us! Perfect fit and completely free! So I wanted to share them with any of my homeschooling friends out there in case you were interested.

My older kids and I all learned to read the phonics way. That is the only way I know how to sound out words, teach reading, etc. After 8 years of homeschooling Dakota and many of the early years unsuccessfully trying phonics with him I soon realized that not everybody learns that way. He just doesn't get it. Now we concentrate on going through list of words. In my opinion this is definitely not the best way to learn but he IS learning so we keep trudging on. This first website I'm going to share with you helped us immensely with our lists -

1000 Most Common Words in the English Language - this is broken down into three groups. We started with the 2nd group because he knew how to spell all the words in the 1st group already. I started with the A's and called out words to him asking him to spell them. We went right down the list until he misspelled 10. Once he had reached 10 misspelled words - those were his spelling words to work on until he had memorized them.

Teach Me, Play A Game, Test Me - Spelling City - I then take those 10 misspelled words and plug them into this website. Then Dakota is on his own. He can use those words and play games, make sentences, a computer voice will call out each word and he has to spell it and once he thinks he is ready he can take a test. When he is done with his test, the computer grades it, shows him which words he got wrong and the correct way to spell them. Then he prints it out and brings it to me. We normally work on the same word list for about 3 days because I make him write them out one day and make sentences one day. He enjoys both of these websites a lot.

Basil and Oregano

I purchased these little kits of Basil and Oregano in the Dollar Spot area at Target. They were $1.00 each and both came with pot, package of seeds, and soil. I was curious to see what happened and if they would really grow. The soil that came in the packet was like a quarter-sized hard pellet and I had to drop it in a little bit of water and let it sit for about five minutes. Once the pellet absorbed the water it opened up and was just like regular soil. Pretty neat the way it worked.

Last Saturday I planted these. I am amazed at how quickly they are growing! The pot on the right has tall, thin shoots coming up as well but you can't really see it in the picture.
There were so many seeds in the package that I didn't want to put all of them in the small pots so I planted the rest in this egg crate. They are growing just as fast! Now that I know they are going to grow I guess I'll be moving them into a bigger pot. I love watching plants grow right before my eyes!

Toilet troubles

Image by Hendricks Photos via Flickr

We have two bathrooms in our house. One in my bedroom and one in the hallway between my bedroom and Dakota's bedroom...we refer to that one as Dakota's bathroom. He's responsible for keeping that one clean and picked up.

About three months ago his toilet kept running everytime someone flushed it and then a month later the inside mechanism finally broke late one night after Dakota flushed the toilet. Greg and I made a midnight run to Walmart to buy the parts needed so he could fix the toilet that night. Everything has been fine until recently...

Since I got back from Hawaii a little over a week ago I've noticed the toilet is running again. Ugh, what the heck?! I've been busy playing catch-up with everything else so I really haven't stopped to investigate and find out why the water keeps running every time Greg or Dakota flushes it - but I have to keep sending them back in there to stop it from running - especially Dakota!

Last night Dakota was playing his Xbox Live and he was on there later than normal. I told him around 10:30 to be off by 11:00. At 11:10 he was still on there - I told him to get off - he said he was trying to complete some mission and was almost done. I was half asleep and was getting irritated that I had to get out of bed to get him off of his game. I walked back out into the living room at 11:20 and let him know in no uncertain terms he was to turn it off immediately because I was beyond being nice and I marched back to my bedroom and settled into my comfortable bed.

He shut down his game, turned off the lights, went to the bathroom, FLUSHED the toilet and went to his room and shut the door! OH. NO. HE. DIDN'T. I laid there for a minute, silently praying that the toilet would shut off itself so I wouldn't have to get out of bed AGAIN! No such luck.

Grrrrrrrr, I get up and head to the bathroom. I lean down to lift off the back of the toilet because I have to do something inside the tank. I'm balancing the basket that sits on the lid and holds all of Dakota's cologne, deodorant, air spray, etc so it doesn't spill over (basically being lazy and just trying to get it done so I can climb back in bed.)

As soon as I lift the lid up this wild spray of water starts shooting me in the face, on my shirt, on the wall...everywhere! It was like a firehose gone wild! WHAT THE HECK!?! I am desperately trying to hold on to the lid and keep from dropping it...the basket went flying on the floor and everything in it went everywhere. As soon as I could set the lid down I grabbed hold of the runaway water hose from inside the tank and put it back down inside there to finish filling the tank. Once it finished filling up the tank the water stopped and then I could hook it back on the tube where it had come unhooked from the side of this tube thing in there.

Then I looked in the mirror - Oh my goodness I was drenched! Sopping, dripping wet. The wall and floor and toilet paper was all dripping, sopping wet. By this time it was 11:45...I changed my shirt, threw towels down on the floor, climbed in bed and watched TV for an hour to calm my beating heart down. I felt like I had just worked out!

Greg asked me the next day "Why did you have a wet tshirt in the tub? What happened?"
Oh no he didn't!!!