Home Sweet Homemaker

My husband’s Amazon wish list is empty and he couldn’t be happier. Every year, I have the hardest time coming up with Christmas gift ideas for Mike. I have no problem making a massive Amazon wish list for myself, but my husband… that’s a different story. When my brother introduced us to the Settlers of [...]

South Beach Diet Phase 1. We love this stuff. It takes some time to shell the pistachios but Jocelyn and I have started doing that earlier in the day. I prefer the sweet onion the recipe calls for but white works when sweet onions aren’t available. I’m not a fan of avocado but I thought [...]

Our College & Careers class met at David & Karen’s tonight. I had wanted to have a time to celebrate the lost and forgotten holiday of Thanksgiving together. Instead of the traditional turkey dinner, Karen was outside in the dark grilling hamburgers and hot dogs in November. It was a great alternative since we’ll all [...]

We have too much stuff. Part of making my home a haven is having only what I need and enjoy. As I look right now at my desk, I see many things that I do not need. And it’s not all about function. If it’s something I don’t need, it should be something I enjoy. [...]

In mid-October, we began a series on Spiritual Discipline in our Sunday evening College & Careers class. I’m not going to post my complete teaching notes, but I thought I would hit the high points of what I’ve been learning.
When I think of “discipline”, I think of something I lack. As I was preparing for [...]

Besides the standard mop, broom and vacuum cleaner, I own the Floormate, Spotbot, a variety of Swiffers, and way too many wonder cleaners in a bottle. My latest discovery is the Woolite Pod. It is cheap, small and effective. At less than 4 bucks, it can within minutes remove baby food spit up from my [...]

I’ll admit that I’ve never successfully read Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but as I was studying for our College & Careers class recently, I read a quote of his about “cheap grace” in the book Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster. I came across the context of the quote on the internet and have included [...]

This image is a screenshot of the original theme my site is based on. I just thought it would be fun to show what I am working from. It is by Tim Hyde of Living Open Source. He says there is “something very gospel about the whole concept of open source”. Tim is a pastor [...]

I finally converted to Firefox a few days ago after years of knowing I should. After installing it and uninstalling several times over the last couple of years, I am happy to say that it is now my default browser. It’s just hard to give up what’s comfortable, even when you know it’s not best. [...]

I bought Jocelyn a Snow White costume a size too big for Halloween. I procrastinated and that was all they had. Originally I wanted to make costumes for the girls (yeah, right). Jocelyn was going to be a tomato and Alexis a pea pod. (How do you strap a pea pod in a stroller?) [...]

The following is an excerpt from my original site. This was dated October 1, 2007.
I am so stubborn! A friend of mine suggested I use Wordpress to manage content on my site. I switched to a Linux server to support PHP and installed Wordpress. But have I used it? Of course not, because I am [...]