View from the Prairie Box

I’ve been juggling—juggling bits and pieces of life in the air and hoping to successfully catch them all, one at a time.

I’m used to juggling motherhood, friendships and church work. And every so often I’ll pretend to do some domestic chores in order to keep everyone in clean clothes. I won’t even pretend I cooked last week, but that’s a different story and I’m trying to do better this week.

Recently I’ve begun to juggle two very cool, very exciting life bits: freelance writing and photography. This past summer I began to feel it was high time to fully pursue my gifts and talents in these areas. When I’m writing or taking photos, I feel like I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing, and I delight in worshipping God through these activities. I’ve always known that “whatever you do, do it all the glory of God,” but I’m experiencing that in a very new and quite satisfying way right now. I could probably say a lot more about this line of work and how much I’m enjoying it but I won’t… at least not in this blog post.

So the juggling.

Turns out, I’m not a world class juggler. Imagine that! Or perhaps it’s just that I’m juggling too many bits and pieces at one time. That’s fine, really, because I’m in a transition stage right now and have plans for the future that will involve putting down some of the bits and settling into a less juggly-type routine. And oh, I do love routine. Consistency and comfort zones are two of my favorite things. Apparently, juggling is not.

But you must excuse me, I see that laundry in the air and I’m contemplating tossing up some freelance writing work as well. That amount of juggling I can handle.

What are you doing for fun??

1/2 C washing soda
1/2 C Borax
1/3 bar of Ivory soap, grated

In a large pot, heat 6 cups of water; add grated soap and stir until dissolved. Add washing soda and Borax and stir until dissolved. Remove pot from heat.

In a clean 2 gallon pail, pour 4 cups of hot water and add heated soap mixture. Top pail with one gallon + 6 cups of cold water; stir well.

Use 1/2 cup per load, stirring detergent before use.

After my friend Sarah M. posted a detergent recipe, I became very curious about the idea of making such a product at home. While I’m not exactly a frugal woman, I knew making my own detergent would save a lot of money. But the biggest draw in my eyes was the number of ingredients. I’m concerned about all the weird chemicals in our home environments these days and I’ve slowly become more interested in using simple products to accomplish household tasks. I still like spraying 409 on the kitchen counters, so don’t suspect me of turning super granola or anything. ; )

I used this page as a reference and ended up visiting the Duggar family site (afterall, their kids look clean, don’t they?!). If you dig around the world wide web using Google you’ll find a lot more information on the financial savings of homemade detergent. I’m also going to post the (inedible) recipe to Needs More Butter for easy referencing in the future.

Final note: Arm & Hammer Washing Soda isn’t the easiest product to find. I check about six different stores before finally locating it, ahem, at my grocery store three miles down the road. Wish I had looked there first!

Kids can’t resist piles of leaves.

And fun-loving adults can’t resist doing things like this.

With minimal arm-twisting, poses are made and captured with my camera.

And then the dog gets involved. I wish I could insert video here because Shiloh’s tunneling and leaf-leaping was absolutely hilarious.

Even the neighbor boy gets involved, because, as we all know, kids can’t resist piles of leaves.

The sweet babe in the following shot had just woken up from a nap. Her eyes were a bit puffy from sleep and her hair was sticking up adorably. I love this tender moment of cuddling between the little punkin and her mama. It’s a privilege to snap shots like this.

The almost-two-year old in the following photo completely cracks me up (on a regular basis). She was looking kind of funny in the pic prior to this one because her tongue, though in her mouth, was thrust under her upper lip. Next thing I know, her tongue is outside her mouth and I’ve got a perfect shot. So funny and so cute.

Oh, this one is sad! Before you feel like I’m a horrible human being for snapping this guy in his moment of distress, you’ve got to know why he was so distraught. He wanted a blue cookie, BLUE, and there was nary a blue cookie to be found. No one in his class had blue cookies, but such rational thought did nothing for the sweet lad. Life is hard sometimes. Sometimes one just needs a blue cookie, what can you say?

The last photo is self-explanatory as I have great love for this kiddo. Could someone please tell me who replaced my baby with a big kid?

Q: What’s worse than having emasculating surgery and then being forced to wear a cone?

A: Having emasculating surgery, being forced to wear a cone AND a doggie diaper!

We had Shiloh neutered on Wednesday. Apparently, post-surgery he was the perfect model of a canine patient—didn’t lick or bite at the incision and stayed perfectly quiet in the kennel at the vet’s. However, within seconds of being placed in his kennel in our car, he was going nuts. So on went the cone and we went home.

The next morning our pet proved to be not only terribly flexible but also quite tenacious. We needed something more than the cone. We needed… Dog underwear! Oh my goodness, PetSmart has items I’ve never even heard of. Now I know that we have options if Shiloh is ever incontinent (doggie wraps for the boys), but for the moment, girlie pants will do the trick.

Cone + dog diapers = highly amused family + one slightly crazed Coton.

We met up with the Weeks and Kirk families last night to enjoy the Lincoln Children’s Zoo Annual fundraiser, Boo at the Zoo. Livia chose to dress up as Tinker Bell for the second year running, which was fine by me. Halloween in Nebraska is almost always a cold-weather event, so my Tink is dressed in a green sweats. I think that will become my yearly challenge—how can I dress my little trick-or-treater warmly?! As you can see, I dressed up too. I love becoming someone different for one night.

Praise God from Whom all blessings flow…

Praise Him, all creatures here below…

Praise Him above, ye heavenly host…

Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

The Tredway Three have been home a great deal over the last 10 days or so. It began with the cold weather (and snow!) and continued throughout the following week. Last week was cold, that’s just all there is to it. Cold, cold, cold. One last trip to the children’s zoo? I think not. A nice autumn walk to enjoy the fall colors? Uh, no. Playground? No. Backyard? No. Sit on the porch for a spell? Perhaps a minute tops.

We were homebound. The extrovert and her two introverted family members were tucked away indoors for the duration of the cold spell. And then… Jeremy. got. sick.

Dun, dun, dun!

In the middle of the night, my husband became a shaking mess. With chattering teeth he asked me to cuddle close to warm him up. Let’s just say that getting close to him felt about as comfortable as hugging the sun. He was smoking hot—and not in a good way. I knew he was burning up with fever but he had already taken meds at bedtime (when he knew he was coming down with something), so I tried to warm him up a bit and wait it out ’til morning. A few hours later he wasn’t shaking anymore and informed me his fever had probably broken. I pulled the thermometer out of his mouth: 101.7.

That afternoon I dropped him at the doctor’s office, ran to pick up Livia from preschool, then returned to hear the doctor’s report. I found my sick guy in the waiting room, a paper mask covering the lower part of his face. Another woman, with an infant in her arms, was wearing a mask too. Apparently Jeremy walked into a waiting area full of masked folks. Uh-oh.

Let me pause here to mention the terror and confusion accompanying the H1N1 virus. People are dying of this strain of the flu. People always die of the other strains of the flu. But for whatever reason, perhaps because of its contagious nature, we are all freaking out about H1N1. I have type 1 diabetes and RA. My child is five years old. Jeremy took steroids for allergies last month (I only mention that because I wonder if his immune system is a little depressed right now). None of us want to die of H1N1, no one does, and yet some will—and are—dying of this virus. And as much as we’d like the vaccination for H1N1, no one in Lincoln is handing it out just yet. Back to the story…

Jeremy had a cough, a fever, body aches from head to toe. He apparently looked just like all the other coughing patients in the waiting room that day. And guess what? They weren’t testing for H1N1 anymore. Because really, it just didn’t matter. My ailing husband was told to take Tamiflu right away, and even though our neighborhood Walgreens was out, another pharmacy filled the order. Within four days, Jeremy was feeling much better. By the time the weekend came around, I was down for the count. No fever, but body aches, sore throat, exhaustion.

So… What were we sick with? H1N1? Perhaps. No one knows. I’m hoping we had a mild case of it and will thus have immunity against this particular strain for a time. Regardless of a name for our illnesses, we stayed home. For days on end.

I did dishes. I did laundry. Livia and I made bread. We watched all sorts of old cartoons on Hulu. Jeremy introduced Liv to The Dark Crystal and The Neverending Story. I got sucked even deeper in Harry Potter Book 5. But yesterday something glorious happened. The sun came out and warm, October temps hugged us like an old friend. We turned off the tv. I put the book down, for a spell at least (get it? Spell? Harry Potter?). Then we went off to the Pioneers Park Nature Center and praised God for this amazing world he’s given us.

Today we’re back to the daily grind—and we’re thanking God for the blessing of good health.