Smoothies, Sentences, Secrets & Sales

This week has been extremely busy with home improvement projects, Enrichment, classroom party planning and more Christmas shopping. But there is always time for a smoothie just about every day. We're addicted! The kids love it when I open the Smoothie Shop after school and pick what they want. I must say, my smoothies rock. Credit is probably due to my Hogi Yogi days but I have even come a long way since then. I guess if you have one EVERY DAY you are bound to get it perfect! My 2 faves are blueberry, peach, banana blended in rice milk (no dairy for me right now) and mango, kiwi, banana blended in orange juice. Both with a little sprinkle of Splenda.
We are back to tough love in our house. Periodically we have to get mean and make the kids write sentences as a form of punishment for whatever. We had a nice Family Home Evening lesson about lowering our voices and speaking kinder words. There are slips of paper with kind words written on them taped all over the house to remind us. Anyway, the sentence thing works. They hate it especially during the school year when they already have callouses on their fingers from writing so much. So far the kids have learned how to shorten "I will obey my parents" to "I'll obey." 150 of those is much easier than the longer version. We like to scare them by telling them they have to write "I will obey my parents always because if I don't then I will have to pay the consequences, and I don't want to do that because I want to be able to play with my friends outside" or something like that - 200 times. :) And after all that they still love us...
Justin is growing way too fast for me. The newborn phase has come and gone and he has quite the personality. He's very energetic. He does, however, like to snuggle with me sometimes if I whisper secrets in his ear. He'll sit very still for a very long time and even fall asleep occasionally if I whisper anything in his ear.
I hope to get our Christmas cards done this weekend and in the mail on Monday. Basketball season for Jackson and Sadie has started and we are gone 2 practice nights a week and the games start up next weekend. I wish they would wait until after Christmas to start up the season but they don't. Sadie is the only girl on the team and she has much to say about that, as you can imagine. I hope she doesn't get too discouraged because she likes to play.
The kids want to have a garage sale to make some extra money for Christmas. I don't want to and we've thought about just giving them the money for donating everything to Goodwill but also want to teach them the value of work. They do all the work for the sale and reap the rewards. We recently got new carpet (still a pleasant surprise every morning when I step out of bed) so we de-junked a little before we put everything back, so there's a little money to be made but garage sales are a pain. If we don't do it next Saturday, it's all going, going, gone!
I know, a lengthy post, but it's easier for me to do it once or twice a week, rather than every day. I think it's time for a smoothie!