Small Successes

Celebrating the little things in life that add up.

Amazing how Thursday keeps creeping up on me. My weeks are beginning to turn into blurs. Where is the time going?

Despite feeling like I've been caught up in a whirlwind of activity, I think I've had a rather productive week. There are still plenty of things that need to be done, like my laundry and this week's lesson plan for my religious ed class (I REALLY need to work on that!), but I accomplished a lot. Even I'm surprised and I don't surprise myself much given my perfectionist tendencies.

1. Madeline's rural community model for her social studies class is FINALLY finished. We did a prototype, then we did what we thought was the final version (and I couldn't get past how bad I thought it looked since it curled). Then I made a few other possible prototypes which I didn't like at all. Finally I decided to take a few steps back and rethink how we were going about this project. I went back to tried and true methods: wood base, poster board and paint. Let me say that Crayola Model Magic is pretty neat given it's lightweight nature and fast drying. I don't like it as much as Play-doh, but it got the job done nicely. And clear mailing labels sure are great when you are required to label everything.

2. Shock of all shocks, I ordered prints of some pictures I've taken. I needed some pictures for Ellie's Thanksgiving project. (Yes, that's right we had two school projects in the house in one week. God help me if I ever have three children and three projects--I'd probably have to run far far away.) I am now the proud owner of 30 4x6 prints (coming from the woman with over 30,000 digital images) from various events of the past year and one of Ellie's first birthday, (Don't laugh, some of us take a while to get around to printing things out.) and multiple 5X7s and 8X10s of my favorite beach pictures I took last month.

3. Now that it's November I'm totally focused on the holidays. Thanksgiving and Christmas are my favorite times of the year. I managed to get another good chunk of my Christmas shopping completed. I only have to shop for a few more people and then I'm done! I'm fairly certain that I will meet my goal of being done with Christmas shopping by Thanksgiving. In fact, I have every gift with the exception of Yankee Candles and gift cards wrapped. I also ordered my photo Christmas cards from Winkflash yesterday. I've been waiting for them to have their annual 40% off photo cards sale for a couple weeks now, and they finally put up the code. I'm very happy. Now I just need to order Christmas stamps from the USPS website and print out my mailing labels.

Here's hoping next week will go by a little slower.