Seven Quick Takes-- Alien Movies, a 1990s SUV, and a Bunch of Old Socks

This is me licking the lid of an icing bucket we got for free from our grocery store's bakery.
I'll uh...have to tell you that story sometime. 

Whew!

It's been an intense week.

My 21 year old brother and his girlfriend came and stayed with us for a few days AND my husband returned to work from Summer Break, so it has been crazy. Visiting with my brother and his lady friend (who is an absolute gem of a human being, and I was very happy to get to know her) was wonderful, but it involved lots of late nights, and both my hubby and I are exhausted.

We're (sigh) getting old.

Here's what else I've been up to.

1.) We're trying to sell our Suburban. 

We recently paid off our car and bought a minivan.

Well...paid off our car, then started paying car payments on a minivan.

Paying off the car put a serious dent into our savings, so we're trying to make that up by selling our old Suburban ourselves instead of trading it in to a dealership. There's nothing wrong with the Suburban...everything on it works just fine. It's just that a minivan better suits our needs right now.

It's been up online for a couple months now though, and the only people who have expressed interest are scammers trying to get us to buy a Car Fax through their company.


So my younger brother (different brother than the one who just visited) and I are going to try and film a commercial to get this thing to move. We're going to make it as ridiculous as possible in the (perhaps somewhat vain) hope that someone local will see it and be interested.

Think this...

meets this...

I'm truly sorry for getting it stuck in your head again.

We're going to go by the Super Bowl rule of commercial making...the more off the wall bonkers it is, the more people will remember it.

At the very least, it should be an interesting way to spend an evening.

(If you're interested in buying a Suburban, the listing for it is here).

2.) I made my husband freeze Promethius to get this image so I could make an NFP meme out of it. 

Isn't it beautiful?

I am accepting caption ideas if anyone has a good one. 

3.) I figured out that old worn out socks make pretty decent 'cloth wipes'

We cloth diaper our toddler when we're at home, and I've found that having some sort of washcloth that I don't mind getting really dirty is much easier for me to use than disposable wipes.

Someone gave us a set of those thin newborn baby type washcloths when our oldest was born, and those work pretty well, but we don't have enough of them, and a couple were starting to get really threadbare. I tried replacing them with t-shirt rags, but they didn't work very well at wiping up stuff.

Then my husband gave me a bunch of old socks with holes in the heels to toss out, and I had an idea. 

I cut off the heel like this...

Then the toe like this...

Then cut it down the middle on the top of the sock, so that the finished product looked like this.. 

The bottom grey absorbent bit works a lot like the rough texture of a washrag, so it cleans up baby bottoms with no problems. I cut up a bunch of them and threw them in one of those Huggies reusable wipe boxes in the bathroom. When I need to use one, I just run it under the tap, wipe up the mess, then toss in the diaper bucket.

4.) I'm actually trying to (gasp!) plan out a homeschool curriculum this year. (Sort of). 

My oldest is only four, so I'm going to keep it pretty casual, but I decided that some structure would go a long ways towards helping me keep sane.

I'm doing unit studies. I'm choosing a topic for each month, then trying to find stuff we already have in the house that matches that topic, looking for ideas on Pinterest, and staring really hard at my collection of toilet paper tubes. I figure that I'll use our local library to find more materials on the subject as we go along. 

I've found out a couple things trying to do this. 

a.) There have to be literally HUNDREDS of variations on the game where you try to throw a ball into a hole on Pinterest.

I look up "bear themed games", and there's a game where you throw plastic balls and try to 'feed' a giant cardboard cutout of a bear. 

I look up, "ocean themed games", and there's a game where you throw plastic balls and try to 'feed' a giant cardboard cutout of a shark. 

I look up, "dinosaur themed games, and....you get the idea. 

b.) Vintage Childcraft Encyclopedia hunting at Goodwill has actually turned out to be a good investment. 

I have most of a set from the early 1990s, all found at our local thrift store. 

I have fond memories of a 30 year old incomplete World Book encyclopedia set that someone gave our family when I was a kid, and I'd like my children to have a similar experience of being able to just browse for facts and information-- not something that's really safe for them to do online. 

They're actually really fun to look at. I've found myself leafing through the ones on geography and holidays for fun.

Branching off of that... 

5.) The Childcraft book on Holidays is actually a FANTASTIC source for living liturgically 

It even has St. Lucy on the cover! 

It's meant to be a 'holidays around the world' type book, so there's Muslim, Buddhist, and regional holidays listed in here.

There's also a surprisingly large number of Catholic/ Christian ones. Ash Wednesday, the feast St. Joseph, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the feast of St. Joan of Arc, the feast of St. Lucy, the feast of St. Andrew (turns out it's a huge deal in parts of Scotland...who knew?), and the Christian backstories for Halloween and Mardi Gras are in here, as well as Christmas and Easter. The explanations are perfect for reading aloud to children, and they get into the regional observations of these holidays in the parts of the world where they are most celebrated.

Definitely worth buying, even if you don't get the other books in the set. 

6.) I'm trying to write a once-a-week homeschool co-op creative writing curriculum for homeschoolers.

And I'm discovering why teachers give homework.

It's an odd feeling. 

7.) I have a love/hate relationship with Pop Tarts. 

I sometimes think,

"Hey, you know what sounds good right now? A Pop Tart." 

So I heat it up, and start eating.

And almost at the first bite, I remember that these are actually disgusting. But I keep eating, because I've opened the package now, and I'm committed.

And I'm left with a nasty taste in my mouth, and uncomfortable feeling in my stomach, and a heart full of dashed expectations.

I keep thinking, "this time will be different." 

But it never is. 

At least it's whole grain. 

Click HERE for the rest of this week's Quick Takes.