Friday Fragments

Be sure and link up with Mrs. 4444 if you're fragmentin' today!

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All three of my kids have now lost their new glasses. I think they got them about a month ago. So... awesome! Especially for Chloë, who is blind as a bat without them and has been having her SOL (standardized tests) at school for the past two weeks. Their favorite line, when we tell them to go look for them, is, "I don't know where they are!!!" Hello, that's what "LOOK FOR IT" means!

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We continue with our pledge to buy locally, eat organically, and make our own for everything possible. I scored a new breadmaker off Freecycle, with the warning that the giver wasn't sure if it works. It does! (I also asked for a juicer and an ice cream maker; Hubs was quick to point out the irony, since we gave our bread maker and juicer away years ago when we first joined Freecycle...)

The kids and I have made at least half a dozen loaves since we got the machine, including regular white bread for sandwiches (they didn't have wheat flour the last time I picked some up), cinnamon raisin bread, and buttermilk cheese bread. All SOOO good - even the one I messed up on and forgot to start the machine until the next morning. Whoops!

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Wednesday, our first weekly delivery from South Mountain Creamery arrived. They are an "almost local" dairy farm in southern Maryland (where's northern Maryland, 5 minutes from that??) and are the closest working dairy farm to our area, so that works. Virginia law requires sold milk to be pasteurized, so the only way we could get raw milk is by buying shares in a cow, which our budget prohibits at the moment. So this works for us. OMG, the milk is crazy delicious. I bought a bottle of skim for me, chocolate for a dinner treat, and five bottles of whole milk for my chugging kids. They're already well into their second bottle, so I fear I'll need to increase the weekly delivery!

I loved putting out the cooler full of ice on Tuesday night and peeking out my window all day Wednesday to see if the milkman was coming. It all felt so old-fashioned, in a good way. I love knowing my kids are getting healthy, fresh milk, with no preservatives and which comes from happy, grass-fed cows. When we get a chance, I plan to take a road trip up to South Mountain Farm, because I want the kids to be able to know exactly where their food comes from - something you can't exactly do with milk from the supermarket!

The delivery also included fresh-squeezed juice from Florida (not local, but really, how could it be?) and a half-pound each of SMC's salmon cream cheese (ick, for Rob) and apple-raisin cream cheese (for the kids and me). The latter is extraordinary, and paired with the cinnamon raisin bread we made, ho-leee cow! Chloë and I have been indulging in that snack far too much!

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Bye-bye, Britto! Remember the Britto? If not, it was the artwork that Rob and I purchased during our European cruise almost 2 years ago, an original by Romero Britto, whom we now adore. If we had the money, we'd definitely have a nice little collection of his works, but the Deep Night Romance that we DO own speaks to us personally. 

Anyway, it's a giclée painting, and it's three-dimensional. Two of the 3D pieces fell from grace their original positions during transit, and the corner of the frame was damaged as well. It's taken us more than a year to break down and pull it off the wall (or I should say, have Steph's husband Tim pull it down for us), but Thursday, it was finally picked up by Park West to be repaired. There's a big, blank spot of wall over my desk right now, and I miss my little big ol' Britto dearly! Come back, giclée!

(BTW, if you go to Britto's site, linked above, check out that car he painted. Hello, I want it!)

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I'm steadfastly refusing to frog the mis-knit sweater, even though both Steph and Gloria said I should. Why? Because I'm a stubborn ass like that. I don't like to work hard on something and then just undo it; I prefer to do as Tim Gunn famously says: "Make it work!" So that's what I'm doing. The button bands are on (the ripply one will be fixed with blocking) and close together when I'm wearing it. Next the collar, and lastly, the sleeves, which I'll make as long as possible with whatever yarn I have left. If I can't wear this sweater - which was originally intended for my 5yo Sophia, but now fits me, hehe - because it's kinda short, then I'll sell it or give it away to a particularly, um, chubby little girl. SOMEONE will fit this (&^%$^$ sweater!!

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Check this out - I got this $37 Scotch laminator for FREE, with $13 worth of additional stuff, from Kmart! We've finished 3 weeks of mostly deschooling Jack, so I'm not exactly sure yet WHY I will need a laminator for home-schooling, but everyone says that I will. I had $50 in free gift cards (regular readers might remember the Hershey's Pieces candy promotion from Kmart a few months ago, which turned out to be a huge moneymaker for me) for Kmart, so the girls stopped by there Wednesday after dance classes, to see if they had one. They told me they didn't on the phone, but go figure, I found two on the shelf. SWEET. 

I also picked up two packages of legal-size file folders for our lapbooking projects and a dry erase marker and eraser set. Slowly but surely, our classroom-to-be is taking shape. Now if the Missouri Department of Revenue would get its act together and send us our tax refund, I could really get started!

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I guess that's about it for me this week. Have a great weekend, everybody!

Fin.