You did it! You survived another week! Congratulations!

As your reward, I have some hysterical quotes from the kids I work with. Read on, you won’t be disappointed.

I wrote in a previous post about our holiday Random Acts of Kindness campaign, run by myself, Casey, and my Mom.

I’m linking up with the Do Good Challenge, to challenge everyone to make some sort of difference out in there world this holiday season (and beyond!)

When I talk about Random Acts of Kindess, people don’t always understand what we do. So I wanted to elaborate, because many of them cost little to no money.

Here are some ideas and examples of things we have done!

-Go down the busiest street in town and let ALL the cars into traffic.

-Pay the toll for the person behind you at the toll booth.

-Buy a cup of coffee for the receptionist at your office, (or doctor’s office, etc)

-Make cookies and give them to neighbors.

-Shovel the snow off of the car parked next to you.

-Let someone go ahead of you in the grocery store.

-Buy a pointsetta and give it to someone as you are leaving the store.

-Buy a $5 dollar Dunkin’ Donut gift card (or any other), and have the cashier give it to the next person they wait on.

-Pick an address out of the phone book and send a Christmas card with a positive message/quote in it.

-Compliment a stranger (this is part of my happiness project, and I do it every day. It’s SO fun).

-Leave happy quotes/pictures in the inbox of your co-workers

Basically, you can do anything that makes a day brighter for someone else (that you know, or that you don’t know!) It can be as big or small as you want it to be. But it’s something! Call it good karma. We have a lot of fun doing this as our holiday project and enjoy carrying it on through the year!

Once upon a time, a Baby Girl was born.

She grew up among many Country Roads, in the great state of Vermont, Somewhere in Between Canada and the rest of the United States.

Her parents wished many things for her. They wished in her life that No Rain would fall, and that she would experience nothing but Peace and Love. Her mother often said, you can always Count on Me, and as they took wild road trips together she would sing to the little girl, Have I Told You Lately That I Love You? (Sometimes they would even get lost, because they didn’t really know The Way).

For the early years in this young girl’s life, she was a Daydream Believer, and spent most of her days Footloose and fancy free. Life taught many harsh lessons early on, about death, loss, cancer, mortality and how sometimes you just Can’t Cry Hard Enough. Some of these experiences left her Bitter and wishing that she was Somebody Else. She cried for the people that she missed, taken too soon- often whispering to them in the dark, before she fell asleep, Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again. But they weren’t, and somehow the little girl and her family would have to figure out how to Float On through life without them.

In high school she was a Goody Two Shoes and hung out with a lot of Misfits (still does), but their True Colors were beautiful, and as a group they had immeasurable amounts of fun, singing together at their senior prom, I’ve Had The Time of my Life.

After Graduation, there were a lot of tears as the little girl left the state of Vermont and drove to Maine for college. But they all knew it was coming, after all, These Boots are Made For Walking. Her mother accompanied her to Maine, to help her move in and carry loads of boxes up three flights to her new dorm room. As her mother drove away, her words of wisdom “Don’t Stop Believin’” lingering in the air, the little girl who was now a young woman embarked upon a new life. She knew, if it didn’t work out, she could always return home. After all, Who Says You Can’t Go Home?

There are a lot of lessons the young woman learned in her time at college. Life is nothing but Shades of Gray and you really spend a lot of time Hanging on for Hope, especially in the early days of living on your own, when you’re really doing nothing more than Living on a Prayer and splitting a cup of ramen three ways. Her best friend moved to Maine to live with her, which was a blessing, because her best friend was always saying to the young woman I’ll Be There For You, and she was – no matter what.

College was a powerful experience. She met like-minded people, and learned that a social work career was The Only Way that felt right to her. She spent a lot of time during both her bachelors and masters degree hoping that her example would say to others – I Dare You To Move, to make a difference- to stop the routine of being little more than Ants Marching, and make a change in society.

There was several more life lessons learned during this period. Painful moments- one of them being when the young woman almost lost her Mom. One day, when her Mom was Barely Breathing, she whispered to her Mother that she would always be her Sword and Shield and begged her, pleading “Have a Little Faith in Me.” Her Mother is strong, and she survived thanks to a stubborn will to live and a lifesaving gift from the young woman’s best friend (who is always the young woman’s Bridge Over Troubled Water). The young woman also had friends in her masters program that were amazing supports during this period of time, (she often thought – hey! These are Loser(s) Like Me!)

The day that she graduated with her masters degree, her mother was there, alive and “normal.” The young woman was 26, and in her head she could think nothing more than This Is The Moment.

In this time period, she learned a lot about love, too. Good and bad. She learned about people who would hurt you (but then again Everybody Hurts), and you could do nothing more than learn the lesson and Hold On. Then, when she was 25 she met a young man. Together, they grew into A Groovy Kind of Love, and knew that they were Better Together than they would ever be apart. It became clear that this was the real deal, and the young woman thought to herself The Search is Over, and she would whisper to him in the dark after he fell fast asleep –” there is no Life After You.“

One night, the young man fell to his knees, in the corner of his kitchen where he and the young woman had just been dancing. He opened a ring box and whispered Marry Me, and in that moment the young woman cried knowing this moment was the Best of What’s Around. 6 months later, on a beautiful day in September, the young girl walked down the aisle and said I Do, knowing in her heart that With Love We Will Survive. At the reception they laughed, danced, and even took time to Walk Like An Egyptian.

The young woman went on after college to work mostly with children. She also worked with their parents, who often yelled you Can’t Change Me! But change is made in small increments, as she desperately tries to convey that despite what many adults think Children Will Listen. And although at times she finds her job Impossible, it’s not really. And there are days when she feels so elated in her work, that she can practically Defy Gravity.

The young woman and the young man live together in Maine, now often thinking to themselves – “I have Carolina On My Mind.” Because soon, they will be moving to North Carolina (which they want to do In A Big Way), with the young woman’s mother, to continue the adventure called life. They are also wishing on a Lucky Star and hoping that one day they will have a family of their own. The young woman often thinks of the baby she lost in an early miscarriage, and often whispers to this child “I wish I could Hold You in My Arms.”

Life is nothing but an open road for this young woman, who was once a little girl. She has had many Seasons of Love, times when she couldn’t pay the RENT, and times when she could barely figure out how to keep Breathing. But she is strong, she is brave, and she dares the world with her words- Send Me On My Way.

Have a Nice Day, everyone!

Sincerely, Me

The Story of my Life – Bon Jovi

Baby Girl – by Will Hoge

Country Road – by John Denver

Somewhere in Between – by Lifehouse

No Rain – Blind Melon

Peace and Love – Blessed Union of Souls

Count on Me – Tonic

Have I Told You Lately? – Rod Stewart

The Way- Fastball

Daydream Believer – The Monkees

Footloose – Kenny Loggins

Can’t Cry Hard Enough – The Williams Brothers

Somebody Else – Bleu

Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again – The Phantom of the Opera

Float On – Modest Mouse

Goody Two Shoes – Adam Ant

Misfits – Third Eye Blind

True Colors – Cyndi Lauper

I’ve Had The Time of My Life – Jennifer Warner

Graduation – Vitamin C

These Boots Are Made For Walking – Nancy Sinatra

Don’t Stop Believin’ – Journey

Who Says You Can’t Go Home? – Bon Jovi

Shades of Gray – The Monkees

Hanging on for Hope – The New Amsterdams

Living on a Prayer – Bon Jovi

I’ll Be There for You – The Remberandts

I Dare You To Move – Switchfoot

The Only Way – Ellis Paul

Ants Marching – Dave Matthews Band

Barely Breathing – Duncan Sheik

Sword and Shield – Sister Hazel

Have a Little Faith in Me – John Hiatt

Bridge Over Troubled Water – Simon and Garfunkel

Loser Like Me – GLEE

This is the Moment – Jeckyll and Hyde

Everybody Hurts – REM

Hold On- Wilson Phillips

A Groovy Kind of Love – Phil Collins

Better Together – Jack Johnson

The Search is Over – Survivor

Life After You – Daughtry

Marry Me – Train

Best of What’s Around – Dave Matthews Band

September – Daughtry

I Do – Better than Ezra

(Lift) With Love We Will Survive – Flickerstick

Walk Like An Eygptian – The Bangles

Can’t Change Me – Chris Cornell

Children Will Listen – Into the Woods

Impossible – Cinderella

Defy Gravity – Wicked!

Carolina On My Mind – James Taylor

In a Big Way – Darius Rucker

Lucky Star- Madonna

Hold You In My Arms – Ray Lamontagne

Seasons of Love – RENT

RENT – RENT

Breathing – Lifehouse

Send Me On My Way – Rusted Root

Have a Nice Day – Bon Jovi

Sincerely, Me – Better Than Ezra

So I have a crush. And it’s not my husband.

Actually, I have a few crushes if we’re going to be honest.

They’re blogging crushes.

They are the blogs that I was lurking upon months before I ventured into writing my OWN blog, and they are my celebrities. I am in awe of their writing ability, their ability to network, and how nice many of them are (at least on Twitter, and that’s real… right?) They give me inspiration. And today I want to share them with you (in case, by chance, you aren’t already reading them!)

I feel like everyone loves The Bloggess, or at least anyone who has a glimpse of a sense of humor. I mean, I was hooked at Beyonce. She is funny, and she is over the top, and many time she is very, very real.

Speaking of real – it doesn’t get any more real than Casey, (no NOT my Casey! But it IS a cool name) who has had bouts with depression, infertility, and life in general. Her writing inspires me. I found her many months ago, and recently SHE FOLLOWED ME BACK ON TWITTER, and interacts! Uhm. I may have squealed. Plus her babies are beautiful and she responds to nearly every comment you leave on her posts!

Casey’s blog naturally led me to her IRL best friend, Emily who has HILARIOUS children that make great signs. And she makes turd cakes! Yum! Seriously, she’s funny and worth a follow!

Nichole, is the writer behind In These Small Moments. Again, her writing is amazing, and she inspires me frequently. She’s also from Maine! And we talked about that once on Twitter. I felt like I was hanging with a cool kid. Also? She’s commented on MY little ol’ blog recently. Pretty amazing! I love that she writes about the small moments in life, the ones that really are the big ones, anyway.

Within a few months, I found the beautiful blog Four Plus an Angel, written by Jessica. She writes about autism, and her beautiful angel. I am in awe of the strength she has, and also the power in her words. She’s also been by this little blog before (thank you!)

As I mentioned, there is Mel at Stirrup Queens who I found when researching infertility, and found a place to belong, to laugh, and to find hope. The resources on her page are numerous!

There are SO many more blogs that I’d love to share with you. Like Katie at Loves of Life, who has found a new love for running (just as I quit it!). I found her back when I was searching for stories about miscarriage, right after we experienced ours. And Jess at Dudes and Sweets who has a wonderfully chaotic life that she shares about with a great sense of humor. And there’s Gina at Namaste By Day who has a lovely space on the internet where she shares about parenting, but also about the work she does with kids as a speech & language pathologist. And I can’t forget Katie at Sluiter Nation who I again found when I was looking for stories of miscarriage, and how to get through it. Her words are poetic, painful, and very real. They helped me at a difficult time.

A lot of the blogs that I read are “Mom Blogs”…or should I say, blogs that are written by mothers. Maybe that’s weird (since I don’t have kids), but it also gives me hope, and inspiration. Hope that someday I will be a Mom to a baby here on Earth.

It also reminds me (and I need it many days) that there are wonderful parents out there who love their children.

So I urge you to go check them out, and I’ll do another post sometime in the near furture with some of the others I have a crush on…

You may have noticed, if you are a returning visitor (which Google Analytics tells me that 49.87% of you are) that the blog has undergone some renovations. Taylor has displayed stress over the loss of our teddy bears at the top of the header. They, or some other picture WILL be back. As soon as I can figure out how to not make it a huge picture at the top. But I will figure it out. Maybe. Probably. At some point. (Did you know a night of staring at  HTML code will make you lose your mind?)

This was my 5 minute Stream of Consciousness Sunday post. It’s five minutes of your time and a brain dump. Want to try it? Here are the rules…

• Set a timer and write for 5 minutes only.
• Write an intro to the post if you want but don’t edit the post. No proofreading or spellchecking. This is writing in the raw.
• Publish it somewhere. Anywhere. The back door to your blog if you want. But make it accessible.
• Add the Stream of Consciousness Sunday badge to your post.
• Link up your post below.
• Visit your fellow bloggers and show some love.

Happy December everyone!  Congrats to my wife for keeping the blog going on a daily basis, and for allowing me not to have to spell “NaBloPoMo” even once!  I’ll still be keeping up my much slower, every Saturday pace, even with November having concluded (I should be able to manage 😉 ).

Seeing as how the month of November and Jenn’s recent SYNDICATION ON BLOGHER (congrats, again!) got us a lot of new readers and followers, we both thought it might be a good idea to post 25 random facts about ourselves that you may not know.  Look for Jenn’s, coming soon!  But for now, enjoy mine:

1.  I broke my right collar bone in first grade, when I slipped off my bed with some loose covers (while playing, not sleeping).  My teacher, Miss Irice (now Mrs. Tibbits…I assume, I haven’t talked to her since the mid-to-late 80’s) selected two members of my class to be my “bodyguards” on the playground.  They were a bit overzealous, and went after a kid who was just saying “hi” to me and apparently got too close.

2.  I broke my right collar bone again in second grade, when I slipped in a wooden chair and caught the arm underneath my shoulder.

3. I broke my right pinky toe when I was 10, dancing down the hall and flapping my legs to the “Garfield And Friends” theme song (my toe caught a door frame…OUCH!).

4. When I was 16, I was in a pie-eating contest at our high school.  I came in 4th place out of four, didn’t even finish, and almost hurled.

5. When I was about 15, I drank a glass Pepsi bottle full of curdled milk.  I curdled the milk myself by mixing it with Vinegar, for the sole purpose of drinking it.  Teenage boys are dumb most of the time.  It’s just a fact.

6. I was in the school spelling bee in 4th grade.  I was the top speller in my class, and I amazed my classmates repeatedly with how easily I could spell a lot of the harder words during our practices.  I was eliminated from the spelling bee on my first word.

7. Many of you probably know that Jenn was featured on the Today show and I got to be featured with her.  But one cool thing that I don’t think we’ve mentioned is that we’ve spoken to Al Roker.  Backstage in the green room.  Just casually.  As he came out of his dressing room we said “hi”, and he returned our greeting as he went out a door down a set of stairs.  Then a few seconds later, he popped back in and walked by us, and I said “Welcome back!” and Al, just as jovial as ever said back “Yeah, I like taking short trips!” and trotted off.  And as a bonus, we officially talked to somebody who appeared on “Seinfeld”.

8. I don’t think I’ve blogged about this yet (maybe I will in the future), but I didn’t really learn how to ride a bike without training wheels until I was 29.

9. I know a lot of weird pointless trivia about things like cartoons and comics, and also about candy bars.

10. I HATE eggs.  No, actually, I don’t.  I LOATHE them.  Not things that are made with eggs (i.e. most baked goods), but scrambled, fried, poached, etc….I hate.  When I was little, I couldn’t even be in the same room with one without being sick to my stomach.  Now, I can tolerate them, but I don’t like them.  They’re an unborn chicken.  It’s gross.

11. I also don’t like seafood.  The only fish I eat are the white perch I catch during ice fishing season.  I also enjoy a very occassional swordfish steak.  Kind of weird, being that I’ve lived over three decades in a major seafood capital of the U.S., but I guess I’m prone to being weird.

12. I used to watch the Powerpuff Girls (as an adult), and my favorite is Buttercup.  While, I don’t watch it anymore and I just sold my DVDs, I still respect it, and think it’s a great show.

13. Also along the lines of favorites, my favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle is Michaelangelo.  That spelling of his name that I just used is how his name was always spelled back when I was a kid (versus the Renaissance artist’s name “Michelangelo”).  In recent years, it’s been officially changed to the same spelling as the artist’s name (with just one “a” and it tweaks me out whenever I read it (much to the annoyance of Jenn).

14.  My handwriting sucks.  It’s always sucked.  When I was in first grade, they gave me a special triangle shaped chunk of plastic to put around my pencil as some sort of helping tool.  Didn’t work.  And now that our society has been taken over by keyboards and touchscreens?  My handwriting sucks even more.  My 9th grade English teacheronce watched me write and told me it was “beautiful”.  He also asked me if I like “Dungeons and Dragons” to which I said “yes”.  I think that pleased him, and I’m pretty sure he had some kind of weird man-crush on me.

15. Speaking of nerdy games, I was a huge Role-Playing Game nerd as a teenager.  For those who don’t know, the original “Role-Playing Games” long predate the popular RPG video games such as “Final Fantasy”, “Kingdom Hearts”, etc. and involved a lot of keeping track of stats, dice rolling, and basically sitting around a table “playing pretend”.  I still think it’s an intriguing concept, although not really my thing today.  Some things never leave my brain though, such as “THAC0” means “To Hit Armor Class Zero”.  I can never truly escape my nerdom.

16. I mentioned in my “Hoarding Horror” post that I was into “Heroclix”, which I’m sure meant nothing to at least 99% of the people who read it.  Heroclix is a game of little collectible superhero (and villian) miniatures (think Superman, Spider-Man, etc.) with little stats printed onto their base.  You make a team of them and try to duke it out on a game board with another player’s team (“duking it out” really means “roll dice a lot”).  There are 44 color-coded superpowers, meaning, for example, that when you see a green box on a certain spot on the base, that character has “Super Strength”, brown means “Hypersonic Speed”, etc.  I know them all, and probably will for the rest of my life.  I also had a room totally devoted to the 2,000 or so Heroclix figures that I owned and displayed them all in seven, wall-mounted plexiglass display cases.  The room has been dismantled as part of our selling efforts, but it still gets refered to as “The Heroclix Room”.  Casey=Mega Nerd.

17. I mastered the art of tying a twizzler into a knot with just my tongue, teeth, and the various surfaces of the inside of my mouth.  I don’t know if I still can, but it was pretty cool.

18. I didn’t go to my first rock concert until June of last year (at age 32).  It was Daughtry, a present from Jenn for my birthday, and it RULED.  Even though my ears were still ringing well into the next afternoon.

19. When I was 17, in the early days of the internet, I decided it would be cool to write my own stories about the characters in my favorite video game at the time, Final Fantasy 3.  They became fairly popular, with hundreds of fellow SNES-nerds downloading each one, and around 100 people “subscribing” to them through e-mail.  I still have them, and I’ve been meaning to go back and read them just to see how bad they were.

20. I only got one detention in the entirety K-12.  I forgot to do my Math homework one night and had to stay in during lunch recess with my head down on a desk.  I was quite the rebellous youth.

21. I love astronomy.  I was REALLY into it, when I was a kid, and I still remember a lot of things about it (although some of it has been proven to be incorrect since then…Pluto isn’t a planet? WTF?).  I also took an astronomy class in college, mostly for fun.

22. I was lactose intolerant from when I was 12, until some point before I was 22 (when I decided to try dairy without medication).  My cousin had the same issue as a teenager.  When it first happened, I missed three weeks of school thinking that I had some kind of nasty flu, and of course, drinking an occassional glass of milk whenever I started to feel better.  I had an actual flu a few months later, which messed with the lactose intolerance, and turned into some sort of digestive disorder (“irritable bowel syndrome”, a term I’m told now by my PCP means “we don’t know”).  I missed a month an a half of school because of that.

23. I have never read any of “The Lord Of The Rings” novels, nor have I ever seen an episode of “Gilligan’s Island” or “I Love Lucy” in its entirety.

24. I had a tinsel obsession as a child, and each year when we decorated the Christmas Tree, I would roll around on the floor playing in it.  I was also keep some in a ziploc bag and add to it each year, refering to it as my pet “Silver”.  I had three sandwich bags stuffed full before I stopped.

25. When I was 8 or so, I decided to “take over the house” the same way my favorite cartoon villians were always trying to take over things.  I tied my parents and sisters wrists behind their back with dental floss and then put them in the bathroom.  The bathroom was to be the “prison” of the new evil fortress that I was attempting to turn the house into.  The door didn’t lock, so I used more floss or something wound around the door knob to somehow keep the door from opening easily (in the many years since my retirement as a supervillian, I’ve forgotten how some of my evil inventions work).  I took scotch tape and spread really long pieces across one of the doorways as a big web, a trap that was sure to ensare intruders and hapless dogooders.  My parents bedroom was to become the meeting room where I would go over my evil plans with my imaginary minions.  Unfortunately, it all fell apart when my family stopped playing along  escaped!

And that’s 25 totally random facts about me.  I hope you found at least some of them to be entertaining!  Please note that you can learn many other things by reading previous posts!

Have a good week, everybody!

Dear Friday- WE LOVE YOU. Why do you make us wait so long for you? I promise your outfit looks fine, you don’t look fat, and you’re not wearing too much make-up…so next time, don’t take so long to get here mmmkay? Thanks!

Well, it’s Friday so it’s time for some more funny kid quotes! To recap (for those of you who don’t read my every word… and why not?!) I am a social worker. I work primarily with kids, who are super funny. I started collecting some quotes (with just their ages) a couple of years ago and sharing them. People laugh. People enjoy. People ask for more. So I’m bringing them here. On Fridays. When you need to laugh to get through those last eight hours before the weekend! Enjoy!

Me: What did you put up for Christmas decorations?
Kid: Oh you know….Santa, Rudolph, BG.
Me: BG?
Kid: You know…Baby God! (8 year old)

“This is my Daddy’s room, he has a stuffed animal too because sometimes Daddies get a teeny weeny bit scared.” (5 year old)

(while playing Monopoly with a 6 year old)
Me: Okay, well I’m going to buy a house for my property.
Kid: WELL. *I* am not buying a house until I’m married with children!

“You know Mrs. G, my memory is sort of like a CD player. Sometimes you put the CD in and it starts playing right away. Sometimes you put the CD in and it just says ‘Disc Error'” (12 year old)

Me: well, school is important if you want to be a lawyer like you said.
Kid: Oh c’mon Jenn, you know I’m just another brick in the wall. (14 year old)

Me: Wow, you have a new baby sister! That’s great!
Kid: Not really. When she cries she sounds like a dying cat. (7 year old)

Me: What do you want to be when you grow up?
Kid:  ummmm…probably a unicorn trainer, but it depends on how college goes, you know (6 year old)