Think Pink for October

I created a Treasury on Etsy yesterday with such beautiful items from such a talented group of artists! You can see it at http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list_west.php?room_id=70308 What a great time to shop for very cool items and to shop for such a wonderful cause! Shopping and doing something good does it get much better than that? I'm certain that we all have our story about someone we know and love that has had their life stopped for a time with the news of Breast Cancer and it is all you can think about and then the many decisions that go with this news of surgeries, and treatments. This is my chance to share my story of the first time this frightening cancer attempted to enter into my life. Unfortunately since this first time there have been so many others. It is time for a cure what a silly statement it is way past time for a cure!
I was a Junior in high school which would make me 16 years old when my mom was hospitalized in preparation for surgery. The night before her surgery my dad returned from the hospital and I can still visualize him sitting in his brown recliner with tears running down his face. This was the first time in my life that I had seen my father cry! This left quite an impression on me! Life truly was easier when at 16 mom and dad pretty much control your world even though as a teenager you are not always so grateful about that fact and thankfully I thought that dad could take care of anything! I used to tease my parents saying that mom knew everything and that dad could fix anything! So this was a tender reality jolt to find my dad in this distress. I don't know yet seeing this time in hindsight if dad didn't have something to do with fixing this too as I know he was sending so many prayers to our Heavenly Father about this situation. My mother had a lump in her breast. This was in 1972. When my dad was at the hospital the day before mom's surgery was scheduled he was pulled aside by our family physician who told him that he wanted to prepare my father for the worst possible outcome. He thought mom had breast cancer, he thought that her lymph nodes were involved, and that he was concerned that it was so involved that my mom might not even make it off of the operating table. My dad traveled home that night offering up prayers to God that he would do anything if God would save his wife. My youngest brother Kevin was only 12. My oldest brother Wayne was married and had a child of his own and my older brother Mike was just finishing his University studies and was to be married that Spring. My mom would tell of this day of her surgery that the surgeon patted her hand before surgery and told her, "innocent until proven guilty." My brother Kevin reminded me recently that what he recalled was the impression it made on him when he heard that our family doctor took time to pray with mom before the surgery. This was a terrible scare for us however we were very blessed by the outcome as her lump was benign. I will always remember how it felt like my life would be changed forever by this and how fortunate our news was. Regretably at this same time I had a class mate named Nan that was in a hospital bed in the room directly across from my mom's room who had also had surgery and her news was not to rejoice about. She had throat cancer and we both missed our Junior Prom that was the weekend following these two surgeries. I always think of Nan when I remember about my mom. You know the feeling when you actually feel guilty because your news is so wonderful and someone else has such terrible news? Then too I remember that I felt so bad for Nan and prayed for her but I was a putz and didn't cross the hall to walk into the room to tell her these things! I have always regretted that! Of course other than being a not so great friend to her I truly was afraid that I would faint! Seriously! Fainter at the scent of hospitals maybe that should be the title to another blog? It is an embarrassing burden that thankfully has since left me. She was a courageous girl who lived to graduate from high school, ended up being employed in the same place that I was, married, had children and unfortunately did die too young. That puts me back to the reason for this blog. Too many lives have been touched by cancer! It can leave us feeling helpless and that is not a good way to feel. The month of October is set aside to remind us to be educated and take all of the precautions to do our part to help remove breast cancer. Make a stop by the Susan G. Komen website http://ww5.komen.org/ to learn what you can to help prevent and fight against this cancer. Get your yearly mammogram, do a monthly breast check, take care of yourself you are important!
Now for a fun topic as women shopping is like a sport to us. We might not be sitting in front of the television to watch every football game this time of year but chances are good that we are searching flyers or strolling through the mall to find the latest item that we really NEED (cough, cough)! I want to encourage you to check out Etsy.com there are so many talented artists there and you don't even need to leave home to browse and shop. Many shops on Etsy are offering to donate for Breast Cancer Research so stop by to see their beautiful things and know that your purchases could be helping to someday remove this frightening disease. I too have faced this disease twice in my life the first time I discovered a lump was when my firstborn was only a few weeks old. I remember going in for my first mammogram at the age of 22 while my husband held our baby boy in the waiting room. I was safe as the lump was a remainder from having Mastitis when trying to breastfeed but I remember all too well what a frightening time this was. I have since faced this scare a second time a few years back when I went through several tests, a biopsy and then surgery. I had a fast growing lump and was fortunately benign. I think it is important that we don't become so immersed in the fear that we don't do our health checks. The proceedures that can be done to save lives have increased. There are so many survivors of breast cancer. We need to be a part of cheering this process on. So this blog is to honor the women in my life who have been touched by this disease or by going through the frightening time of finding a lump. This blog is for Eva, Sharon (survivor), the memory of Shirley,memory of Colleen, Joanne (survivor), Becky (survivor),memory of Dorothy, Mary (survivor) , memory of Elvis' mother. Feel free to comment to leave the name of your loved ones.
Also, if you managed to get through this long blog there is some fun to check out. My two shops myshininglights.etsy.com and nannasknitting.etsy.com are offering free shipping throughout the month of October to encourage shopping for the cause and any item in my shops with pink on them will have a portion of the sale price donated to find a cure! So please stop by to see if there is anything that just has to come to your home. Also, I am going to have a drawing to give away a free pair of earrings on this blog. So please register in the comment section for this drawing with your name and your email address and on November first I will choose the winner and notify the winner! Have fun!

Invisible Illness Awareness Week

I feel so honored to be able to write my blog entry today about Invisible Illness Awareness Week! First let me say if you are interested in learning more about this then just click on the nifty badge that I actually figured out how to add it to my blog without daughter or husband help! This badge will take you directly to so much information about Invisible Illness Awareness Week that will be especially helpful to you if you or a loved one does have such an illness.

I really want to applaud those who have gone through so much to bring this information to us and their efforts to educate those who are either unaware of this or who do not understand. I am especially impressed by this group of volunteers who have made this annual event possible because most of them suffer from an invisible illness and yet have taken their time and energy to put this week together. Now try to imagine the last time you had the flu. Right, you don't really want to think about this as it was quite unpleasant. Now imagine putting together a large national event while you were in the midst of having the flu. Hmmm, tissues in hand, comforter pulled around you, body aches turning you into a whining lump of yewww, you aren't moving from that couch today let alone pulling a vast organizational event into place. Good job! You have just imagined what most people with an invisible illness go through every day in just trying to get themselves out of bed, getting dressed, and trying to make some type of semblance to their day.

I first started writing this blog so that I could be a spokesperson and hopefully comforter to those who have an invisible illness. So I am especially happy to have the opportunity to be able to blog today and to have the ability to send you to a place where you can receive more informative guidance. But before I do that let me explain a little about what is involved or the meaning of this phrase that I keep repeating of Invisible Illness. Invisible Illness has the face of so many symptoms. Those most familiar to me are Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, Sjogrens, Arnold Chiari Syndrome, Muscular Sclerosis, Depression and Lupus. This gives a very small start to the list of illnesses that fit under this category. So now just click on the I'm blogging for Invisible Illness Awareness Week at the side of my blog and it will take you to so much more information. That is where I am headed so that I can find the broadcasts for this day and feel the companionship of others that face the same challenges that I face.

How Great This Feels

August 14 through the 16th my daughter planned and organized a Bake Sale. It took the efforts of many helpful hands in our community but let me tell you Deanna is a baking whiz! And Steve wins the Father of the Year award for volunteering to work at the sale for two days. The Bake Sale was for The Great American Bake Sale so google that if you are a baker or a willing volunteer. It is designed to feed hungry children. Deanna's hopeful goal was to raise $200.00 but instead ended up donating $400.00 to the Great American Bake Sale. People from our church and our community and our family generously donated baked goods, items for an auction, and baking ingredients. Then most of those that purchased baked items did so without accepting change from their purchase. And several threw in very generous donations as they purchased their baked goods. Deanna decorated the tables in our church where the sale was held with table cloths that had my vintage aprons added for a bit of whimsy and color. Steve and I are just so proud of her that she took on such a large project and was the impetus of having it be successful.

It has been a very busy Summer for us. That is a very good thing! We have had lots of time with our family which is so wonderful and rare for us. As a Minister's family we are located far from our families and time spent with them is so dear to us and just does not happen often enough.

This July our daughter had a visitor from Birmingham, England. She has been communicating with him for almost a year through e-harmony. His name is Elvis and he is originally from Cameroon, Africa. He was at our home for almost two weeks which did not seem nearly long enough. This was his first visit to America so we tried to think of ways to introduce him to American culture through our food choices, restaurants, and trips to the mall for his souvenir shopping.

We live in a very small city so there is a limited amount of things to do but we managed and he seemed very content. We also introduced him to our extended family which at the time lived in Grand Forks, ND. They have since moved. Sniff :( but that is one other part of our Summer. Our nieces and nephew participated in the Grand Forks SPA (Summer Performing Arts) and so they provided some very wonderful entertainment for us at the time Elvis was visiting. We were able to enjoy Bye Bye Birdie that our niece Mary performed in. And then an all girls musical performance that our niece Sarah performed in. And to not leave Nathaniel our nephew out I must say that Steve and I thoroughly enjoyed his performance in Damn Yankees!

We also took a trip to Itasca State Park which is where the headwaters of the Mississippi begins. I do have photos of this delightful trip to share. There are a couple of areas in the park that one can walk across the Mississippi and the water is so clean and clear that you can see the bottom of the river bed and there are three areas where you can walk across the Mississippi. It is truly a beautiful place to visit and I would encourage anyone that is going to be in Northern Minnesota to take the time to check this out.

We have also enjoyed two weddings this Summer of our dear nieces Sara and Brooke and we were able to take vacation time to travel to Madison and Illinois for this time to enjoy their weddings and time spent with family.

Summer isn't over yet thank goodness! I am hoping for a few more adventures or at least time around our fire pit toasting S'mores.

Dreams Do Come True

My husband is just crazy about bikes! He loves to ride them, to talk about them, to tweak them, look at me using bike terminology! He has recently starting riding again and he is so excited about this. On the 4th of July he rode 20 miles with some newly found biking friends who hope to do some riding every Saturday. It is part of his determination to become more physically active and fit and I am in his cheering section to help him reach his goals. For years he has had a dream of fixing bikes and then being able to give them away to those who do not have bikes. Those who can not afford them or for what ever the reason have not been able to own a bike. This dream is finally coming true. The only disadvantage to this is that our garage is now taking the form of a bicycle parts shop. I guess it is a good thing that we needed to sell our second car because now the bikes have taken over it's parking place. He is able to select bikes from a community resource and then cleans them, tweaks and repairs, and then finds new homes for them. I took this photo of his first attempt at this endeavor this past Spring. He advertised the availability of the bikes on our local radio swap shop and within minutes of the announcement he had received phone calls and all of the bikes had new homes. It means a lot to him to be able to pass on his joy of riding to others and especially to children. It would be his dream to have every child supplied with a bike. That would be a pretty large undertaking though so for now he will just focus on our community.

Wonderful Surprise On Sunday

I was greeted by a conversation on my Nanna's Knitting at Etsy this past Sunday that my scarf Tribute which was in a beautiful treasury had made it to the front page on Etsy. The creator of the treasury Jennifer Hewett of jenhewett.etsy.com was even kind enough to mail me a screen shot of that front page on Monday so that I would be able to see it. Her treasury featured beautiful gray items and it was the first treasury that she had created. So way to go Jen! Needless to say I was ecstatic about this news. Steve was out on the deck reading the Sunday paper and sitting in the sunshine when I was able to tell him. I couldn't even wait to get out to the deck to do my happy dance so I had to let him know through the kitchen window. Well there were significant reasons for this as to go out on the deck would require a change from my pajamas into clothes and I was much too excited to take that long. I will include a photo of Tribute and I will also show a button of this made it to the front page of Etsy. Well that is what I intend to do anyway. That depends on if my computer skills are up to the challenge. I must confess, I couldn't figure this out. It is a wonderful thing to have a daughter that knows how to use a computer!

Time to Rejoice

It is a beautiful day today. The sun is out. It is in the 70's AMAZING!We have watched as the Gold Finches have gone from a dingy gray to their beautiful Golden color which in itself seems to be a miracle of Spring. It feels like a season to rejoice. Spring is new life a burst of freshness in a way it is like Ready... Set...Go! Our family has been reeling with illness the past couple of weeks Steve with Pneumonia, Me with Sinusitis, Deanna with Cysts and Enlarged Lymph Nodes which was a better diagnosis than Appendicitis, though she is still having pain. So antibiotics for Steve and I and pain medication for Deanna and we are all more than eager to jump into a fresh new Spring.

As I am writing this the view out my front window shows little tiny pink buds on our flowering crab. In a couple of days that tree will be exploding with blooms. Our garden has it's newest layer of fertilizer on top and is ready for tilling. I'm thinking about which plants to put into our garden. Always tomatoes, there must be potatoes as this is one of the best regions for growing those. I'm thinking carrots, peas, yeww I don't know if I even want to fool with green beans though they will have to go in as my sweetie is the one who tends the garden and he does like these. I think asparagus would be nice though it can appear to be messy and if memory serves me I don't think you can harvest the first season. Any fellow gardeners reading this can leave a comment for me on gardening tips. I'm looking forward to seeing how large my herb patch will be this year. Last year my Rosemary did not make it through the harsh winter. The Lavender was growing wonderfully and every time I see it or take a whiff of the fragrance I think of the fields in Provence and dream of someday visiting them.

The Collies in residence Abby and Skye are even smiling as they have been diligently watching Steve pound posts into the ground to put up the fence in our backyard so they can run, leave it to the females to advise from the sidelines on building projects. I know that our neighbors must be giddy with joy as they see the fencing going up. As they have looked at that neon orange snow fence throughout the end of last summer until now. Well it was covered by snow for most of the Winter so at least they didn't have to see it then.

God is so good all I have to do is look out my window and see the gorgeous world that he has created for us and the abundance of beauty and eventually the provision of food that he will give to us through our garden. Life is good!