Our Cozy Little Nest: February 2012

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Valentine's Day provided a great occasion for holiday crafting. For Simms's valentines, we gathered up old broken crayons and recycled them into heart-shaped crayons for his classmates. Simms really enjoyed passing them out to the kids and teachers at school.

Fun and easy to make: break up old crayons & bake in silicone molds

Package them up

Pass out to to all your valentines!

The next project was to break out the old sewing machine and make valentine shirts for Simms, Jasper, Roscoe, HoneyB and Turtle. Thank goodness for the seam ripper. Best 0.99 cents I've spent in a while.

Making use of old fabric scraps

Simms, The Heartbreaker

Jasper, The Little Heartthrob

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Coughs. Sniffles. Sneezes.

For the last month, we've all been battling some type of cold. Simms had an ear infection in both ears causing a fever that reached 104 degrees! He was simply miserable. He stayed home from school for 4 days - napped, read books, curled up in our laps, whimpered, and watched episodes of Curious George on my iPad.

Our poor little guy

Being sick is no fun.

Fortunately, his antibiotics kicked in quickly, and he's on the mend. Unfortunately, I have come down with a sinus infection and am also antibiotics. Despite our best preventive efforts and the two bottles of GermX we've been pouring all over ourselves, baby Jasper has picked up our cold. I guess with all of us coughing, sniffling and sneezing, he didn't stand much of a chance at dodging it. Hopefully, by next week we'll all be in better shape.

The mini pharmacy on our countertop.

And this isn't even all of the medications we've been taking....

Trek Kelly's "The Good In America" Project

Greg's cousin, Trek, spent one evening in Jackson, Mississippi this week. This is the first time I've met one of Greg's cousins. Trek is spending the year driving a 1969 van across 50 states in 50 weeks to explore, share, discover and celebrate What is Good in America. It's an adventurous, inspiring, and ambitious project. During this trip, he publishes an online weekly newsletter, "The Sunday Evening Post," posts short videos and interviews on You Tube, plants apple seeds along his journey, and organizes and participates in "Saturday Help Mobs" which volunteer at local foodbanks, schools, shelters, etc. While in Long Beach, MS, he organized a team of folks to pick up litter and trash along hwy 90 and the beach.
You can check it all out by visiting his Good in America webpage and his project's Facebook page.

Tuesday evening, we all gathered at Barry and Barbara's for a delicious meal that Barbara put together. We told Trek and Jenny about some of the people, places, and things that made Mississippi special - delicious cuisine (fried catfish, hush puppies, fried chicken, hot tamales) literary treasures (Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, Willie Morris, Margaret Walker Alexander, William Faulkner), historic homes (Rowan Oak, Jefferson Davis House), musicians ( Elvis, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson), Civil Rights sites, Dixie National Rodeo, Highway 61 Blues Highway, delta landscapes, cypress swamps, etc....

It was nice to meet more of Greg's family and to see these cousins together after so many years.

Greg, Trek and Simms at Barry and Barbara's house.
Simms loved playing with Trek!
(Simms looks scared in photo above b/c we were like the paparazzi with our cameras)

A picture of the van that Trek's cruising around in (from his webpage)
I couldn't get a photo of it parked in Barry and Barbara's carport because it was night time...
Safe travels, Trek!