Have you heard of this?

Have you heard of Mindbloom? I just learned about it last week and I think it's fantastic. It's a website where you set goals, determine what areas to focus on in your life, prioritize your time, and in doing so you create this adorable little tree. Each branch represents an area of your life you feel is important, and you can start out with three branches. Mine, for example, are Relationships (family), Spirituality, and Health. (Other choices on the list are Career, Lifestyle, Finances, Creativity, or Leisure.) You set simple, attainable goals within these branches, and as you accomplish them you earn more "seeds" (points) which you can use to set further goals, add leaves to your tree (divisions of your branches), and additional branches.

They give you lots of ideas for goals, such as "drink at least 8 glasses of water each day," "take some time to listen to one family member today," or "spend some time today in prayer," for example. You can choose your own customized goals as well.

Yellow/brown leaves are areas that need more attention; green leaves are healthy. For the record, the image above is NOT my tree; mine's all cute and green today! :)

There is also a social-networking aspect; you can invite friends and have a whole forest full of other people's trees, for group support of accomplishing your goals, I suppose. And you can link to your facebook account if you choose to. For me, most of my goals are more personal... but if you did want to have a forest full of friends, you can keep selected branches of your tree private.

I have had fun with this so far (the past week or so). What I like about this is that it forces you to start small; you can't set too many goals at once -- which for many people could be a set-up for failure. I don't know if it's human nature or just my nature, but I have loved visiting my tree every day to check off goals I've accomplished, however small, and have Mindbloom tell me what a great job I'm doing. It may sound silly but it's working for me!

Speaking of being old...

The kids & I just came home from our Tuesday "Summer Movie." We've been enjoying a different movie every week, with two more to go. The last movie of the season is Muppets From Space, and I was explaining to Zoe that every summer they choose a blend of current movies with a few older movies mixed in; and that the Muppet movies were made when I was young. So then Zoe said,

"Oh! So they had movies in COLOR when you were a kid?"

Good grief, child!

Not too old after all!

We've had a little "retro" toy-playing around here lately... a delightful reminder to me that although my kids ARE indeed growing up too fast, they're still young children. {hooray!}

Zoe and Lucy each got a baggie full of homemade play-doh from their church teacher today, and you wouldn't believe how excited they were about it. They've been playing with it for almost two hours now.

For reasons unknown, Noah decided two or three days ago to get out his old collection of matchbox cars... which hadn't been played with for years! He put together the Hot Wheels track that he got for his 3rd or 4th birthday (shown behind him in the picture below) and started systematically racing each of his cars to determine the fastest one of the bunch. The girls have been involved too; picking their favorites and cheering on the racecars. I think Noah has been pleased to have the girls playing "boy games" with him for a change!

Now today Noah and Molly are taking the building projects to the next level, getting out the train set Noah got when he was two. While we have gotten rid of several old toys over the years, I'm glad we've hung onto these "classic" toys that the kids have rediscovered this weekend.

Back to School Haircuts, 2010

{Before}

{After}

And even better news, last night I got an email from Snip-its which contained a $5 coupon... so we paid only $5 for each haircut! Considering that they are normally $16.95, that was a super good deal. Each of the girls LOVES their new hair!

And just for fun...

2009 back-to-school haircuts

2008 back-to-school haircuts

July 12th.

Today is a special day.

If you wonder why, you can read about it here.

Hungry Tchaikovsky

The other day a friend of mine brought over these small plastic busts of famous composers for me to possibly use during piano lessons. I had them lined up on the kitchen counter all day, and at one point Lucy stopped to study them. After a few minutes she said, "This one looks bored, this one looks mad, this one looks like he's watching a show, this one looks sad, and this one looks hungry."

I thought it was so funny, I had her repeat it so I could write down her descriptions. When I wrote "watching TV" for Chopin, she corrected me, "No Mom, it looks like he's watching A SHOW."

So there you have it.
I hope you've had a lovely weekend.

Cooking Class

I didn't take any pictures of yesterday's Cooking Class. It was all about EGGS... we talked about different uses for eggs, what's good about eggs, how to prepare eggs, etc. Then, for the big exciting moment, the kids each got to practice cracking some eggs. They loved that and surprisingly, they were all really good at it! They each cracked 3 and out of all 12 eggs total, only one had a bit of shell in it, one yolk broke, and none were catastrophes. I was prepared to let them crack a lot more than three each, but they didn't seem to need the practice!

I showed them how to separate an egg but none of them tried that. In fact, Molly was totally grossed out watching me separate one. Silly. Since most of their yokes were intact, I scooped them out and we used some of the whites to make some cocoa meringues. They loved watching the slimy egg whites transform in my Kitchenaid into smooth glossy peaks... and then into cookies! None of them loved the cookies once they were cooked (I guess meringues are an acquired taste... I love them!) but they DID love that I used some of the other eggs they'd cracked to make french toast for dinner.

All in all, another successful cooking lesson.

I tweet.

Frequently I'm cooking/baking and I discover some little trick to make something tastier or easier to prepare, and I think "I should do a post about this on my recipe blog." Well my recipe blog is really supposed to be for recipes, and Twitter was MADE for short tips, so it was only a matter of time before I started Tweeting...

Come see at http://twitter.com/saracooksalot and if you have a Twitter account you can "follow" me. If you're not on Twitter, you can just go to that link any time you want and read whatever it is I've been tweeting about.

As for the name... my gmail account is saraplayspiano, so in keeping with the tradition of talking about myself in 3rd person present tense, my twitter account is saracooksalot (my first few choices were already taken).

And I do like the little blue birdies.

The boys' trip

While my girls and I were in San Diego, the boys took a camping trip to Colorado. If you look past the fact that Noah refuses to ever make a nice, normal face for the camera, you can see that they were in a very beautiful place!

they say they sat in this spot for hours, enjoying the view.
silly faces but very pretty surroundings

dinner!
Looks like they had a great time! They're already talking about when they'll be able to go again.

It's so beautiful up there.

How was your 4th?

Look at this flour sack towel made by my very talented Mom! I've been enjoying drying my hands on it for the past week or so :)

We had a tasty Mexican food dinner last night with some friends, and we found some fireworks for later. Our "regular" fireworks show at MCC didn't happen this year (sad) so we found a show in Gilbert; not as impressive but still lots of fun. It cooled down yesterday and the weather was actually quite pleasant during the fireworks; we were only sweating due to running races across the park to pass the time waiting for the fireworks to start. For the record (according to Noah's stopwatch), I am exactly as fast as Molly. Who is eight and who has legs about 2/3 the length of mine. Oh well.

The fourth of July is always fun isn't it? I hope you had a wonderful day too! Oh and also for the record, our closing hymn at church was the Star Spangled Banner, and I bawled all the way through the last verse. Embarrassing since I had to get up to say the closing prayer right afterwards.

Have a great Monday!

Noah's party

Noah had a swim party for his 10th birthday. It was a super hot day so swimming was the perfect activity!

The girls did a little lounging...

Everybody did tricks for the camera...

Look at these crazy back flips!

And of course "who can make the biggest splash" contests.

I made a cake that tied in our "theme" of swimming/water (details here). Noah loved it.

Having a birthday party on a holiday weekend in the summer means you may not have as many guests as you thought; some of Noah's friends were out of town but a smaller group just meant less chaos & less mess :) Everyone had a fun afternoon.

Little Fish

Here's Molly in her 25-meter butterfly race at the kids' most recent swim meet. She's in the lane to the left; mostly in the center of the screen. She got 2nd place in this one. Noah and Molly are both doing well in swim team this summer; it's been fun to see their improvement and to go to the meets every week together as a family.