Making Memories

Wordless Wednesday: True Winter at Last

Amanda — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 04:14:26 +0000

Wordless Wednesday: “Winter” at the Park

Amanda — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:09:23 +0000

Quick Takes: 1/6/2012

Amanda — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:06:23 +0000

— 1 —

We had a lovely Christmas this year. JR, Gabriel, Joshua, and I enjoyed Christmas day together as a family. JR’s sister and her family visited from North Carolina for a few days during the week after Christmas, and we celebrated Christmas with my family on New Year’s Day. We really enjoyed being able to spread out the celebrations and not feel like we were rushing through the holidays this year.

— 2 —

It’s not really my news, but my brother and sister-in-law’s first baby (a girl) was born on Sunday, December 11. When I married JR, I automatically became an aunt to his older sister’s children. I’m the oldest in my family though, so this is the first of my siblings to have a baby.

— 3 —

I finished the coursework for my e-business degree last month. Unless I change my mind in the future, I am officially finished with the college stage of my life. Anyone looking for someone with my background and life experiences for work in e-business and/or social media?

— 4 —

Since four takes catches me up on the past several weeks, and I have other deadlines to work on, I’m going to take my leave at only four takes this week!

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

Fifth Blogiversary

Amanda — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:23:57 +0000

Five years ago today, I started this blog. In those days, I was a newly wed, and expecting my first child. I stopped qualifying as a newlywed years ago, and have two children now: a four year old and a two year old. Amongst all the events of my life (pregnancy, birth, life with a newborn, life with a toddler, moving, job loss, and more) over these past five years, my blog has remained a constant.

Here’s to five years as a blogger, and, God willing, a future that contains many, many more!

Wordless Wednesday: Merry Christmas from My Family to You

Amanda — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 03:09:10 +0000

Xmas is for Christmas

Amanda — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 20:27:27 +0000

Every year around this time, I’ll come in contact with someone complaining about the use of Xmas instead of Christmas and how it is directly related to the secularization of Christmas as society seeks to remove God (and Christ) from most aspects of public life. In reality, Xmas is a legitimate Christian abbreviation for Christmas. Χριστος (Khristos) is the Greek word for Christ. Yes, the Greek alphabet causes it to look radically different from our English version, but the pronunciation is quite similar, and it is easy to hear that our “Christ” is derived from the Greek Χριστος.

It is not often that I use Xmas in a manner that others are going to see. I am probably most likely to pen a shopping list that reads, “pick up JR’s Xmas gift,” in a hurry. It would probably appear next to “buy O.J.” and “go to USPS.” A couple of ways in which you may see me use Xmas in real life are on Twitter or in text messages. The number of characters count in these situations, and I will use Xmas instead of Christmas if it means one cohesive tweet or text message instead of two separate parts of the same idea. Unless I am in a super rush, I will probably never write someone a letter (or even an email) in which I use Xmas instead of Christmas. And I would certainly never say Xmas instead of Christmas. Xmas is exactly what it is: an abbreviation for Christmas. Proper use of an abbreviation is fine with me.

Project Idea: Christmas Thank You Cards

Amanda — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 17:33:54 +0000

I always try to send thank you cards out in recognition of gifts or kind deeds, but sometimes those thank you cards do not make it in the mail quite as promptly as I would hope to get them there. This year, I have Christmas thank you cards ready and waiting, personalized with our family name on them:

Magi Gifts Brown Thank You Card

Click here to browse our popular thank you card designs.

View the entire collection of cards.

With such handsome, personalized stationary, I’m really looking forward to getting our thank you cards out the first chance that I get this year.

Do you send thank yous, Christmas or otherwise? Have you found that nice stationary products make you more likely to correspond via non-electronic means?

* I will receive a $10 Shutterfly credit in exchange for sharing this project, but all opinions shared within this post are my own.

Wordless Wednesday: Gabriel, Joshua and Meeko

Amanda — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 13:00:47 +0000

NaBloPoMo 2011: Complete

Amanda — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 04:30:56 +0000

I’m calling it: I completed NaBloPoMo 2011.

Sure, I realize that there’s technically tomorrow left, but I already have a Wordless Wednesday post set to auto-publish. Thus, I think it’s close enough to call it now.

I think that I probably ‘phoned it in’ more days than not this month, but I always enjoy NaBloPoMo because it forces me to come up with something, no matter how half thought-out or incomplete, and hit publish. The rest of the year, I spend days working on a post, that never gets finished quite the way I want it to, so it stays in my drafts folder, waiting for me to get back to it one day when I find the time. There are several posts that I’ll probably never publish, simply because I’ve waited so long that whatever I was going to say doesn’t really matter/isn’t pertinent anymore. Every year that I’ve done NaBloPoMo, however, paints a better-than-average picture on this blog of what my life is actually like, rather than the meticulously composed posts that I only manage to pull off occasionally. My life, it’s not actually always meticulously thought-out, folks. I don’t want you to think that I always phone it in, either – but some days, I do feel lucky to pull off the bare minimum. Like this blog, my life falls somewhere between the two. That’s okay. It’s the point that me, and my blog, are both at right now.

SciFi

Amanda — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 04:50:57 +0000

Prior to getting married, I wasn’t one to watch much television. My parents never had any sort of cable, and monitored television viewing pretty closely in my youth. Throughout high school and college, the largest time commitment that I usually ever came up with was a movie here and there. Sometime after getting married, I remember JR and I watching an episode of Matlock most nights on the Hallmark channel, but I still never really got into television shows.

Enter motherhood. Having a newborn to feed gave me more time than ever before to sit and watch television shows. We also got DVR service around this time, partially because of my aforementioned sitting around nursing a baby most of the time. We watched Gillmore Girls in rapid succession during this time, and were also hooked on Scrubs. I became a Chuck fan at some point in time as well. When I was pregnant for Joshua, I became a fan of Mad Men (I’ve always enjoyed historical fiction – and even, I, as a non-stylish person enjoy it for that reason – also, the bits of marketing in the show mean something to me after taking marketing courses), and introduced JR to Friends. Also, one of our current favorites: How I Met Your Mother.

The genre of television that I probably never would have found, left to my own devices, is SciFi. Somehow, I made it to adulthood having never really watched Star Wars. Since Star Wars seemed to have been pretty universally loved OR hated, I was pretty sure that I just fell into the latter group, and that Science Fiction just wasn’t for me. I have JR to thank for my introduction to SciFi. First, he got me hooked on Warehouse 13, which is another of my favorite television series running currently. Also, it’s SyFy’s most popular series ever, so it may be worth checking out. It incorporates a lot of steampunk; which JR and I enjoy. At first, I thought that Warehouse 13 was a unique SciFi series, and that I wouldn’t like others, but I was wrong. Fact: I have not seen a SciFi series that I do not like, though I admit that my exposure to such shows is relatively low.

Star Trek: The Next Generation? Good.

Firefly? Good.

Stargate SG-1? Good.

Eureka? Good.

I’ve put some thought into it, and I believe that SciFi is particularly good, in part, because they aren’t limited by the normal parameters. For most television series to be really good, they must do something differently from the others out there. How I Met Your Mother does remind me a lot of Friends, but I enjoy the aspect of it being the ‘love story in reverse,’ of already knowing the end of the story and learning little pieces of the puzzle, one at a time. Unlike most of the sitcoms and dramas that I was familiar with, SciFi doesn’t have any real limits to what it can do to achieve this. Secret government warehouse agents that gather artificats with some historical and/or literary link, that would wreak havoc on the world if such agents weren’t risking their lives to stop them? In that world, of course H.G. Well’s time machine and Lewis Carroll’s looking glass exist, and Harriet Tubman’s thimble possesses a special power. I’m not saying that I do not enjoy seeing the everyday stories faced in sitcoms and dramas, just that I enjoy the previously-unexplored world of SciFi a lot. I do not dream/remember my dreams very often, but, as JR pointed out: reading and watching SciFi makes for some very interesting dreams. It encourages our minds to consider previously-unexplored possibilities. Afterall, isn’t that what most of the great minds of the past, those people that we celebrate today for their innovations, did? Motherhood has likely stunted my brain, at least for the time being, beyond interesting discourse of such things, but I’d like to think that the fact that I think about such things will help me encourage my children to greater creativity.