Five for Friday

Welcome to my first "Five for Friday" post for 2016!

1. Thanks so much for everyone's encouraging words about Austin getting his driver's license!

And, it has been great!

On evenings, when I'm making supper, I've been able to ask him to go and pick up

his siblings if they've stayed after school for art club, basketball practice, choir, etc.,

which has been wonderful!

And the other night, he took the car to youth, so I didn't have to leave my house at 9:30pm

and go and pick him up.

It's awesome!

2. For the past few months, I haven't been reading very much.

But when I was subbing at the middle school, I picked up a copy of the book

 Wonder by R.J. Palacio and was hooked from the get-go.

I got a copy at my local library to read and loved it!

I noticed that the author had another book called 365 Days of Wonder and picked

it up at my library yesterday.

It's filled with wonderful quotes about kindness, etc. -- one for every day of the year.

Sage found the ones for our birthdays and I just loved the one for mine,

so I decided to put it up on the chalkboard over our piano.

3. So, I made some goals for the new year...

One of them is to test for my 3rd Degree black belt in Taekwondo in May.

And, in order to achieve this goal and feel great about it, I also made a goal to lose 30 lbs.

I've cut out sugar & deep-fried foods and am keeping my calories below 1200 each day.

I'm using an app called Lose It to track my calories and so far, so good.

I weighed myself yesterday and I'm down 6.5 lbs. :)

4. Our town's festival of the arts is coming up this spring,

so we've been busy selecting pieces to perform:

voice for Sage, poems for Jonah and Sage

and piano for Jonah and Sage.

Jonah and I will be performing a duet of the Mission Impossible theme song

and Sage and I will play Amazing Grace together. 

5. And lastly, I have a card to share today that I made for

the Muse Card Club Challenge #149, which was to be inspired by this card by Tracey McNeely:

Sage's voice teacher recently lost her mother, so I decided to make a sympathy card for her.

I diecut my spring moss and white cardstock using Mama Elephant's Femme Frames.

I stamped the flowers using Papertrey Ink's Brushed Blooms.

I used a paintbrush dipped in watered-down ink to add some detail to the smaller yellow flowers.

I stamped the sentiment using Reverse Confetti's Lots to Say stamp set.

Thanks for looking!