Nicole’s son Rhett is involved with a great organization at his high school called Legacy Club. The tagline for this club is athletes committed to excellence.

Rhett is helping his soccer coach with a gift card drive for CASA of McHenry County. While they are doing an in-person drive on October 6, Rhett wanted to reach out to his travel sports teams in McHenry County, and provide a digital way to purchase the gift cards.

Linda and Nicole wanted to help facilitate this project with Rhett, and so together, they all created a temporary page on this website where they could use a PayPal account and help Rhett accomplish his goal. 

CASA of McHenry County is a remarkable not-for-profit organization.  CASA stands for Court Appointed Special Advocate. CASA trains volunteers to advocate in court for abused and neglected children. These trained Advocates then get appointed by the court  to be paired with a child during the child’s court case. The Advocate has a one-to-one relationship with the child throughout the case, and meets with the child twice per month.

This fundraiser is specifically targeting teens from age 13 – 21.  The teens are often the ones most forgotten in the foster care system and always appreciate a gift like this when their CASA Advocate visits them!

Visit the CASA of McHenry County website for more information, or to donate.

Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) of McHenry County is a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization and your donation is tax-deductible within the guidelines of U.S. law.

Just as Linda finishes the details on a new stand up desk, the Wall Street Journal publishes an article on the very subject. Are you reading this article sitting at your desk? How long have you been in your chair? Even if you don’t make the jump to creating a desk, it might get you thinking about moving a bit more.

Here are some quick facts:

• Higher calorie burn and better posture
• Medical studies have tied excessive sitting to increased obesity and other health problems because of factors including a drop in physical activity
• The human body is designed to stand, not sit. Standing is better for the back than sitting. It strengthens leg muscles and improves balance.

And a few resources:

• The Many Benefits of Standing At Your Desk, Harvard Business Review
• Stand Up While You Read This! The New York Times
• Those With A Desk Job Please Stand Up, The Washington Post

Linda works from home, and being closeted in a room did not appeal, so she decided to make her work station part of the living area. She wanted something that didn’t look too ultra modern. Ready-made stand-up desks were either way over budget or too big and bulky looking. And being an artist, she admits to enjoying the work of  building things with her own hands.

The step was to get a file cabinet, a needed accessory. She found a fantastic deal with a damaged floor model. Nicks are barely visible, and style looks great. Next was to decide on the counter top. The perfect economic and beautiful solution turned out to be from Ikea – butcher block counter top for only $60. When Linda went to pick it up, she found that it was damaged from being dropped on one end. It was not a problem to cut it down 6″, gaining a 30% discount. One coat of stain and 4 coats of poly, and it was ready.

I hope this was inspirational – stand up for a while!

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The experience of jungle trekking occurred on Nikki’s honeymoon to Central America in 2005. She and her husband found themselves high in the mountains talking to a shell asking for a beer. After an hour of looking way up to the bar for assistance and lots of scratchy wire sounds, they rock-paper-scissored to determine who would climb the rocks, returning what seemed another hour later to the luke warm pool panting really hard with two cold Belikins.

Was this just a first day fluke? No…it went on like this every single, married day. You wanna eat that remember for a lifetime chocolate mousse? Go climb three hundred rock-stairs and jump over a coral snake.  In retrospect, Nicole did note suspicious stares before their romantic stroll in the jungle. It took them through a head-tall grass path, included crossing a river, and concluded with climbing a steep, wet, mud cliff to a clay dirt road with military trucks zooming by to view Nicole sheepishly waving. How about the bike ride to the nearby resort for out-of-this-world ceviche fish tacos? Hahahaha. Look out for that ocelot!  Nice ruins…are there any rock stairs by chance with ropes like in Chichen Itza? …maybe this is another post, but the quest for excitement began to creep into all of the family vacations, and the endearment factor grew.  They were hooked.

Years later and with three little boys in tow, Nicole’s husband decided (after too many requests to go skiing with his friends) that these boys will know how to ski as a life skill.  He has learned to say, “I don’t ski,” rather than “I can’t ski,” just as we say “it doesn’t speak to me” instead of “I don’t like that.”  If you haven’t ever roller bladed, ice skated, water skied or cross country skied, then downhill skiing is even harder to pick up later in life.  Nicole can’t really figure out if she really enjoys skiing either, and to finish that debate, decided her first bucket list item of her life is to do the Most Difficult.  (Completing  a Black Diamond run would then make her an official skier, so she can say she did it, then choose to switch back to her first love of cross country skiing, with hopes to wrangle her husband into a couples’ hobby.) At this time, she continues to look forward to another season of downhill, building up the skill and nerve to actually try the black diamond.

The expensive sport seeks us out like a cowboy toting his elk rifle discovering an elkstravaganza on a spring cat-trail.  Nestled in the country, the town has an aura of niceness & seclusion. The visitors are global and the Ozments really don’t mind being nothing special, because everyone else is from someplace like Iran or Venezuela. They want to know more about their world, and enjoy they the brief conversations while shuffling like cattle through the lift lines.

Friends drove many hours to visit and give big hugs like no one else, because they are like family.  They also got the Colorado giggles (without actually partaking), which would usually happen at dinner doing something like a silliest face contest. (Which seven year old Wade won doing a blank stare and drooling.)

So in the end, what was the best part about Steamboat Springs skiing with their trademarked Champagne Powder snow and tree wells? While they are not equipped to answer that question because they grew up with Wilmot Mountain where ice is a special thing, they did leave Colorado with a suitcase full of thankfulness and Smartwool. Although you can’t see Nicole’s Smartwool, she is wearing it on her fashion diary of everyday outfits on Tumblr,  TheLastDancer. They left feeling really good about family time together and having new experiences. They also skied a lot. It is so pretty it makes you cry laughing. Colorado, for sure was a trip worth taking.

Nicole’s sister sent  an email with the subject interesting blog and book. It was a link to an author/blogger on parenting. Nicole  loves self help books, but is beginning to discover that one really needs to be in the mood for them.

She recalls one year many many years ago at Christmas being given a book called something like, How to Create a Life Worth Living. Ironically, today Nicole would so want to read a book like that, but at that time it felt like criticism. Last year, when she was reading a self-help book about relationship-first parenting, it made her husband feel that she thought something was wrong with their relationship.

Anyway, life quotes do inspire Nicole, and she is more open minded these days about recommended books. She will probably end up getting that book from the link her sister sent.

The quote written on the chalkboard above is from The One Minute Mother by Spencer Johnson, which Nicole devoured it in a minute. (ok three weeks) She still thinks back to that book and its advice. As much as she wanted what she had learned to effect her children, maybe they were not in the mood.

I admit, I was a little disillusioned about how much laundry would be a reality in my lifetime. For awhile I was feeling very uneasy, maybe a bit livid, with the huge amounts of time that were robbed from my life by laundry. Working as a freelance artist is about as impossible to fit into my day as it is to fit into this paragraph. Somehow, though I am starting to make it work.

I love to be at home. For the past ten years I have been working from home. Does working from home really work? Yes. Let’s take one thing at a time …starting with how to handle family laundry and working from home.

First, know that I will look back and weep for the sweet memories of little socks filled with dirt. Next, devise helpful efficiency plans to make the laundry easier, such as teaching your children to turn their clothes right-side-in and konmari(ing) clothes closets. (see previous post on Konmari).

For me it works best to clean my house one week and do a laundry marathon the next. During the cleaning week, I sort laundry by family member, spray stains and pull out what cannot wait a week to be worn &/or is a specialty delicate item. (such as a basketball uniform or my new black jeans) Then I do that laundry and put the sorted laundry back into a big rolling hamper, keeping it separated by sheets or towels. I try to right-side-in and pull out specialty items during my off laundry week before it gets to the laundry room. This reduces minutes in the laundry room, which is good for me.

When the race day arrives, I start early gathering additional dirty clothes and sorting them with the presorted clothes. I start the loads as quickly and early as possible. As the first load is starting, I put all the sorted clothes into a line-up of mesh collapsible hampers organized by person and things. Now anyone can participate in the marathon because loads just need to be put in, moved over and put back into baskets all clean. (Yes, not folded.–Hats off to people who can iron or fold their clothes when they are warm and dried just enough.) I honestly lose count of my loads (maybe 10?) and do them as fast as I can. In the evening, when the machine noise is done, I lay the clothes flat face down in piles separated by person and thing. Sometimes one child can have two piles because I keep school & sports uniforms in a special place. The next day, I fold the children’s clothes, sheets and towels and put them away.

I still feel like I do laundry everyday but at this point I am no longer drowning in it. Next, I started to use my time in laundry land to incorporate work somehow, by watching tutorials on Adobe, listening to podcasts, sketching a logo…etc. I often work on Skype with my business partner. I have realized that she can be buried in as much techie code as I am in clothes. We all have these piles. Life is messy. Try to figure out something that’s helpful to you, and use any possibility to move forward.

Working from home is often a mental balance of necessity. I shouldn’t feel guilty doing my own work even if the laundry is far from finished. My breaking point line to my husband is “it’s an impossible job!!!” I have to remind myself over and over that keeping up is the goal, and a family motto of ours is do your best. I also feel the need to mention that my husband, along with my children, did not dump the duty of the laundry on me. I work from home and so I took control of it. He is right on board helping and loves the efficiency of the schedule too.

My most recent breakthrough has been creating art where I am. Queenie Liao‘s sleeping baby art came about when she had three baby boys. Her work was impressionable to me. Somehow I have found fairness in the laundry piles by adding another layer of satisfaction in my life’s work. I set up a tripod and played with focus while I did this last laundry marathon. Maybe not quite the artist in her studio but I am working on it.

[addtoany]

Toy Story Lives!
(thumbnail is the clearer version of the pixelated photo to compare.)

Nicole’s mother came up with these little DIY Halloween ghosts and they are decorating both of their fall trees. We like them because they are friendly looking, hang nicely and really look like they are flying in the wind! They have lasted for a years and you don’t have to be careful about storing them. We get white foam packing material like this in the mail and we save it to make the ghosts. Find the center of the foam sheet and stuff the heads with anything really, like a dry cleaning bag. Next, tie the neck with fishing line and leave part of the string on one side long to tie to a tree branch. You can decorate the faces with felt eyes or we have also used duck tape. Finally, trim the edges of the bottom to make it look even and a little more like torn fabric. This project can be done with children because it is fast. For really little ones, pre-cut the eyes so they can simply be glued on. Happy Halloween!