Sometimes I lie but I have good intentions

As I mentioned in the previous post, UpTake is a hosting a contest.
Anyone can enter.
The deadline's tonight at midnight.

The prize is a spa getaway in Napa Valley at Silverado Resort for four people.

I admit it, I'd sell my children and run over girl scouts for a chance to win.

See, let me tell it like it is.
People come out of the woodwork for contests.
People with sick kids, hard knock lives and woe-is-me stories.

Do you know how hard it is to compete with Sally Sob Story and Henrietta Handicapped and Tanya Toenail Cancer?

Well, I only have one arm.
And one leg.
And I have fifteen kids (all adopted, of course)...that I home school.

In my free time, I serve soup at the homeless shelter...with my one arm, while balancing on my one leg.

I have no hair, because I donated it all to make wigs for chemo patients.
And I donated all my blood to sick people.
I even had all my teeth pulled to give to toothless people.

Why wait til I'm dead to take my organs?
I have a few I don't need...
I've chopped off a few toes for charity & donated a butt cheek to a good cause.

I recycle, volunteer, teach people to read and care for old people.
I bring food to the hungry in third world countries.

No one's more deserving than me.


So, I win.
Right?

Simply Savoring Life at Silverado

We all need to escape life's responsibilities and pressures every now and then.
We all need to stop and breathe in fresh air.
We all need to take a moment to relax and savor life.

UpTake is offering up a contest with Silverado Resort to one lucky blogger and the three people she chooses to accompany her.

I'm not more needy or more deserving then the next person.
I'm just your average person, wanting to get away.
To explore something new.
To take the time to remember why I love life and what I want out of it.
To spend time with those I love.

Who would I take with me?

My sister, who spent most nights of our childhood in my bed, surrounded by stuffed animals, listening to the bizarre bedtime stories I made up. She understands me better than anyone. She knows me in my entirety. She moved halfway across the country, and I miss her!

My mother, who inspires and amazes me. Who taught me I could do anything. Who showed me to approach life and everything in it with all I've got. She's someone I will always respect and admire and strive to be like.

My grandmother, who has always loved me unconditionally, and who I will forever associate with creaking porch swings, singing and the crickets of summer. Someone I'm still getting to know, even now, and treasuring every second.

These three women are part of my past, present and future. They've shaped me, and I've shaped them. We're intrinsically intertwined, and I want to savor life with them at Silverado.

Ketchup, Holiday Drama & a Contest

I've been spending all weekend playing catch-up (ketchup. hehe)
I've been catching up on sleep.
I've been catching up on blogs.
I've been catching up on laundry.
I've been catching up on spending time with my boys.

I've played a million games of Mario Kart, racing my boys.
Now my thumb hurts.

We celebrated Forced-Love Day as a family by hanging out at home all day with each other.
Playing games, watching movies, just being together.

My husband, Texas Homeboy, surprised me with an extremely thoughtful gift.
Our relationship has been rocky lately.
Normally, if I even get a gift, he's a last minute gift-giving kind of guy.
But two days BEFORE Valentine's, I came home from work to find he had bought and set up an external hard drive for my computer!

The best gift. JUST what I needed.
My computer was bogged down with thousands of photos and moving slow.
It was a thoughtful and wonderful gift.

I was touched.

Speaking of photos, UpTake is having a photo contest. You could win $250. Check it out!

Now on to the drama.
Remy, my 7 yr old, had to make Valentines for his whole class, of course,
But, Donny, my 12 yr old, is now in middle school and this is the first year ever he didn't have to make Valentines for the whole class.
Except, Friday, in school, his English teacher made them all make Valentines in-class. And they had to say something nice to each student.
Donny is respectful to all his teachers. And a good student. But this teacher sometimes drives him nuts because he feels like she treats them like children...young, stupid children.

And my son wrote down on one kid's Valentine, "Thanks for messing with Mrs. English Teacher."
And of course, the teacher saw this.
and pulled him out of class to talk to him.
And then called me.

What I've learned from this?
My smart, respectful son can make stupid decisions occasionally.

Now, let me leave you with this for now.
We've discovered our sweet Annie doesn't like stickers on her head.

Wicked Cool

Question: What do you get when you cross a Star Wars Storm Trooper
with a Giant Whoopee Cushion?

Answer: My children.

Question: What do you get when you mix Sunshine and Lemonade?





Answer: An awesome blog with a Wicked Cool contest hosted by the lovely Kat.

Kat is hilarious, witty, and wonderful and has an amazing blog.
She knows Latin and lives in Georgia.
She loves to travel.
She's an avid reader.
She's my bloggy BFF!

She's giving away prizes once a week...for TEN WEEKS!

How cool is that?! GO CHECK HER OUT!

Are you Up on Uptake?

Regarding yesterday's photo post, you guys are HILARIOUS!

I love some of the wonderfully creative ideas you came up with regarding that picture.

I wish I had an answer for you with what was going on in it,
but no one in my family seems to have any idea.

My mom has more old photos, so I'll see if I can get another one scanned sometime soon.


* * *


Next, let me announce the contest winner from last week.
(I know, I don't know what took me so long!)



I had planned to do a cute hat drawing video with the kids, but my printer ran out of ink, the kids wouldn't cooperate and I lost my desire to do it.

Long story short, I used that darn random number generator, adding in those of you with the extra entries. It was complicated, probably unnecessarily so!

Without further rambling, the winner of the 11" brand new fry pan and jambalaya mix is...

Scargosun!


And, as a bonus, I'm giving away a packet of jambalaya mix to:

Sassy Stephanie & Kimba!


Winners email me at rhea@tx.rr.com with your addresses.


* * *


Now, as you know, I've been job searching.
And, I've found some free-lance writing jobs and some blogging work,
but nothing full time.

I'm seriously thinking about applying to Target!!
I need something with good health insurance.


One of the places I am blogging part time for is called Uptake.
It's a travel information search engine, and I'm super excited!
I'll be posting about fun things to do and see in Texas...and possibly other places I've visited.

What I would love from you, is to click on over to Uptake and comment on posts with my name. Today...and any time you feel like it!
I don't get much comment love over there yet, and I've gotten spoiled with it over here.
You guys rock!!



I'll leave you with these photos of my pink streaks for now.

Natural lighting,
no photo editing,
no makeup,
crazy angles
weird facial expressions, and
I'm not even sure I brushed my crazy, frizzy hair.

It's Rhea Au natural con rosa!!
(I think I just mixed French & Spanish...and probably not even correctly)

and a plea for comment love at Uptake!!

Thanks!!

Why are there flowers in their pants?

My mother recently learned a lot about her family roots.
Someone traced them from Alabama back to Scotland in the 1600s.
How cool is that?

She also was given a lot of old, old, old family photos to scan and preserve.

We came across one that completely boggled our minds.

The man on the left is my great-great-grandfather, and I have no idea what he's doing.

So, I've decided to call on you guys to help me out.
What's going on in this photo?
I'm at a total loss.
It's so cool, but completely confusing.

Is that Romance I smell...or something else?

Romance is not often in the air around here,
and on the rare occasion it drifts by,
it is immediately flushed out and dissipated
by much more noxious boy fragrances that rule this house.


My husband is an attorney who works long hours,
my boys are both in sports, which take up a lot of time,
and my elderly father lives with us.
All those ingredients do not a romantic environment make.


So, when my mom offered to watch the boys and told us to look up romantic hotels,
I threw the children from our moving car and sped out of town leaped at the chance.

We ended up deciding on a bed & breakfast in Fredericksberg, Texas,
a delightful small town settled by German Americans in the 1800's
that is now a popular Central Texas destination for bed and breakfasts, abundant hunting, fishing, antique stores, museums, the German influence in the form of bakeries, restaurants, stores, and peaches.

My husband and I had big plans. We checked into our B&B, and then headed out walking to browse antique stores and have dinner at the famous Fredericksberg Brewing Company.

It was wonderful to be kid-free, work-free and just plain old FREE to do what we wanted.
As night fell, we headed back to our quaint little romantic B&B
to test out the large hot tub surrounded by candles.




As we stripped our clothes off, turned out the lights, lit the candles and poured in the bubbles,
I began to feel a little sick to my stomach.
I tried to ignore it.
This was our moment.
Our romantic shining moment that had to be perfect.

As we climbed in, giggling as we bumped and slid into the tub, I was reminded why I loved this man, and how he was still the 13 yr old boy I'd fallen in love with,
albeit grown up and hairier.

We held hands, locked eyes, and leaned in for a kiss...
that was interrupted by my sudden urge to vomit.

EVERYWHERE.

It kind of killed the mood.
And so that night, in our big four posted canopied bed, my husband slept like a baby



while I cradled the toilet and slept on the bathroom floor.

And the entire car ride home was spent clutching a bowl and moaning in agony.

It was not the trip we'd planned, but romance had been in the air, briefly,
and we clung to that memory
and laughed about it for years to come.

Even those intended-romantic-resulting-in-non-romantic moments strengthen the love and bond of a marriage and life together.

Life experiences that make up our quilt of memories.

What are your more memorable romantic or non-romantic moments?

Not your average, ordinary day

Today is a BIG day. It's a celebration!!

It's the SITS BLOGATHON!!

To me, this is a day to show my love for a group that has brought together bloggers and formed a wonderful community where we can find support and blogging fun.

For you, this is an opportunity to check them out and WIN GREAT PRIZES! The SITS girls will be giving away awesome gifts every hour. All you have to do to win is leave a comment. Because that's what this group is about, leaving comments and supporting our fellow bloggers.

I have found so many wonderful blogs through SITS.

The two founders of SITS, Tiffany and Heather, are on my blogroll now, and I read them daily. Tiffany has The R Family Diaries and Heather has Mindless Junque.
They are inspiring and funny.








If I hadn't joined SITS I might have never met Lula of Lulaville or Cristin of Tiptoeing Through the Tulips or Insane Mama of Help, I have a Teenager! And they are all fellow bloggers I read daily and just adore!! They seriously ROCK!

and, without SITS, I might not have discovered The Monogram Chick.
You see, the SITS girls have giveaways EVERY WEEK.
and support bloggers who have ESTY shops and make their own stuff.



I bought a car decal from Monogram chick.
She's got an awesome shop.

My blog was a featured blog of the day at one point, and the comment love I received that day was amazing, incredible and so much fun!

I ended up with new readers and new blogs to discover.

And I received this cute badge to display on my site:

So if you have a spare moment today, head over to The Secret Is In The Sauce, because that's where I'm going to be...and you might win something. No matter what, I guarantee you'll find something or someone you like just by looking.

En Passant

It's origins go back two thousand years ago to India.

Each piece has a special stylized ability to move.

It's a game of strategy.


What am I talking about?




The Game of Chess.




My father taught my how to play when I was 10.
I became a chess dork and participated in some tournaments.

I passed on the love to one of my sons...and will teach the other son soon.

I used to play online at Red Hot Pawn, which was a lot of fun.




In the game of chess there is a move called en passant, a surprise move where the conditions have to be just right for a pawn to move in a unique way and capture a piece by moving past it.





And, as a surprise, I'm going to try to pass it on two of my loves (books and chess)
to YOU...

I'm giving away this book I just finished reading.
It's a book of strategy, historical fiction, romance, mystery and intrigue.

Katherine Neville's debut novel is a postmodern thriller set in 1972 ... and 1790. In the 20th century, Catherine Velis is a computer expert with a flair for music, painting, and chess who, on her way to Algeria at the behest of the accounting firm where she is employed, is invited to take a mysterious moonlighting assignment: recover the pieces of an old chess set missing for centuries.

In the midst of the French Revolution, a young novice discovers that her abbey is the hiding place of a chess set, once owned by the great Charlemagne, which allows those who play it to tap into incredible powers beyond the imagination. She eventually comes into contact with the major historical figures of the day, from Robespierre to Napoleon, each of whom has an agenda.

The sequel is due out in a couple of weeks:

TO ENTER:

Leave me a comment tell me if you know how to play & who taught you.
What your favorite move? Or favorite piece?
If you know nothing about chess, then just say hi.

This giveaway ends tonight at midnight, Pacific time.

The Fine Art of Bribery

My boys starting learning the value of money from a very young age. We didn't grow up with a money tree in the backyard or a gold-filled underground vault in Gringotts, so my children figured out pretty quickly that money came from our wallets, and that to get that money into their grimy little palms, they had to work for it.



Maybe we should have taken more of the Capital One approach and set up a system, logical and with plenty of financial planning...but the system we settled into instead was bribery.

It started with potty training.

I set the ground rules. "If you tee tee in the potty, I'll give you a quarter. If you poopoo in the potty, I'll give you a dollar." I was desperate. A couple of weeks until pre-school started, where diapers weren't allowed, and nothing else had worked.

$20 later, we no longer needed diapers. It was worth it. For both us and them.



Elementary school honed this way of thinking into their constantly networking and newly sprouting neural pathways when we started paying them for good grades. We rewarded them a dollar an "A."

Our boys, they're so smart, they started making all A's.




Now they are eleven and six years old. Good grades still apply for earning money, as do chores and trips to the grocery store.

Here's my grocery store policy. "If you don't throw coffee beans, hit each other with the cart or hurt each other, but instead help me out and behave, then you can each have seventy-five cents to get cheap, plastic toys from the quarter machine when we're leaving."

It works.

My boys have worked hard for their money by going in the potty, making good grades and behaving in public. They have learned the value of money and the fine art of bribery.

"Mama, if we pick up the dog poop in the backyard, will you pay us $20?" Oh, yeah, baby.

Then their grandmother comes to visit from out of town and gives them each $100 bills.

Wait a second, no freebees!! This ruins everything...no, wait, I get it. She's bribing them to look forward to her visits...to ensure fun time and love. Ok, cool, I get it, no problem, bribery is still alive and well in this household.

It even works on me. I wrote this whole post in hopes of winning an iPhone from Capital One and Parent Bloggers. Go check it out and do your best to get one too. :o)



Sidenote: My boys do save up their money for those items they want and can't wait for Christmas or birthdays to get. And they are so proud of themselves for buying it on their own. A sense of pride that just handing them things doesn't bring. It's worth it.

Awesome SITS Giveaway!

It's a Cricut Expressions.
This thing does it all.
Scrapbooking
Vinyl Lettering
School Projects
The list goes on and on!
The Cricut Expressions is a must-have! Go to this site to find out how you could win one!

Monogram Chick & SITS

The SITS girls are having a contest again!



They have the BEST giveaways ever. This week they are giving away monogrammed stamps from Monogram Chick.

Monogram Chick has some of THE CUTEST stuff I've ever seen! Everything from unique and trendy travel mugs (great holiday gifts for the kids' teachers) to adorable backpacks. ALL OF IT MONOGRAMMED!

This week's prize is AWESOME... especially with the holiday's approaching. How would you like to stamp your Holiday cards with this:


OR This:


Yep, it's a personalized address stamp. I would LOVE one of these. But, I'm sharing in the excitement and letting you know about the contest too. To earn an extra entry. hehe

Go check out SITS and Monogram Chick!

Texas Word Tangle Summer Giveaway

SURPRISE!!!!

I've decided to host my very first, blog GIVEAWAY!!! I'm new at this, so bear with me. First of all, you want to know what I'm giving away, right? Well, here is the bulk of it, displayed by my helpful assistant, Remy.

Let's get closer, shall we, and see better what colorful fun stuff I have in store for you.

Yes, that's a cowboy hat, a brightly striped tote bag, a rainbow photo album, a patchwork journal, bright pink notepads, glittery gel pens and some colorful jewelry.

Here I am modeling the hat. (Excuse my frizzy, unbrushed hair. It's clean, freshly washing, I promise.)

I wore this cowboy ten years ago in my first rodeo where I did the barrel racing on horseback. My horse, an Appaloosa named Indian Runner, slipped on the last barrel, but we pulled it out and made it back to the gate in record time. My hat flew off and into the stands, and the guy who caught it brought it to me after the event. It was Brad Pitt!! I won but I barely noticed because Brad Pitt was beside me. I was given a trophy and a huge shiny belt buckle. That hat is special to me and it's been good luck to me ever since...

Ok, just kidding. That was all a tall tale. Here in Texas, we like to tell stories.

Not lies, mind you...stories.

Ahem, well, moving on. Did you notice this little guy next to the tote bag? Yep, a gift card to one of my favorite places, TARGET!

And, while this is a fabulous amount of stuff I'm litterally throwing at ya, I can't promise I might not add a little to it when the time comes to mail it off. Because I LOVE to give gifts. And, as this is my premier giveaway, I've gotta do it right.

Now, there are some rules. And, because I love a challenge, they're a little complicated. You see, in order to be entered for this contest, you have to go to Uptake and leave a comment on their blog...then come back to my blog and leave ME a comment telling me you did it. Easy, right?

Uptake is a travel search engine that combines all travel sites to bring you the most information at your fingertips when you're planning a trip. AND, on their blog, they are featuring interviews by locals about their cities.

So, choose a blog on one of their featured cities. (I like the one on Austin the best, because I lived there for 19 years!) And when you come back to comment on my blog telling me you did it, let me know which city you chose to comment about and WHY. And, yes, I'll be checking to make sure you did it.

If you want to earn EXTRA entries into my contest, feature my giveaway in a post on YOUR blog. That'd be great! I'll give you two extra entries in addition to the first one. (one plus two equals three) Feel free to copy and paste the first or last picture in this post that features the giveaway name.

Sound like fun? It should be. You see, my sister works for Uptake, and I want to bombard her with comments. I don't think she believes we bloggers can take her site by storm, but we can and we will, right?!! Let's do it, have fun in the process and someone will win something!!

So, before you go, one last thing. Here's our sweet Annie modeling the cowboy hat. Start your engines and let's go!!

Oh, yes, one final thing.

This contest ends Saturday night at MIDNIGHT central stardard (Texas time).