A Cold, Sick and Rainy Monday & The {thrifted} Lord of The Rings

Yep.  That's what's going on here today at BIG FAMILY/small apartment.

My teenage boys are participating in their fall high school musical and have had rehearsals and then shows for 14 days straight.  Theatre Boy took his PSAT's somewhere in there too.  My job was to make sure their meals were hot and their laundry was clean throughout the ordeal.  Still they landed sick.  Typical not-able-to-pace-themselves-gung-ho-overachievers.  I wonder who they got that from.  Girlfriend may get the award for most over-achieving though because she sniffled all the way to school this morning so as not to disappoint her adoring fans.

So I'm doing the hunker down and snuggle in thing here because the boys are asleep, the apartment is nice and quiet and the outside looks like this:

Somehow my camera didn't catch the pouring rain.

The inside, however, looks like this:

See?  I know how to make the best of a cold, sick day.

This past week I didn't do a Thrift Store Thursday because of the boys schedule.  But I still took Girlfriend to the thrift store and she picked out a couple of things for her brothers that I wanted to share with you.

I love thrift store shopping with girlfriend.  She'll forcibly drag me away from the furniture section discourage me from buying furniture I don't need and she's got a good eye for the unique, unusual and definitely one of a kind.

Her first purchase was a vintage 1981 Snowflake Shmuzzle Puzzle for 99 cents.

Our family had so much fun with this by the fire last night!  This puzzle has 168  identically shaped pieces that look like salamanders.  It says 'number of correct combinations - 1' and 'number of incorrect combinations - Approx. 2.5 x 10^302'.  Now any kind of challenge involving scientific notation fires my boys up.  So the Shmuzzle got 1/4 of the way finished last night while I made the whole family their sickie food.

Speaking of sickie food, let me share our sick traditions with you.  Doesn't everyone have sick traditions in their home?  We always treat our viruses herbally, and our favorite herb to use is Lemon Balm.  Lemon Balm has been found to have some anti-viral properties and also helps with rest and sleep.  I always make and herbal 'decoction' with it.

First we take organic dried herbs and put them in a teabag.  Then I fill a stainless steel pot with filtered water and bring all of it to a boil.  Then I turn the heat down and let it simmer until the liquid in the pot is approximately 1/2 of what I started with.  Then everyone gets a cup of strong, decocted Lemon Balm tea.

It looks like this in the pot:

After everyone has had their tea then I make something I call "Sick Soup".  It's gluten free noodles (we're all gluten free here), organic chicken broth, butter and a dash of cayenne pepper.  Whatever the Lemon Balm doesn't take care of, the Sick Soup will!

Because this post totally has ADD, I wanted to get back to Girlfriend's thrift store shopping.  She won big points for getting her biggest bro (Theatre Boy) a present.

Any clue what this is?

Well, it's a tree, made out of wire, epoxied to a couple of pieces of granite.  It cost less than a Starbucks, and I thought Girlfriend was insane when she brought it back to the shopping cart at our local Goodwill.  She apparently knew what she was doing though, because when she got it home her brother bowed down to her greatness.  Apparently the wire-tree-and-granite-sculpture was a total depiction of the tree from The Lord of the Rings and thus earned a prominent place on his shelf.

Living proof you can find ANYTHING at a thrift store.

Now to change the subject on you one more time before I go back to my coffee-sipping, laundry-doing, quiet-making, fire-stoking Monday morning life.

I'm currently in a dispute with Mr. Big [FAMILY/small apartment] about the use of these:

Our apartment complex is brimming with them and my girls did some major pine cone gathering yesterday.  Mr. Big wants to throw them in the fire and burn them up with the firewood.  Noooo!  I want to spray paint them and dip them in glitter!  Of course Mr. Big said they wouldn't burn well that way, but he would definitely give it a try.  Grrrr.  Look for some pine cone projects in the future as well as attempts to hide them from Mr. Big.

I'm excited about some up and coming projects this week.  My furniture-painting-enabling-friend and I moved my two projects into their garage before the rains hit.  So I get to work on them inside this week and actually finish them!  So excited!

Have a great Monday and I'll see you back here again soon at BIG FAMILY/small apartment.