What a Night!!!!

When Jasmine went to bed last night she was burning up and complained that her nose felt congested. I figured that she's getting another cold!!! After giving her some medicine, I put her to bed. Because both kids weren't feeling too good, they wanted to sleep in bed with me, and since hubby works weird hours and stays up all night and sleeps during the day, it worked out fine.

She falls asleep but is whining and moaning. At 1am I am awakened by her jumping up in bed and throwing up. ALL OVER MY BED!!! I start yelling for Curt to come and help me and run her to the bathroom. So now it's 1:30am and we are changing out the sheets on the bed, she managed to miss my comforter all together. YAY!!!
Back to sleep but within an hour she's up getting sick again. Seems that she's caught whatever is going around here, a lot of people with this cold/stomach bug. Of course for Jasmine it means not going to school.....and even though she can't afford to miss anymore days, what can I do????
I can't send her to school running a fever and throwing up every hour!!!!
So she's home for the day and laying on the couch.

Last night while the kids were laying next to me in bed, I caught a movie on tv, well actually more like 3 movies part of the same story.
It was "Love Comes Softly", "Love's Enduring Promise" and "Love's Long Journey". I'm not one to watch movies more than once, and I had already seen these at least twice, but I ended up watching them again. I love Janette Oke and her stories are so heart warming!!!

You all know that lately I've been on the search for a closer relationship with God. It's not easy, I'm sure you agree, but it's well worth the effort and work.
I'll be the first to admit that at times being so overwhelmed and so busy with our hectic lives, God takes the back burner, which in turn just creates MORE havoc around me. There are those days that you feel that you are being tempted over and over again but it's not surprising because it just seems to me that everyone has become so obsessed with materialistic things that they forget what is really important.
The reason I mentioned this is because my SIL Hayley, sent me this today and I thought I would share it. It's for all the kids who grew up in the 60's, 70's and 80's. Boy would I love for things to be back the way they were.

• We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or latches on doors or cabinets and it was fine to play with pans.
• When we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets, just flip-flops and fluorescent 'spokey dokey's' on our wheels.
• As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or airbags - riding in the passenger seat was a treat.
• We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle and it tasted the same.
• We ate chips, bread and butter pudding and drank fizzy juice with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.
• We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle or can and no-one actually died from this.
• We would spend hours building go-carts out of scraps and then went top speed down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into stinging nettles a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
• We would leave home in the morning and could play all day, as long as we were back before it got dark. No one was able to reach us and no one minded.
• We did not have Play stations or X-Boxes, no video games at all. No 99 channels on TV, no videotape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no DVDs, no Internet chat rooms.
• We had friends - we went outside and found them.
• We played elastics and rounders, and sometimes that ball really hurt!
• We fell out of trees, got cut, and broke bones but there were no law suits.
• We had full on fist fights but no prosecution followed from other parents.
• We played chap-the-door-run-away and were actually afraid of the owners catching us.
• We walked to friends' homes.
• We also, believe it or not, WALKED to school; we didn't rely on mummy or daddy to drive us to school, which was just round the corner.
• We made up games with sticks and tennis balls.
• We rode bikes in packs of 7 and wore our coats by only the hood.
• The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of...They actually sided with the law.
• This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
• We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.
• And you're one of them. Congratulations!

Now doesn't that make you wish you were still a kid? So what are some of your favorite memories from your childhood and the way things were back then?

I think for me there were a few, but I remember playing outside with the neighborhood kids until 10pm when it finally started getting dark in the summer. We would be called in for dinner and then go back out and play and the next morning it started all over again. We went on picnics, we played hide and seek, we played go cart races, we played hopscotch. We enjoyed life and it was fun being a kid. I didn't have soccer practice, dancing, piano lessons, basketball, softball etc etc. I was just a KID, doing what kids did best, ENJOYING LIFE!!!!

It may be hard for me to pass that on to my own children, but I will try my best. Kids nowadays are spoiled, and I know because I'm guilty of the same. Again it goes back to materialistic things. Kids have been taught that they NEED to have all the latest fashions, latest toys, best looking bikes. You know what, we were 4 kids growing up, me and my 3 brothers and we never had a bike, and neither did a lot of the kids in the neighborhood. So what did we do???
Believe it or not, the few kids who DID have bikes, shared it will all of us and we all took turns riding them, and it was fine, we weren't mocked or bullied. How things have changed???

So I leave you this morning with a trip back to the 80's with A-Ha "Take on Me".
And here is a question....What will you do to make sure that your kids enjoy their childhood, and what kind of things from your own days as a child do you still incorporate into their lives? Traditions, games, that special dinner, tell me what you are doing to share your childhood with them.