Just had to share the fun little details of my good day today.  I spent several hours at Curves (where I workout) with samples of my Tastefully Simple goodies.  I made a good number of sales, and enjoyed the time chatting with ladies while addressing Christmas card envelopes. [Sidenote: The cards I ordered from SeeHere on Thanksgiving night arrived on our front porch on SATURDAY.  Can you believe that??  Crazy fast!  Not to say that I'll be that fast in sending them out...] [Another sidenote: Let me know if me and my Tastefully Simple goodies can help you with your Christmas shopping!]

I had a few errands to run, and one was at the mall.  As I was walking through JC Penny to another store, I remembered a fancy wedding we’re going to this weekend, and thought I’d see what the clearance rack of dresses held.  I found a super cute (though slightly summery) black and white dress that fit, marked down to $25 from $100.  A pretty good deal, except that I might need to buy a sweater or shawl and some dressy black shoes.  Hm.  As I was hanging it up, still mulling the purchase over, I saw a pink stain on the back near the hemline.  I asked the cashier if the price reduction was for the stain, and lucky me… it wasn’t.  She had forgotten to mark it down again.. to $4.97.  WOOHOO!  I’m hoping I can get the stain out, and if not… well, it’s pretty far out of sight.  And now I can see if I can find any deals on a sweater and shoes!!

I had a few extra minutes between Curves and picking Analise up from school to browse on Twitter, and saw there was going to be a LandsEnd chat with some prizes.  So I answered a few questions (well, 12) while I was waiting, and voila!  I won a sweater!  WOOHOO!

Anyway, good day for this mommy.  I really appreciate my sweet mother-in-law for keeping the kids so I could enjoy sharing my tasty goodies (and please call or email if you want me to help with your Christmas shopping!!!!), and my sweet hubby for getting the kids fed and ready for bed.   Going to go tuck myself in with a smile on my face!

Here’s a glimpse of our Christmas cards (which you may or may not see before Christmas… I’ll be impressed if they’re out by New Year!).  Brian’s dad took 19 photos, and inevitably, in the best ones (“best” defined as where both children have semi-decent smiles, in the vague direction of the camera, and I’m not tugging Josiah back to the ground as he bounces incessantly) the top of Brian’s head is cut off.  Not so important to me because, really… people are looking at my cute kids, right?  I won’t tell you how many “just one more, Josiah, I promise this is the last one” photos there were!

We made a make-shift velodrome out of the leaves in our driveway — although our velodrome also had a Nascar style pit row.

Today we asked Josiah to say our Thanksgiving blessing. I was hoping to get a video of him with his eyes shut really tight the way he normally prays but I think the video camera was a distraction.

Also here is a couple pictures from our biking adventure around a running track near our house. The kids had played all day at Grandma’s house after biking in our driveway in the morning. They were tired and ready for bed early!

Ok, there are too many of these that are too good not to share!  Surely you’ve got some photos you can use for these deals…

• The iPhone Blog notes that a great password app, 1Password, is FREE until December 1st.
• Freebies 4 Mom has a code for 50 free photo cards from SeeHere.com … I’m making ours right now with today’s family pictures!  This code expires at midnight on Nov. 30th.
• Freebies 4 Mom also has info about a free photobook from Photoworks.com, courtesy of The Bonnie Hunt Show.  Photobooks can be tedious to create online, and comments on the post show that the website has been slow.  There are only 25,000 free books available, and you can’t know if you’ll get it for free until you go to checkout with the promo code.  With all those disclosures aside, I’ve used Photoworks.com before, and I’m always impressed with their high quality and excellent service.  I’m going to try to create mine tonight.  And shipping is free, too!  I’ve made several photobooks recently, and it’s getting me a bit more caught up on archiving our many family memories!
• Canvas People is offering a free 8×10 canvas (pay shipping, $15) or $55 off any other size canvas.
• I’m about ready to click “Buy” on an Amazon shopping cart with about 80% of the Christmas gifts I need to buy.  Another 10% are already bought.  The last 10% aren’t figured out yet.  Maybe I’d better browse a bit more… The deals at Amazon are great, though!  No need to head to the store where I’d surely find more to buy than I needed to!

We’re having Thanksgiving dinner at Brian’s parents, and here’s my part of the menu (with recipe links!)…

• Cheesy Green Bean Casserole
• Corn Casserole
• Pumpkin Pie Bars (the recipe I’m most excited about!)

Analise is off school this whole week, so we got a little crafty today, doing painted leaf prints around thankful lists.  They turned out very nice, and I got a big lump in my throat seeing their sweet answers, and Analise’s carefully printed list, with “Mom” at the top.  I’m so thankful!