Thankful Thursday/ Thursday thoughts

Thinking of all the things to be thankful for this Thursday- Lots of 'em, big and small. From the kids to tomatoes to DIY dust spays, I've been aware of recently of the abundance of good things and want to note them.

1. This young one started school earlier this week. She indulged me in recreating a few pictures from her first day of kindergarten. 

\

Her wearing a black tiered skirt for both first days of school was purely coincidental but I kind of love it ;). The pictures of her starting KG were so light. That's because she was in PM kindergarten so the KG pictures were taken somewhere near the middle of the day. This school year, Alyssa had to be up at the crack of dawn to make it to school on time so the senior pictures were taken early in the morning. 

2. We got to see Jacob one evening this week for dinner. Jacob has always made friends really easily (it was a good trait to have as a child when the girls played so well together and he was the odd man (/boy) out when the girls were playing dolls and such). Since beginning to attend a church recently and becoming involved in a young adults group, he's made some new good friends. One of his new church friends has a family house on one of the charming towns along Lake Michigan in Michigan. A group of friends are heading north to the house on Lake Michigan. Staying with us for one evening made Jacob's plan for driving north easier. 

3. I'm thankful for finding another blog that I enjoy reading that has many practical ideas for saving money and living simply. The writer is a Christian, too, and I like her writing style or as I think of, her voice. The blog is called Spring Creek Cottage and I've tried one of her ideas which is a recipe to make homemade dust spray.  I was out of my regular (purchased) dust spray and dust was just starting to noticeably accumulate on our bedroom furniture when I read a post of hers that had a homemade dust spray recipe in it.  I had all of the ingredients and an empty spray bottle so I made some right away and used it on our bedroom furniture. It worked like a charm! And it smelled, good, too with tea tree essential oil that I used. I texted my sister and Abby the recipe (Abby was at work). Abby said that she'd like to make some for her apartment since it's natural and it works. The next time that Abby and I were at Wal-mart, we bought a spray bottle so that we could make a batch for her to take to her apartment. 

The ingredients for the dust spray are just distilled water, olive oil, vinegar and drops of essential oil. I doubled the ingredients to make more since I had a large spray bottle. 

I added two cups of distilled water, 1/2 cup vinegar, four tablespoons of olive oil and then several drops of tea tree oil. The amount of essential oil you add depends on how much you want the spray the smell like the essential oil. I love the smell of tea tree oil and it was the only essential oil I had so that made it an easy choice to use that oil :). You need to shake the bottle every time before it's used since the oil rises to the top. 

4. I'm thankful for produce in the garden. All we have are tomato plants but we have eleven of them so tomatoes are coming in hot! I would have planted other veggies but I knew that Donnie was going to have to water the garden the entire month of June and I wanted to make things really easy on him. My instructions were that if the plant had a cage around it, to water it. I've picked well over twenty tomatoes so far and have made marinara sauce twice already. I'll make more of that for sure as we like the sauce and there's no way we're going to eat tomatoes on a quick enough basis to use all of the tomatoes that we have. 

Fresh tomatoes plus garlic, onion, a few spices, honey, red cooking wine and balsamic vinegar make for picky eater approved marinara sauce!

5. I'm thankful for plans for the future- even tentative ones. While it is way more bitter than sweet to think that next year at this time, Alyssa will be heading off to college and we'll be empty nesters, I'm confident that we'll get used to it. When Donnie and I dropped the girls off at the Morgan Wallen concert on Saturday, I was reminded of how much fun Donnie and I have together even though it's almost always low key fun. Neither of us have big personalities or are super outgoing or are risk takers but we enjoy doing many of the same things.  I hope to incorporate a little more travel into our lives when the kids are all gone. We won't be jet setters or anything like that. Donnie is a small business owner who's selling his expertise in units of time- to make money he has to be working. Still, hopefully we can do some long weekend trips here and there. 

6. I learned that cinnamon is an essential oil. What?? I thought it was just a spice. I believe it was from the aforementioned blog that I read that there is such a thing as cinnamon essential oil. Well, from stating that tea tree oil was the only essential oil that I owned, I'm obviously not an "oily" person. By googling it, I saw that my local Walmart stocks cinnamon leaf essential oil so of course I had to go out and buy some. Will make a new dust spray and dust the living daylight out of dustmites in order to have cinnamon scented dusted furniture! When I opened the bottle that I bought of it, I was a little disappointed in the smell. I was expecting Christmas in a bottle. The oil didn't smell nearly as pungent and cinnamon-y as I expected. Abby really likes the smell so we are going to make some cleaner for her with the cinnamon essential oil. 

Those are just a few things that I'm thankful for and thinking of this week...