Happy Halloween

Hope you all have a great Halloween! We have an action packed day planned from school parties and parades, to trick or treating with friends in two different towns at their sponsored events. Miss E will be a purple fairy and Miss A will be whatever she feels like at the particular time we are getting dressed for Halloween. Ah, the joys of being 2! I bought her a darling Raggedy Ann costume and she refuses to even try it on. She turned her nose at last year's Ladybug costume which still fits her, so I believe that she will either be a Pumpkin, Aurora (aka Sleeping Beauty) or Cinderella. I'm hoping she picks the Pumpkin costume because it fits the season and it's not your run of the mill, everyday Disney dress up outfit. Cross your fingers for the Pumpkin costume, LOL!

M'Sevumba: An Inspirational Story

Did you happen to see the Oprah show on Monday? I just rewatched it before my DVR automatically deletes it. The topic was Mothers Around the World and she featured moms from Alaska, Brazil, Norway and the Congo.

The piece about the mother from the Congo was the most awe inspiring. Oprah showed a clip that she had seen on ABC's Nightline several years ago. She mentioned that she remembers the woman's story to this day.

Ted Koppell profiled a woman named M'Sevumba, twice widowed and the mother of 10 children ranging in age from 2 to 17. In order to provide for her family, she works as a porter - - carrying things for people who pay her to transport items up and down hills in and around her town.

The clip essentially showed an average day in her life. In the morning, M'Sevumba got a job carrying a mattress from her town to the next town. She rolled the mattress in a tarp and carried it on her back as she walked barefoot down a steep hill and over logs that had been placed across a stream. She spent the entire morning delivering the mattress and she received 25 cents as payment!

She then made her way back to the center of her town to look for another job. She saw another porter struggling to carry 400 pounds of beans. She and that porter made a deal to split the work and the wages, so M'Sevumba carried a 200 pound sack of beans up hill for 2 miles. Her pay? Just 40 cents.

She then stopped to buy food so that she could cook dinner and spent 56 cents of her day's wages. Later that day, one of her daughters bought a small bottle of oil using up the last 9 cents.

It's hard to imagine a life that difficult, yet M'Sevumba persevered each day for porter jobs so that she could provide for her children. And she never complained. She took great pride in the fact that her meager wages had put 4 of her children through primary school.

I still can't fathom that she received payment of only 65 cents for an entire day of back-breaking manual labor. Imagine how much $20.00 would mean to her? We spend roughly that amount on a DVD or music CD and don't think twice about it. Tomorrow I am going to place a $20.00 bill in an envelope simply addressed to M'Sevumba, Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo. I hope it reaches her and her family!

Like Oprah, I will remember her story. And I'll also think twice the next time I complain that I'm too busy and my kids are driving me crazy.

White Daisy Dukes in October??

That's a question my husband needs to answer... Last week, I flew to Orlando to attend a business conference. Before I left, I made arrangements for my mom to pick up my kids at daycare and school, and my older daughter also slept over at my mom's house one night as her school was closed for Columbus Day. I also left my husband with three outfits for each of the kids to wear complete with matching socks and hair accessories. I also instructed him on the fine art of creating pony tails. Now you might laugh at that, but my kids have looked like street urchins in the past when he has been responsible for dressing and grooming them. In any event, as soon as the car service brought me home from the airport, I drove to the daycare to pick up my 2 year old. She was dressed in a short sleeve dress (at least a nice Gymboree dress) and her hair was a mess. Not one of the long sleeved outfits that I had left for her to wear. When I arrived at my parent's house, my dad warned me that my 5 year old was wearing shorts and a short sleeve shirt. By the way, these were not ordinary shorts either, but white Daisy Duke hot pant shorts. I could not believe my eyes, nor could my mom who was the one who picked her up at school for me. LOL, my mom told me that when she saw what Miss E was wearing, she said aloud so the other moms waiting in the hall would hear, "She must have dressed herself." My husband claims in his defense that my daughter wanted to wear a wild flower power short sleeve shirt with an equally wild floral skirt that did not match. He figured that white went with everything, so he found the white shorts for her to wear. White capri pants were hanging in her closet along with many pairs of jeans and khakis, but he apparently felt a short sleeve shirt demanded shorts. Thankfully, he had written the teacher a note saying that I was away and my mom would be picking up my daughter instead. It appears that the teacher chalked my daughter's wardrobe up to a poor choice on my husband's part, as I have not yet heard from the school social worker or anyone affiliated with a child welfare agency. I have no idea what he was thinking, short shorts in mid-October? Now he would never know that wearing white is a faux pas after Labor Day, but he should have known that shorts are not appropriate fall clothing for a crisp fall day in Connecticut! by the way, did I fail to mention that the darling clothing outfits that I laid out were left in the same places that I left them? Go figure! Luckily for my kids, I rarely travel for business.

Fabric Anyone? Shop Three Chickadees Textiles!

Folks, you heard it here first! Three Chickadees launched its second website earlier today at www.threechickadeestextiles.com. Three Chickadees Textiles will be exclusively devoted to fabric sales, and we'll eventually add ribbon and hardware to the product mix.

The whole idea started when we began to receive inquiries on our accessory site (www.threechickadees.com) from people that wanted to purchase our patchwork madras fabric for their own use. We had difficulty finding this fabric ourselves which is what led to our decision to import it directly from India. To accommodate the fabric requests, we started selling it by the yard in our EBAY store.

My partner, Lisa (also a fellow blogger at Preppy Days) is the one who had the initial vision for a separate fabric site. We started our IT people working on the programming, and purchased many great new patchwork fabrics from our Indian supplier. A few of them are already up on the site, and there are more to follow within the next two weeks. The photo up top is of our Nantucket Summer pattern. It's one of my favorites!

Since we know that there is already a demand for patchwork madras fabric, we decided to start with that material. Eventually we'll add exquisite fabrics from France and Germany. I just love the German Farbenmix fabrics, so those might have to be next...

There are also some other exciting things happening behind the scenes at Three Chickadees that I can't talk about yet! Stay tuned as we may have more big news soon!

Fruit Flies, Oh My!

For the last two weeks, we have been fighting a minor fruit fly infestation at our house. When I first spotted them, they were milling about apples in a glass bowl on my counter. Since we had recently gone apple picking, I assumed that they arrived on one of the apples that we picked in the orchard. I washed all of the apples and put them in the fridge so that the fruit flies would no longer have their food source. For the next few days, I sprayed them and clapped them to death with my hands. Over time though, the number seemed to be increasing and they had spread from the kitchen to my upstairs hall bathroom. I searched and searched for a lost potato that may have rolled under the cabinet or a piece of wayward food that ended up underneath the baseboard heater and I could find absolutely nothing. Since I pay a cleaning lady, I'd actually have been mad if I found something somewhere, but her job is safe as nothing was found, that was until....

One night, hubby was walking through the dining room and yelled into the kitchen that the dining room "smelled old." Mind you, my dining room is the one room in my house that is so never used that I'm even contemplating turning it into a sitting room or den. Well, I went in to see what he meant by "it smells old" and when I flicked on the light, I saw a mass of fruit flies hovering over my beaded fruit centerpiece. It turns out that Miss E had placed an orange in the centerpiece at some point and that orange was now serving as the official Fruit Fly Conference Hotel. I ran for the can of bug spray and sprayed it so long that the can became too cold to hold, my finger hurt from pressing the nozzle, and my throat was irritated. The Hotel del'Orange was moved outside in the backyard and it sits there still.

Unfortunately, that has not completely solved the problem. We still have about a half dozen survivor fruit flies flying around looking for a new hotel, although their flying speed has slowed so they are getting hungry, LOL. (By the way, did you know that fruit flies have red eyes?)