I must confess: sometimes I have my son drink out of a pink sippy cup.

What can I say?  When his cups are all in the dishwasher, sometimes I need a quick fix.

I have several pink sippy cups, and often AG and LB end up both drinking out of identical cups… which can get tricky to keep them apart.

The perfect solution: colored silicone bracelets.  They slip on, stay on, and let me color code the cups!  I can even leave them on when I put the cups in the dishwasher!

Right now, I use red ones for my son.  My sister in law, who has four children, color codes everything – water bottles, Easter baskets, etc – the kids always know which one is whose because of their assigned colors.  This would be a great, easy solution for color-coding cups and water bottles if you have multiple kids of your own, if you have a home day care, etc!

For more “works for me Wednesday” tips, click over to We are THAT family!

I am an amazon affiliate and would receive a small percentage of any sales resulting from the link included in this post.

I’ve always had an ache in my heart for the homeless.

I grew up outside of Chicago and vividly remember my early passing encounters with the homeless on the streets of the Windy city.  My parents still laugh about a time when I was studying a ragged man panhandling for money and announced that I hoped he got enough money to buy a comb!

It pains my heart to remember our trip to Washington DC when I was in third grade – the image of some high school boys taunting an elderly homeless man by holding money out to him and jerking it away just as he reached up his hand will never leave me.

When our family lived in San Antonio, the homeless were everywhere as the warm temperatures drew them South. Mothers sat by the road with their children in tattered clothing.

We all know the grim facts: most homeless individuals are addicts, they will usually spend any cash they get on drugs and alcohol.  Many are mentally ill, a fact which we became more aware of when my husband worked at a psychiatric hospital.

Here’s my question:  if Jesus was in my car and saw that man, that woman and child, that family homeless on the side of the road, would He pretend that He didn’t see them?  Would He fix His eyes straight ahead and hope the light turned green?  Would He mutter that they’d spend any cash He gave them on drugs?

No.  No, He wouldn’t.

Jesus saw people that others tried to ignore.  Jesus looked right in their eyes and gave them worth.  He would have helped them.

A few years ago as I was wrestling with wanting to do something for the many homeless individuals we would see around our city, God gave me an idea.  It’s elegant in its simplicity.

Bags of nonperishable items – granola bars, crackers, applesauce, boxes of raisins, bags of peanuts, gatorade and bottles of water… we could keep zip-top bags of these items in our car and when those homeless individuals stood outside our window proclaiming to the world that they were hungry and destitute, we would have something to give them!!

There is something about being able to roll down your window and look a broken shell of a person in the eyes and tell them “I want you to know how much God loves you.  Please take this.”… there is something about hearing my young daughter ask what we are doing and being able to tell her that we are loving the least of these… there is something about knowing that at least for a few hours, that man has something in his stomach and knows that someone saw him.

It’s addicting.

It’s been a while since we had our stash of bags – it was time to make more.  Amazingly enough, even as I had collected all of the items in our basement and was planning to work on these with my daughter this week, there was a post over at Balancing Beauty and Bedlam about doing this very same thing!!  She gave some great ideas about what they included in theirs.  In our bags we have:

Several types of Granola bars
Cheese and peanut butter crackers
Peanuts
Applesauce
Hand and foot warmers (these were on sale at Walmart last week for $1 for a pack of 6!)

The first time we made these we did it as a project with our small group – everyone brought a bunch of one particular item, and we assembled the bags together and divided them between our vehicles.

What I am most excited about including this time is a booklet version of God’s Big Story.  God’s Big Story is something I wrote to give the message of the Bible in a nutshell – it is a short read, but covers the big ideas of Scripture from creation through Revelation and presents the “big picture” look at who Jesus was and why we so desperately need Him.  It’s like a gospel tract on steroids – aimed at people who don’t know anything about Scripture.

On the last page of the booklet I wrote:

Would you consider making some bags?  [Please feel free to include a God's Big Story booklet - it's free to download and print]

They won’t cost you much.

They won’t take long to assemble.

But they just might change someone’s life.  They just might change someone’s eternity.

And they might change you and your family in the process.

Practically serving as the hands and feet of Jesus works for me.  I hope it will work for you, too.

Photo by Maggie Smith on freedigitalphotos.net

Well, not exactly ANTI.

Does your family have Christmas traditions? Do the same things every year, eat the same foods, have the annual rituals that must not be tampered with or risk having the entire holiday “ruined”?

Our family never really did.

Between my mom being an RN in a hospital working weird shifts when I was growing up, and the fact that our extended family always lived in different states than we did, our holidays were never consistent.

Sometimes we were at my Jehovah’s Witness grandparents’ home on Christmas Day, which meant that it really wasn’t Christmas Day for us.

Sometimes my mom worked on Thanksgiving Day and my dad would make us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches – I remember eating them on china in the dining room one year to make it “fancy.” :)

Sometimes we did our own Christmas a week before or after the actual date because we would be out of town.

Once our house was flooded by a waterbed [true story] just before Thanksgiving, so we ate at a restaurant and lived in a hotel until the week before Christmas. [Donuts every morning and someone who makes your bed while you're gone every day? Awesome.] Oh, and the flood rusted our artificial Christmas tree so we had a teeny tiny desk-top size one. :)

One year we went to the Shedd aquarium in Chicago on Christmas Day – a fond memory of mine!  Another year we decided to go see a movie and bought the tickets online… to the wrong theater… got slightly lost… and since all the restaurants were closed, we ate “lunch” in the car – frozen convenience store foods heated up in the gas station microwave!!  And oh, how we laughed!!

This is not to make you feel sorry for me in any way… I actually am very grateful for this!

I think this odd every-year-is-different pattern actually was our tradition. :) In some ways, I think this was a reminder every year that Christmas is more than tradition – we celebrate Christmas because of Christ. We love to celebrate His coming together, to show our love for one another in gifts and time together… and it doesn’t matter where we are, what we’re eating, or how big or small the Christmas tree is!

I am so grateful for the extreme flexibility of my family. To this day, spending holidays with my family is made MUCH easier by the fact that all of us just pretty much go with the flow… the world isn’t going to fall apart if we do something different. I mean, really… what is “normal?” :)

So, as NP and I discuss traditions we would like to see in our family, I want to make sure that I pass along the tradition of being ok with not having a set-in-stone tradition. I want my kids to truly see that we don’t worship tradition at Christmas, we worship Jesus. And if we truly want to show love for one another, we won’t get hung up on insignificant details.

Enjoy your family rituals this Christmas… but don’t be afraid to scrap them and find a new plan.

Flexibility works for me. :)

Ok, the Christmas countdown is on… 15 days until the big day! Are all of your gifts checked off the list? If not, I’ve been poking around on Dayspring.com and found some fabulous gift ideas for less than $5.00 each. There’s a lot more in their clearance section, so go look around! Here are my picks!

I love having meaningful artwork and pictures on our walls, especially pieces that allow me to have Scripture adorning my home!

Feast your eyes on this Whatever is Lovely Gallery Wrapped Canvas Print – a beautiful piece on clearance for $3.24!

I am so drawn to this Blessed are the People Gallery Wrapped Canvas Print – since it is yet another item on clearance [for $3.24!], I was a click away from ordering it when NP reminded me that we’re running out of wall space for all my finds! :)

This Those who hope Gallery Wrapped Canvas Print is so sharp and meaningful, also – guess how much it’s on clearance for? $3.24!

This Christ’s Example Gallery Wrapped Canvas Print is a powerful statement, and guess what? It’s also on clearance – $4.25 makes it yours! :)

Have a young child or pregnant woman on your list?

This super adorable The Lord Is My Shepherd Gallery Wrapped Canvas Print is on clearance for $3.25!!

I love this May The Lord Bless You Gallery Wrapped Canvas Print [and it is also on clearance for $3.25!!]

Hope this helps your Christmas shopping and your budget! Clearance shopping really works for me! :)

I am a Dayspring affiliate, and would receive a small percentage of any sales resulting from these links.