Sorry ment to post on food page - so this is the 2nd post! What time does the swap last to? Depending on time I can bring what ever is needed food wise. I have a test in Bowie at 10 am unitl ? so I am hoping to get there by noonish ! I saw a post about What time does the swap last to? Depending on time I can bring what ever is needed food wise. I have a test in Bowie at 10 am unitl ? so I am hoping to get there by noonish ! I saw a post about Ice, mustard and catsup, pickle relish etc is that covered yet? Ingrid

Give out the mini pretzels and then you won't have to worry about anybody coming to your house next year. Also, the egg smell comes out of your entrance foyer after you scrub and rinse well with a mixture of baking soda and vinegar (rinse and repeat) and then rub it all down real good with some orange oil:-) I'm just joking with you! Seriously, it should be okay. Go get some candy if it makes you feel better....But kids really DO get plenty of candy from all the other houses! But remember....The only thing YOU will have leftover to munch on is pretzels. Unless you raid your kids stash!!! Which may be why they want you to go get candy:-) Happy Halloween!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank you so much for asking! The party was great - had a few last minute cancellations since there was a softball tournament the same day and their kids were on teams that kept winning, but I am thrilled that the girls did well so it was all good. The menu was everything listed above, except I skipped the ice cream sandwich thing - it was overkill, and I am glad I did. Several friends (who know me well) know that dessert is usually not my thing, so they all brought desserts! The contributed a pecan pie, a walnut caramel cheesecake (OMG it was delish!), a strawberry cheesecake, and a huge plate of chocolate chip cookies and chocolate covered pretzels. Everyone had a blast and the hat parade was a riot. My GF had been in San Diego on business a few weeks earlier and bought a fascinator there. It was incredible - purple, black illusion lace, black feathers... just amazing and she looked so beautiful in it. I was happy she won, since she has had a tough year battling breast cancer. I am already looking forward to next year! Alexa

You are doing great! And it sounds like you are doing some of the same things that I am! At the moment, I'm procrastinating (taking a break) from cleaning up my worktable so it can get in gear for Christmas. It's been the world's slowest quilting station for the past few months (in that I only get to it a few minutes here and there), but now I need to change gears and put that away for a short while to start getting packages ready to ship- within the next 2 weeks :) Medical stuff is interesting in some ways. It's not something that I've had a great deal of experience with, but am getting a little more. From my perspective, I would keep the more bureaucratic end of things in a 'to be shredded' type situation, and keep information pertaining to your actual medical health in chronological order for the long term. Sometimes it's helpful to look back at your medical reports/results over the long term. In some cases you can probably do this online, but I can say for myself that keeping paperwork that you can lay out and look at can be very useful. I'll give you a very recent example. This week, DH got results from a routine blood test that said it was out of acceptable limits. Very quickly we were able to pull out paperwork results from the last time he had these tests from two different sources (4yrs and9 yrs) and the levels were almost identical- and considered normal then. This was incredibly helpful for us to not panic and to come up with suitable questions regarding what is going on (i.e. was it suppose to have been a fasting test they did, but they forgot to mention that to him?) This is a little bit difficult to write about, so I will try to keep it succinct, but last year a family member of ours overdosed on RX drugs. What happened was he messed up his brain and essentially made himself a dementia type patient for 5 months, unable to care for himself. During that time, we ended up setting out and tracking down as much medical information as we could about him, because he was not capable of answering questions from a standpoint of reality. It would have been much easier had we had paper copies from his home to begin with. For the first few months, we didn't have an accurate medical picture of who he had been for the past years (he is a hermit, for lack of a better word) which made his doctor's appointments a hit-and-miss proposition. In the end, my DH ended up collecting everything we were able to get from the past few years, and filing it in chronological order inside of a binder. I would definitely go that book-style route again with medical records and decide on the topic whether they should be kept for 2 years, 5 years, indefinitely. Right now, DH, DD and I are able to keep all our medical stuff in a small folder, but as we get older and have more things going on, I will probably look into using a binder, maybe even filing by year with page separators? Hope you find a good system and get your packages out on time :)