Saturday stuff, including the giveaway winner!

First things first, the giveaway winner! I found that random number generator thingamabob and duly entered the numbers in, and it told me the lucky winner is:


Number 7 would be Annikke, who has a blog called Mom is in the Fishbowl that is very cute and fun to read (although Kiddo thought it was about Nemo based on her header). Congratulations, Annikke! I hope you and your family enjoy the Jazzy Fairy Tales CD! For those of you who didn't win, the Jazz For Young Children website has a shop with all their offerings, so I strongly encourage you to check them out for the kids on your holiday shopping list! It's a great, unique gift idea that helps introduce kids to some new genres of music in a fun and entertaining way. My daughter is positively hooked!

Oh, and another quick Kiddo-school update: the woman who was my top choice has accepted the position as Kiddo's sensory diet aide and begins on Wednesday. WOO-HOOOOOO!!!! I'm so hopeful that she will be a great match and will do an excellent job with everything! She is a grad student with an ultimate goal of becoming an elementary school psychologist, and while she makes me feel quite old in comparison (how can a grad student look so young?!?), she seemed to be kind, smart, energetic and quick on the uptake, all good things for working with Kiddo. She said she is familiar with SPD and also took the handout I'd prepared for the school about SPD (specifically, Kiddo's subtype thereof) so that should help her hit the ground running, at least in terms of the "whys" even if she needs to be trained from scratch in the "hows" of the sensory diet. I am feeling more confident about this young woman than I have about any of the folks I've met thus far who have been in the position. Fingers crossed that it all goes well from now until June!!

In other business, my Down-Under friend Givinya De Elba did a meme and threw it out there for anyone who chooses, so I'm choosing! I actually had chosen to do this yesterday, then we had a power outage or surge or something that knocked the computer and cable out for just long enough for this to disappear, but I'm redoing it because it was fun! I also am rolling an emailed meme into this one as they had some overlapping questions but also some unique ones. Here goes the combomeme!

Ten Years Ago I:

* was working in a job that I loved at a non-profit agency with a great team of coworkers, a fantastic boss and hardly any pay.
* last went on a European vacation - Hubby and I spent the first half of our trip driving around the UK in a rental car (and out of that period, I drove for approximately 20 minutes, being utterly unable to get the hang of the whole "wrong side of the road" thing - I kept fouling up the turns especially and was utterly confounded by the one roundabout I encountered while behind the wheel) and the second half in London, where we crashed on a friend's pull-out couch and did all the touristy stuff, like the Changing of the Guard and visiting the Tower of London. All stuff I'd done on previous trips but still quite enjoyable to do again, especially as it was just me and Hubby and not me as a teenager jammed into the back seat of a two-door car with my two younger sisters and all of our assorted luggage like it was the previous time I did the "driving around the UK" trip.
* got a royal flush while playing poker at the Orleans Casino in Las Vegas.
* met my BFF (not counting Hubby, of course) while taking a creative writing course.
* saw The Lion King on Broadway and was totally blown away.

Five Years Ago I:

* became a mother.
* stopped working a paying job for the first time since I was 19 years old.
* went on my last childless vacation, which ended abruptly when Kiddo was born a little over five weeks early.
* appeared as a contestant on Jeopardy!.
* wrote my first will.

Five Things on Tomorrow's To-Do List:

* take Kiddo to a playdate after church while Hubby goes on a "playdate" of his own - he's been invited to a card game and I believe there is also some football watching involved...
* finish the ambitious closet purge I began a couple of weeks ago and managed to abandon about a third of the way through.
* put away all the laundry I did yesterday, that is now towering in a clean and folded mountain atop my dresser and/or in laundry baskets waiting to go into Kiddo's room.
* sort through massive piles of paperwork that I keep shifting from one spot to another without actually ever quite sorting through.
* finish the Christmas gifts I'm working on for the grandparents.

Five Snacks I Enjoy:

* popcorn (preferably air-popped, with butter and salt)
* pretzels
* fresh fruit - in the summer, nothing beats berries of any sort. In the fall, apples - espcially Jonagolds which are my favorite. This time of year, I will eat Clementine oranges until I am literally sick to my stomach. Oh, how I love Clementines!
* Cheez Doodles (puffed, not "crunchy" or "crispy" or whatever that other kind is called)
* chocolate (pretty much in any way, shape or form)

Five Things I Would Do if I Were a Millionaire (I'm going to assume by this that I have millionS - plural, I mean, if I'm going to dream, might as well dream big, eh?):

* Ensure that Kiddo's educational fund is sufficiently large.
* Buy a new house, that has a playroom/rec room for all Kiddo's stuff so we can have a coffee table instead of a mini-trampoline in the living room, for example, and my picture display table instead of her ginormous easel, that sort of thing. Basically, a room so that my living room is no longer decorated in "Fisher Price" or "Little Tykes" with accents of "Disney Princess" and "Dinosaurs-n-Safari Animals" too. Also big enough so that we have a separate home office and guest room, so there's no need to snake your way carefully through all the computer equipment to get to sleep if you are visiting us...
* Ensure that our parents are able to retire comfortably.
* Support the charities and foundations I care about.
* Share the wealth with my siblings to help my nieces' and nephews' educational funds, etc.

Five Places I Have Lived:

* Branchburg, New Jersey
* Lakewood, New York
* Lebanon, New Hampshire
* Zoagli, Italy
* Biddeford Pool, Maine

Five Jobs I've Had:

* Production Office Manager for a video/tv/film production company
* Nanny
* Secretary/Administrative Assistant
* Clerk in the gourmet foods section of a grocery store
* Job Developer for a supported employment program

Five Places I've Never Been That I'd Like to Visit Someday:

* Hawaii
* Australia
* Scandinavia
* Africa
* Greece

Five of my Favorite Holiday Songs:

* O Holy Night (especially the version done by the Oak Ridge Boys)
* Silent Night (again, love the Oak Ridge Boys version, complete with the reading of the Christmas story from Luke - one of my favorite readings from the Bible)
* The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire) (nobody does this better than the Velvet Fog himself, Mel Torme)
* Have Yourself a Merry, Little Christmas (Ella Fitzgerald does an amazing rendition of this, and Judy Garland's version is pretty dang amazing too)
* Happy Holidays/The Holiday Season (done by none other than Andy Williams - any other version just sounds wrong somehow!)

Five Books I've Read Over and Over Again:

* A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas
* The Autobiography of King Henry VIII by Margaret George
* the entire Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
* Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding
* The Bible

Ten Movies I'll Watch Over and Over Again (not sure why this one is 10 and not 5 but I'll take it!):

* The Princess Bride
* The Sting
* Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
* Goodfellas
* Braveheart
* Out of Africa
* Sense and Sensibility (the Emma Thompson version)
* Truly, Madly, Deeply
* any of the Monty Python movies but especially Holy Grail and Life of Brian
* since this is the holiday season, I'll give a shout-out to A Christmas Story

Anyone else want to give this one a shot? Consider yourselves tagged! I shall leave you with a little snippet of one of my top ten movies, then I'm off to eat some of the turkey and rice soup Hubby has been making today with some of the leftovers from our Thanksgiving turkey - it was 16 pounds which is a lot for three people (well two and a half as Kiddo doesn't eat much turkey) so we had a lot of leftovers to freeze and use later! The soup smells soooo delicious that it has had my stomach rumbling all afternoon. Not even four Clementines have taken the edge off - my belly wants SOUP!