Today must be my lucky day!  Or maybe Monday was my lucky day, but I was just a little late in finding out about it.   No, I prefer to think of today being the day.  Monday was the beginning of a hurried and harried week.  My year-end report had to be written for work.  My husband became a SAHD for the second summer in a row.  There was car shopping to complete, and extra hours to work, and a toddler to transition, and not a lot of time for relaxing and enjoying.

But today?  Today the report was completed, and turned in, and I got out at 1pm.  Today, the toddler and the husband lived in perfect harmony for the first time this week, and there were no tears.  Today I got to drive the new car and take a meandering walk along a canal with my baby boy after my yoga class.  And today I got to catch up on my blog reading, and discovered my name attached to this, over at Txting Mr Darcy:

So today is my lucky day.  But, as with most luck in this lifetime (see lottery, inheritance, etc.) there are rules!  Rules, I tell you!  And though I usually believe rules are made to be broken, I'm going to go ahead and see if I can follow them this time.  Just for the heck of it.

Rule 1:  Thank the person who gave you the award.

Well, that's not a hard one!  It's just good manners, after all.  Thank you Brooke!  If you haven't read Txting Mr Darcy yet, well then, click on over there right now and give it a gander.  You won't regret it.  And that might just be the easiest rule I've ever followed.  Excluding the one about how once you open a family sized bag of Doritos, you really must eat them all, until the bag is well and truly empty.  Although that might be less of a rule and more of a philosophy to live by.  In any case, Brooke, the award made my day, and if you lived close by I would share my family size bag of Doritos with you.  Unless you like Cool Ranch.  Then you'd have to share with my husband.

Rule 2:  List 7 things about yourself your readers do not know.

1.  I started a blog in November of 2005.  I  had never even read a blog at that point.  I wrote 1 entry.  Then I lost the blog in cyberspace, and hadn't the foggiest idea how to even find it again.  When I signed up with Blogger in November of 2009, somehow I ended up finding my old 1 entry blog from '05.  I decided it was better just to begin again than to build upon that shoddy foundation.

2.  I had a girl dream.  With my last pregnancy, I had a boy dream very early on, and knew after that night that I would be having a boy.  Well, simultaneously knew and seriously doubted it all the time.  Same thing now.  I'm pretty sure I'm pregnant with a girl.  Except, seriously, how am I supposed to believe a dream?  But I do, and it's a girl.  Maybe.  (It is.)  (Or not.)

3.  I am a terrible nicknamer.  I call my son things like skootle-dee-bootsie-bootle-dee-boo.  He sometimes refers to himself as Booty-boo now (See, that wasn't a random example.  It's one of his actual names).  I should really stop, but I can't.  Multiple members of my family call me Ned Flanders.  Although I don't know who they think they're kidding.  Where do they think I got it?

4.  I actually cook dinner twice a week now, for the first time in my life.  Taco Tuesdays, and Pizza Fridays.  Yes, we eat the same thing every Tuesday, and every Friday.  This is mostly because they are the only two things I know how to cook (although I had to learn to make tacos, and it took me a good month of Tuesdays to get it downpat), but they have the sly side effect of ensuring my variety-loving husband will not want me to take over more than two nights a week, lest he die of boredom following my menu.

5.  In addition to being obsessed with class issues, I'm also somewhat obsessed with race.  I think this is because I grew up in a neighborhood and city that was diverse, but also had a lot of racial tension.  Then I spent my college and grad school years in all-white small towns.  It left me with the unfortunate impression that racism is rampant, especially in places that aren't diverse.  I'm not quite as obsessed now that I live in a city again, but when I lived in small towns I sometimes felt weird about how often I obsessed about race.

6.  I am an all or nothing person.  So I've had periods in my life where everything I owned was organized, labeled, filed, or put away in its precise place.  Other times I keep all my clothing in large, unfolded piles on my loveseat.  I've been in a disorganized phase since we moved into this house, because we just don't have places for everything yet, and sometimes it drives me crazy.  Other times I can tune it out completely.

7.  I've never had cable television in my life.  We don't watch any TV at all, just DVDs that come through Netflix.  But the funny thing is, I order almost exclusively TV shows through Netflix.  I've been saying we'll order cable soon since 2002.  Somehow, we haven't gotten around to it.

Rule 3:  Award 5 bloggers who you've recently discovered.

Okay, here goes!

1.  Angels in the Architecture:  Besides the awesome blog name, Leel posts examples of her artwork and crafts that are very inspiring.  I've done very little crafting of my own in the last few years, but every time she posts pictures of what she's up to, I spend the afternoon daydreaming about what I'd like to make when I find the time to start creating again.  I'm also very intrigued by the story of her birth, adoption, and her family, of which she has shared a little bit.  I can't wait to hear more whenever she's ready to tell it!

2.  The Dayton Time:  Pamela (I won't use a nickname, because I know she hates nicknames.  And it would end up as Pamelootie-toot-tootie, or something equally reprehensible, anyway, in my hands.) blogs about life with her husband The Mister, and their four children.  She makes it all sound like so much fun, and even the annoyances are amusing in the way she tells them.  She sort of makes me want to cook and raise chickens, even though I shudder when I think about chickens.  And cooking, really.  But I don't shudder at all when I see that she has a new post up.  And I'm usually laughing by the time I get to the end.

3.  By the Seat of our Pants:  Jasie writes about her life and family in Port Townsend where she homeschools her son, Silas, and just bought a brand new house with her fiance, Seth.  She too, is crafty, and has awesome fashion posts about her thrift store finds.  I'm not especially fashionable, but I used to sew and create new things from thrift store finds, so I love to live vicariously through her while I take a hiatus from that side of myself.  She's also very thought provoking and has a lot of posts that leave me thinking for hours or even days later.

4.  When I Grow Up:  Michelle is married to an old friend of mine from high school.  We've never met in real life, but her husband showed her my blog after I posted it on Facebook, she commented, which led me to her blog, and the rest is history!  She's a life coach in the Big Apple, and blogs about her own process in balancing work and life, finding her bliss, and making dreams work in the everyday.  You can tell by reading that she's great at her job, and I love her Tough Question Tuesdays, and all the beautiful images she uses to illustrate her posts.

5. Corn-Bean:  Linlah takes amazing photographs, and always makes me chuckle with her dry wit.  Her posts are short, sweet, and to the point, and her pictures are worth more than a thousand words.  And there's a funny story in my family where my mom, seeing the name Linlah in my comments, thought it was my youngest sister's online alias, because her name is somewhat similar.  Alas, no one in my family can wield a camera and end up with photos as awesome as the ones I like to click through over at corn-bean, though.

So, there you go!  New reads galore, and I followed all the rules!  Look at me: making dinner, following rules.  Next thing you know I'll have my whole attic organized.  Or at least finish a family sized bag of Doritos.  I take my successes where I can find 'em.  And I hope tomorrow is a lucky day for us all!