Welcome To my ME page, and thanks for taking the time to take a peek at what I have to say here.
I would like to thank my customers for their thoughts and prayers they have been greatly appreciated...... Not long ago my world was turned upside down when my mother had a seizure in the middle of the night. Two days later they were sent to a larger hospital where an MRI showed a large brain tumor. Within the week they had an apt in Rochester MN, at the great Mayo Clinic and surgery was set for the next day. My brother and I both decided to drive down there at night so we would arrive at the hospital before she had surgery so we could spend those last minutes with her before surgery. It was such a relief to me to be able to talk to her late that night in ICU before we left to go back to our hotel. We stayed the rest of the week while she recovered. The news was less than positive and I needed some time after we got back home to deal with that. It's affected my mom is so many ways and it's hard for me to accept. (speech and memory) She isn't out of the woods yet. It's now March 19th and she is just starting her 3rd week of radiation back in Rochester MN. They are giving her the strongest they can give and she is starting to get quite sick from it even with the medication to help. She will be home the middle of April for a month off before she has to return for several rounds of chemo.
So thanks for understanding why I needed to take a break and deal with family issues for awhile. I didn't handle the news well myself and I'm still trying to cope with it, but it's getting better. Thanks for all the thoughts and prayers for my mom as well and a speedy recovery. (I hope)
~kris
I love selling on ebay to provide my customers to many high quality items but sadly ebay keeps changing the rules sellers must follow so I did what many others are doing and I closed my ebay store and opened my own one off site. But I will still continue to sell on ebay!
I choose to sell on ebay and my own site as a way to supplement our income. So I do this for profit rather than just fun. Even though it can be fun to meet all sorts of new people. And since I began selling I have met some wonderful people.
I started out on ebay as a buyer and slowly switched to selling, and now I do both. But my buying is done on a separate account. I buy supplies for the items that I sell, but I also buy for myself and my family as well. Then I decided to open a store on ebay and I had it for a few years. I was very proud of it but ebay is making it more difficult for sellers so I closed it. I'm proud of all that I have learned (about ebay, computers, HTML and about the products I sell) and I make it a point to comply with each and every rule they have. But there are many that I disagree with, but they don't leave me much choice.
My reborn doll bottles started as a whim several years ago for my daughter. But then I realized there were many things wrong with the recipes that I purchased and set out to learn how to make them better so they wouldn't go bad, separate and stay fresh for the future. I have spent a lot of time working on my recipes and throwing out batches that I wasn't happy with so please don't ask me to share my recipes or my ingredients.
I would like to make it known that I have started using a new recipe that I think is better than any other recipe I have used to date. I no longer depend on white school glue to get the opaque white coloring. The down side of glue is that it will stick to the bottle if your not careful and use to much. So now I use a totally different product to give me my white milky color. While it doesn't separate it does settle a little bit. But unlike bottles made with glue that need vigorous shaking, now they just need to be inverted (slowly even) once or twice!!! How exciting is that!!! You will be as tickled about these as I am, so check them out! I still don't use water because water will mold and they still remain non-toxic and safe even for kids to use.
To read more about reborn bottles in general and the ones I make please read this link HERE
When I first started with my bath and body products I just started with simple bath salts. Mostly for personal use and for my kids. But it didn't take me long till I realized that I needed to learn how to make soap. One of the medications my son takes is a very strong one in the class of anti-psychotic medications. And one of the side effects is photo-sensitivity. Meaning even a few minutes in the sun can give him a really bad sunburn. And we soon learned that cool baths helped with oatmeal, but the down side was the store bought soap also irritated his already sensitive skin. So we found that handmade soap made the old fashioned way was our miracle. Only by that time the rest of the family was addicted. And from there I set out to learn how to make the other products that I offer in my store. I don't use pre-made mixes, but instead I learned how to make all these products, and how to make them while having the right balance of all the ingredients and make them safely as well.
Because I feel safety is extremely important and I feel saddened at all the buyers on ebay who are buying products that they think are safe but are not. Namely the products that should be made with a chemical preservative. The benefits outweigh any risks for using them and only a small amount is used. And the number of sellers who are looking to make a quick buck rather than thinking of the safety of their customers. And those that do not comply with the FDA rules set up for selling handmade bath and body products.
But I also sell other items as well, depending on what I have to get rid of or what I find to sell. Some of my items come from thrift stores or garage sales as well. I'm proud of the items I sell and would never consider selling something that I wouldn't buy for myself or my family.
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All my friends call me ~kris, even though my real name is a bit longer. But I'm a gal from North Central, North Dakota. I haven't lived here all my life, and I've traveled the world and lived abroad for a number of years while growing up as a kid/teen.
I'm now married with children with two dogs and cat. I'm a stay at home mom and have been since my first daughter was born. My husband works for a local grain elevator and also helps out in their fertilizer and chemical department in the spring and summer. He even drives their locomotive train when they fill 110 car trains with grain. And can go to any of their departments and work.
I've got three wonderful kids and the two youngest are special needs. Yet both are so very precious in their own ways. What I wouldn't give for them to not have their quarks, yet it gives them their own special personalities.
My son has severe ADHD, Aspergers syndrome (a form of autism), problems with both fine and gross motor skills, mood disorder, vision problems, just to name a few. Our daughter has PDD-NOS which is a form of Autism. Bot also seem to be borderline OCD with many things. Things must be done a specific way or we deal with a melt down.
When we first was learning of some of the different possibilities that could be wrong with my youngest daughter we had to consider several different possibilities. She went backwards and became non-verbal, hated to be touched, didn't like to interact with anyone which was really hard to watch your child do. One one of the forums I belong to I posted a question hoping someone might help with a personal experience. And someone sent me this poem. I've held it dear to my heart ever since. Because when I was pregnant with my children I had hopes of the perfect child. And they were born with 10 fingers and 10 toes and looked so perfect and normal. But it was years later when everything seemed to fall apart. It's hard to see your child go from happy and verbal to withdrawn and nonverbal and not know why. And even have a doctor tell you it's nothing to worry about. Luckily I disregarded that opinion and got another. And it's been a up and down journey ever since.
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For a long while I had this poem posted on my ebay ME page, and one of my customers read it and told me thank you for posting it. She had been married for many years when her husband was in a terrible car accident one day, and in the snap of a finger he went from a vibrant active man, to one who depended on her for just about everything. It wasn't the life she planned or would have expected. But she found comfort in this poem.
Even if you don't have a special needs child, and don't have to deal with those issues. Maybe you can find some comfort in it for something else, when life decided it was time to throw you a curve ball. Or you can share it with someone who needs to read it. If you share this poem please give the author full credit, by including that information as well.
Welcome To Holland
© 1987, by Emily Perl Kingsley.
All rights reserved.
I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this...
When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome To Holland".
"Holland?!?" you say, "What do you mean "Holland"??? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy"
But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.
So you must go and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around…and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills...Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy...and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned".
And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away...because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss.
But...if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things...about Holland.
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