For those of you who are going, “What?” the word liebster comes from the German word lieb, or love. It also means cute, lovely, sweet or kind and forms the stem of the word lieben, to love. Liebster(s) is an adjective meaning favourite, loved, or dear or it can be used to refer to a person as a sweetheart or darling. If you’re still saying, “What?” then I will clarify.
I was nominated for the Liebster Award by Wings of Wonder. Thank you so much for thinking of me! The blog’s creator is a wonderful artist and always shows such beauty, both physically and in spirit on her blog. Please drop by for a visit.
As with most of these awards, accepting it requires a few rules – thank the person who gave it to you, answer the questions the nominator created, create 11 more questions, select 11 people/blogs along with links and notify the recipients but you cannot nominate the person who nominated you. Wings of Wonder ‘cheated’ a bit and did not create any more questions for me to answer. She simply nominated blogs and then told us things about herself. I think I’ll follow in her footsteps, since today will be a busy one, so here are some tidbits about me:
1) When I was about 8 0r 9, I was hanging upside down on the ‘monkey bar’ of our swing set and must have hit a nerve in my knees for they suddenly straightened and I landed straight down on my head. I’ve had back problems ever since and cringe whenever I see kids hanging upside down.
2) I started babysitting kids other than my younger brothers when I was 12. I think that’s where my love of young children was born – as long as I didn’t have too many to take care of at one time!
3) Around the age of 15 or 16, I got a part-time job at a toy & craft store. Being an arts & crafts type of person, I loved getting the 10% off all crafts supplies!
4) For the summers between the ages of 15 & 18, I worked at the grocery store in the beach resort where we had a cottage. I got to sell lots of candy to kids back when it was truly ‘penny candy’. It was amazing how much you could buy with a quarter, when Mojos and licorice whips were 5 for a penny!
5) The summer I turned 19, I got a job in the canteen at a nearby golf course. I learned I hated sardines. We had a regular who always ordered a sardine sandwich and the smell of those things used to turn my stomach!
6) Between the ages of 16 & 19, I realized I never wanted to be a banker and I never wanted to work retail again! I hated working with money because my Math dyslexia (self-diagnosed) made it scary to give out change – and this was before we had cash registers that told the cashier how much change to give back! I also had nightmares about serving customers until the wee hours of the morning. One night, I even woke up to find I was actually sitting up in bed as I served customers in my sleep!
7) When my daughter turned 8, I enrolled her in Brownies and, in order to help out the Brown Owl, I became her assistant, Tawny Owl. I loved doing crafts with the kids and taking them camping.
8) When my daughter turned 9, Brown Owl retired and no one wanted to take her place, so I volunteered to keep the pack open for Daughter. I was the Brown Owl for the next two years until my daughter moved on to Girl Guides. The last year became rather tedious as I had no regular helper and was often left with 12-15 little girls to keep an eye on – and I had one boy-crazy 10-year old who insisted on slipping away to watch the boys play basketball in the school yard!
9) I learned I never wanted to be an accountant after fundraising for the Brownie pack and trying to make the books balance at the end of each year. I’d get so stressed out working on making things balance. One year I actually thought I was out a hundred dollars! Fortunately, Hubby is a wizard at Math and helped me realize I had put some things in the wrong column. Whew!
10) After working with the Brownies, and later Girl Guides, I found I liked camping out and roughing it. A lot of my ideas for my stories came from those experiences. 🙂
11) Despite my love for roughing it and camping, I don’t ever want to sleep on the cold hard ground ever again. My back just could not handle that!
So we’ve come around full circle and I will leave it at that. On to ‘sharing the love’. These are blogs I’ve been following regularly for a long time because I just love them. There are many more that I have started following recently, but these I have been following the longest. Oh, and if you haven’t checked out the ones I nominated for the Booker Award, yesterday, you really should go visit them, too!
Now, it’s up to you to go check out these blogs. I hope you’ll love them as much as I do!