⚡Trinket Girlies, Hermit Crabs + Tricks/Treats: Lil Treasures #301
We're talking American Girl Dolls, poetry as resistance, and chili day.
Happy Halloween, friends! 🎃
If you’re celebrating tonight, I hope your day of costume and Trick-or-Treat prepping is as magical as it gets! If you’re doing a group costume or something off-the-wall, let me know in the comments. As for me, I will be enjoying the evening eating chili (everyone in my family hates chili, sadly) alone in my house while my kids are out roaming for candy! Glory!
Today is the last day of October, which means (as of late Thursday night) that over 41 million people won’t be receiving their SNAP benefits tomorrow. In the state of Alabama, over 750,000 people will go without the supplemental food help they desperately need. 1 in 4 families in Birmingham (where I live) receive SNAP to help them put food on their tables each month.
Instead of stewing over my frustration that the government is not using their emergency funds for this actual emergency, I’d love to encourage you to give a few dollars to help a local food bank or supplier in your area! I donated to Grace Klein Community and would recommend them to anyone in the Birmingham area. They do such an excellent job of spreading their resources and impacting the community. Regardless of where you live, it’s always a good idea to donate to your local food bank! You can find one in your area at this link.
Lastly, be on the lookout for a resurgence of the We Got You Club in the next week! It’s been a few years since we’ve utilized this resource, so we’re currently doing a few tweaks to the process to make it better. The goal remains the same: connect the helpers with those who need help, and provide resources/connection in any way we can. Stay tuned for updates!
🎧 I had a very lovely chat with Andy Hale over on the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) podcast about what it means to commune with God. You can listen to that episode here!
⚖️ There’s a lot of collective rage (I feel it, too) over how people are responding to SNAP running out and I think Lindsay Rush spells it out so clearly in this poem. Note to add: I have also seen the opposite to be true this week. That pendulum do be swinging.
🍲 I might be having chili tonight, but I am manifesting now that future-Erin will be making this creamy hatch chile chicken and rice soup! Add hatch chiles to anything and I will be personally invested.
🍅 Need some costume ideas or some spooky-related content for your Halloween? Visit this thread for ideas and a few giggles.
🚫 Cue up the newest episode of Faith Adjacent for a hearty conversation on The Nos of Evangelism! We’re taking a few listener comments on things like hermit crabs, evangelism tracts, and much more evangelical-related content. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your pods!
That’s it for the treasures, my darlings! I hope your weekends are as lovely as you are. Will you please leave your treasures before you go? I’ll see you there!
Erin, hope that your Halloween solo chili feast was everything you needed. I'm very excited to share that, after 9 months of searching, I finally got a full-time job! I'm working at a senior independent living community in the business office, and the staff and residents are just the sweetest. It's like having dozens of aunties and uncles, and they all want to stop and chat with the new gal. Plus, staff can get a free breakfast and lunch during our shift, and it's a 4-minute commute! Feeling beyond blessed and so grateful to be contributing in the workplace again and earning a paycheck.
Hope that everyone's Halloween evening was filled with Reese's pumpkins and little darlings in costume. Happy fall back weekend!
Oh my gosh, that animorphs group costume is GENIUS!
Sending all the cozy vibes to you, Erin, as you partake in your blessed Halloween tradition! May your chili be scrumptious, your solitude in your home restorative, and the complaining wrought by your offspring returning from festivities as minimal as reasonably possible. ❤️
A couple of treasures:
- My daughter was hospitalized last Sunday with acute appendicitis and had that stupid useless organ removed on Monday. Everything went as well as it possibly could have. 🥹 We caught it before it got REALLY bad, the staff in our Peds ER and ICU floor were absolutely wonderful, she's been recovering well, and we are very, very privileged to have excellent health insurance through my husband's work.
- Brandi Carlile's new album, Returning to Myself. That wondrous voice of hers just mothers my soul like no one else's.
Have a lovely weekend everyone! I'm excited to see what the new version of the We Got You club looks like - I don't think I was here for the first rendition, and plan to contribute this time around. 😘