Really?

This is what I get when B helps me cook dinner - he's pretending the baguette is a baseball bat!

Warming up

Usually it's the kids who are sitting in front of the heat register in the kitchen. Today I found Muffles there.

Snow has arrived

We could be getting 7 inches today. The kids aren't yet home from school and we've had about 2 inches so far. All evening school activities have been canceled.

Getting ready

Today my friend, J, came over to prep me on what we can expect when our Japanese student is here. She hosted a student last year, her daughter (a senior) went to Japan last summer and they're hosting a student this year. She said the students are very polite and neat and we shouldn't expect to be able to communicate with them very much. Hopefully E can do that better than we can!

For New York

I've been looking for a while for a new cross-body purse to take to New York this fall. I found a nice one today. It has slots for my credit cards and driver's license, a pocket for a phone, another for my camera and several inside pockets. Maybe it will keep me organzied.

Our last Fun Fair

Today was our last Fun Fair as an Irving family. We can go in future years, we just won't have any kids actually in the school. L was there bright and early, before the doors opened at 11 a.m. and stayed all day to the bitter end at 3:30 p.m. B went over to grab himself a slice of pizza for lunch and to see if any of his friends were there - they weren't :( (but friend IB came over later!) Andy and E went to the Chicago Golf Show this morning in Rosemont (E got to drive there) and picked up some reading materials:

E spun a wheel at the Comcast cable booth and won two tickets to a White Sox game this summer. Andy spun twice and won three golf tees each time. Guess we know who the lucky one in the family is. After the golf show, Andy dropped E off at the River Forest Jewel to sell Girl Scout cookies with her troop from 1-3 p.m. Andy came back and took pictures at the Fun Fair to be used in the yearbook. Here's a picture of L's teacher, covered in whipped cream after her team "won" the Pie in the Face Contest - the highlight and culmination of the Fun Fair.

L came home with this interesting cupcake cake she won in the Dancing for Desserts game:

Andy and I bid on a silent auction item to have a family portrait taken at a local studio. I'm hoping they'll be able to take it in their garden. Andy also bid, and won, a one-hour private golf lesson from the pro at the Oak Park Country Club, who's an Irving dad!

Empty Bowls

E had dinner at the high school tonight. She and her friend, A, went to the school's Empty Bowls Community Dinner. About 20 local restaurants provide soup and bread and for a $10 donation, each diner gets all the soup and bread they can eat and a hand-crafted pottery bowl to keep. The bowls are made by students and professional potters who live in the village. The bowl is supposed to be a gentle reminder of the many empty bowls that need filling worldwide. Proceeds from the dinner benefit a local homeless shelter, the local food pantry and the Global Alliance for Africa. I'm not sure how much the dinner raised, but it's been close to $10,000 in years past. Obviously, it's a very popular fund raiser. E had chicken noodle and minestrone soup.

Fun Fair cupcakes

My plan was to make cupcakes tomorrow afternoon for the Fun Fair's cake walk on Saturday,  but L had a different idea. She wanted to make them today after school. She mixed up the cake, poured the batter into the cupcake liners and baked them. all by herself. I frosted and decorated mine first, with pastel sprinkles (above). L wanted to make her dozen of cupcakes into M&Ms, but I urged her to do something easier. She then thought of grating a Hershey bar and putting the shavings on the top of the cupcakes.

I think hers turned out looking better than mine!

What's that?

This afternoon I noticed a mark on B's arm. When I asked him what it was, he said Sophia wanted to write on his arm. Hmmmm. I've heard about this girl before. She's not a girlfriend, he claims, but a girl friend. Then why did she draw a heart by her name? Huh? He certainly wasn't upset by it though. ;)

Talent show

One of the things I missed over the weekend while I was at Darla's scrapbooking was the Pilgrim Talent Show. L's singing teacher helped coordinate the event and L sang, "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." Andy videotaped it for me. She did really well. She said she was nervous because there were so many people there, and there was no microphone. You may have to turn up the volume to hear it, but her teacher said he did a good job and was "rocking out." This was L's second appearance at the church talent show. Her first one was two years ago. Guess that makes this one her encore performance.

Sleepy boy

B came home from school today and fell asleep in my chair. We woke him up for dinner, then he sat down in front of the heat register in the kitchen. I brought him a blanket to cuddle up with. A few minutes later, I walked into the kitchen and he was sound asleep, sprawled out on the floor, with Muffles keeping a close watch. It wasn't even 7 p.m.

Busy, busy

Another busy day of scrapbooking. I got my album caught up to Christmas 2012 and started working on my big project - putting an album together of all the pictures when I was growing up. It's pretty overwhelming and certainly won't be in the chronological order, but it will be nice to have the pictures all in one place. I think the Girl Scout pages came out pretty well:

Darla has all of her old Girl Scout pictures too and I just had to copy her picture of our Cadette troop when we went ot the Ice Capades at the Checkerdome in St. Louis. It was Oct. 13, 1979. I was 13 and in eighth grade. That's Darla and me in the center of the back row. What a dated picture!

We did suspend the scrapbooking after dinner to watch the season finale of "Downton Abbey." We couldn't believe the ending! We all gasped and were in shock! And when the public TV announcer came on afterward to try to sell DVDs of the show and matter-of-factly told us he'd give us "time to catch our breath" I started laughing uncontrollably, just like Darla and I used to do in junior high. We'd start laughing and couldn't even look at other. If we did, we started laughing all over again. It was the same thing tonight. I had to go into the bathroom to calm myself down.

Croppin' away

Today I woke up at 6 a.m. and headed to Staunton at 6:30. I made really good time, arriving close to 10:30, which even included a stop at a rest area overrun with middle schools students headed to Springfield. I picked up Cindy at the farm and we headed to Darla's house. Alice, a friend of Darla's, who is also a classmate of Cindy's, joined us for the day. Darla made a yummy vegetable cheese soup for lunch - I think I'll have to get that recipe. We scrapbooked all day and got filled in on all the happenings around Staunton. When Darla's husband came home from work, he found us spread out in his man cave. We were inquiring about former classmates and had been flipping through yearbooks to recall some names. When he came into the basement, we were huddled around his laptop looking up former classmates on the Internet.

Lesson

The high school was off today so Andy scheduled E's golf lesson for this morning. I took her and her friend, R, to the lesson, then we ate lunch at the Patio and shopped at Yorktown. We were home by 3 p.m. to pick L up from her Outdoor Education trip. Here are a few pictures L took on the trip:

Here's L with her friend, M, showing off their stuffed animals before leaving for the trip.

Lunchtime!

A nice picture of the scenery.

Missing his Valentine

L has been away at her outdoor education trip since yesterday and Muffles has been wondering where she is. He keeps looking out the window, meowing at the door and today, I found him sleeping in her bed. He'll be glad when she comes home tomorrow.

My lunch date

B stayed home from school this morning so he could go over to Irving and test kids for his upcoming science fair project. He gave a fourth-grade class a multiplication test, then re-tested them with the promise of a reward if they did better than they did on the first test. So happy the principal and his former fourth-grade teacher let him do the project today. Otherwise, he'd be at a science fair with no experiment to back up or disprove his research and theory. That wouldn't have been good for the science grade.

After he was done with the testing, he had an orthodontist appointment. The orthodontist put on some new brackets in hopes of pulling some of his teeth down and they only do that during the day. The after-school appointments are for shorter check-ups. After the appointment, we went to Edwardo's for its lunch pizza and salad buffet. Then, on the way home B said we should stop and get him some medicine for his runny nose. The only kind we could find was a nighttime medicine which I'm guessing will put him to sleep this afternoon.

To the Dunes

L left this morning for the fifth-grade outdoor education program at the Indiana Dunes. There was a looong list of what to bring - it looks like she'll be gone for a week. She'll be home Friday afternoon.

Contagious

Even after telling L several times to get her things together for school, she left her lunchbox sitting on the kitchen counter. B couldn't believe it. She leaves things here all the time, then calls and usually B runs them over to the school. Today I was going out any way so I told him I'd take it over later. Sure enough, when he left for school about a half-hour later, I noticed his lunch was left sitting on the kitchen counter. It must have been contagious. Instead of going to one school to drop off a lunch, I got to go to two. I felt like a Meals on Wheels delivery person.

ERain

E's Japanese teacher has been teasing for two years that she can't pronounce her R's right in Japanese. To emphasis her point, her teacher calls her E-rain. A lot of other kids have nicknames, too, and at least doesn't consider hers too bad. Her teacher even included it on the list of people who are going to be at the airport to bring the Japanese students to the welcome potluck and pick up all their luggage.

It's only hair

L loves putting pink color in her hair and we usually help her spray it. However, the spray flakes all over and gets on her clothes, chairs and pillow. She asked if we'd considering dying it. At first we said no, but hey, it's only hair. We put in one pink stripe and it should fade gradually and wash out entirely in three to four weeks. We have enough dye to do it again, if she wants. This is a trial run.

Saturday snoozin'

L and I were the only ones who didn't nod off at some time during the day.

Classes

We went to the high school tonight to sign B up for his freshman year classes. He's going to take English, geometry, biology, Japanese, world history, gym and a freshman-mandated study hall.

E stayed after school today to take a test to pass the school's requirement for computer proficiency. Students can either pass the test, take a class at school or take an online class to fulfill the requirement. She managed (somehow) to pass the typing test a couple of weeks ago before the test shut down and they had to send the kids away. She had to type at least 35 words per minute and with her "search and peck" method of typing, I wasn't so sure she was going to be able to do that. She claims she was never taught how to type. Hmmm. Anyway, she was able to take her passing typing test score into today's test, finish the Word and Excel portions, and fortunately, she passed! Her counselor, who is also B's counselor, said that only 5 percent of kids who take the test pass. I find that pretty hard to believe, especially since E said most of the kids who took the test today said they passed it. E was there with her friend, A, though, who never said whether she passed or not. We're pretty sure if she passed we would have heard all about it.

It's done now

Andy came home from work

and said his chicken didn't seem cooked enough. He grabbed a smaller piece for dinner and put the larger piece back in the oven. He realized it was in there two hours later when he went to use the restroom. He baked a piece of chicken at 350 F. for more than two hours. It's done now, but he won't be eating it. It hardly looks recognizable. Maybe I should tell him that stoves have this handy thing called a timer? At least we both had a good laugh about it.

It's here!

When a package from the federal government arrived in the mail for E today I thought she had ordered some free consumer pamphlets. I set it on her computer for her to open when she got home. Inside was her passport. That was pretty quick - for the government, any way. Less than a month!

Legendary Wizard

E introduced me to the Swiped game for my iPad shortly after Christmas. Like Bejeweled, you can play it without really thinking about it. Just something to waste time, which apparently I'm really good at. Today I hit an all-time high - 17th level and got the new high score. I'm a legendary wizard. Everyone in the family except B plays the game on my iPad but look who has all the high scores:

Japanese Fest

Today was the Japanese Fest at the high school. E went with B and his friend, IR. They both plan to take Japanese as their world language next year as freshmen. We saw some Japanese dancers, face-painting, origami, games, etc. They were also serving Japanese food although B walked down to Tasty Dog to get himself a hotdog for lunch. The best part of the festival is the sumo wrestling. Kids volunteer to put on these huge sumo suits them wrestle. It's pretty entertaining because some of them can barely stand in the suits.

After the festival, Andy took E to their golf lessons, then to a golf club demonstration day at Bensenville. She was hitting the Wilson clubs really well. Guess who has her eye set on a new set of clubs?

Curious

Guess which curious kitten decided to crawl into my grocery bag and look for some food.