Mama On The Move

November is National Novel Writer's Month.  Emily loves to write and has participated in NaNoWriMo for six years.  She has actually completed two full novels and reached her word count goal each year. Each year NaNoWriMo chooses thirty participants whose novels sound promising, and have professional artists design a cover for the novel based on the author's description.  So this year out of around 200,000 people who entered........ Emily's novel was one of the thirty chosen!!!!! She was told about a month ago that she was one of the ninety people who made the first cut.  All the cover artists were each given three titles and descriptions to work with.  They had to choose which of the three novels they thought they could best design a cover for.  Only .015% of people who hoped to be chosen were actually picked and Emily was one of them!!!!! BEHOLD: Kierstan Royal, a resident of the Last Colony on what remains of earth, has more or less resigned himse

Had to laugh yesterday at the conversation between my girls! Emily and Katie were wondering what our dogs would be like if they were suddenly turned into humans.  We don't squelch imaginative thinking in our school. They decided that Ringo would be the type to wear a leather jacket and ride a motorcycle. Katie declared, "Yep!  He'd be a Harley's Angel!"

Katie has been letting her hair grown lo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ong! It was driving her crazy and she was very tired of it, but she was growing it to donate to "Locks of Love".  Today, it was finally long enough to cut!  Hair salons will measure and cut the hair for you.  We'd been in a few times to see if it was long enough, but she didn't want it to be super short when she got it cut so we had to let it keep growing.  She was able to donate ten inches of hair and still have enough left over to touch her shoulders!

Emily was recently able to attend a homeschool homecoming masquerade dance.  She only knew one other person at the dance and rather than sit at a table with her one friend all night, she decided she would just cut loose and dance and be crazy and have a good time because no one knew who she was so who cares what they think, right? Very un-Emily like. But boy, did that make me proud! One of the challenges for glasses-wearers is finding a mask.  Most masks can't go over glasses, and glasses don't go over masks.  Luckily, after some research, I found a mask specifically made for people who wear glasses! And.....since we are talking masquerades and all, here is the masquerade scene from Phantom of the Opera for your enjoyment:

Since Ben is too old to trick-or-treat for Halloween, and he's too far away to benefit from everyone else's candy, the girls decided to send him a candy gram.   A piece of poster board would have been difficult to mail, so Emily found a piece of cloth to use.  It folded nicely into a box.  We used rubber cement to glue the candy to the cloth - and unintentionally to the newspaper behind it as well as to the dining room table.  We were fortunately able to peel it away from the table, but the newspaper had to be mailed with it. It says, "Dear Ben, Last Payday we drove to New York to get you some Turtles that we could teach to Rolo-ver but we got stuck behind a Slowpoke on 5th Avenue and it was only, like, Zero degrees outside and the car Frost-ed over so instead we flew to the Milky Way and Skor-ed you some alien Whatchamacallits.  They said to Take 5 but we only took 3 (Musketeers) because there wasn't room in our car.  Happy Halloween!  Wishing you Extra (Alm