Mama On The Move

Seventeen full years she's been on this planet.  She took her time getting here - arrived two weeks late -and still had to be forced to finally present herself. She's usually on time these days but still pretty darn stubborn about what she's going to do and when she's going to do it. This year, she didn't want a cake.  She wanted her Daddy's cobbler.  And she wanted her Mama's stroganoff for dinner.  And egg nog.  And she didn't want a party, she wanted to watch The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I had ordered her a mandolin for her birthday this year, but she found out about it when she was checking Amazon and saw it in my orders.  I threatened not to get it for her after all.  She was pretty excited when she opened it.  She knew I'd never really take it back as much as she wanted it. Cobbler, stroganoff, egg nog, Lord of the Rings, and a mandolin. She's a pretty happy 17 year old camper right now.

And......on his birthday someone dropped a clamp on to Ben's forehead from eight feet above him.

 I can't believe he's twenty years old!  It seems like just yesterday we were celebrating his fourth birthday with a caterpillar cake.  He loved bugs and wanted a bug themed party. Or his sixth birthday where he wanted a Star Wars theme.  We had the party at Alaskaland and a stranger gave him a few dollars as a birthday gift because her son wanted to join the party.  After all the guests left, a duck waddled up and we fed him leftover cake. Or his eighth birthday where he wanted an Army theme.  Kerry set up an obstacle course for all the kids and ran them through "boot camp" and we threw water balloons that looked like grenades at each other. It's hard to believe my little boy is now a man, planning to get married and looking ahead to all the life before him.  We aren't with him this year on his birthday, there is no theme, I'm not looking for the right cake.  But he is happy and making strides toward being independent and self...

This is the "human video" from the tumbling team.  See if you can spot Ben!

For Katie's Language Arts lessons, we've been covering adjective phrases, adverb phrases, adjective clauses, adverb clauses - you know, things that you'll use all the time as an adult.  If I had a quarter for every time I'd been stopped on the street and asked whether or not a sentence contained phrases or clauses and if so, what type of phrases or clauses they were, I'd be a rich woman today. And if only someone would offer me money to diagram said sentences, well...... thank goodness I have all this knowledge in my head, I'm sure it will come in very handy one of these days. Anyway, Katie has been having trouble remembering the difference between clauses and phrases. I was trying to come up with a silly image to help her remember the difference.  "Just imagine Santa Clause talking.  When Santa CLAUSE speaks, he always uses subjects and verbs!" Katie looked at me like was crazy and said, "Ho Ho Ho has a subject and verb?"

For the first time ever, Kerry, the girls, and I entered a 5K! (I hope you now have the impression that we ran it, and that I am in fabulous shape.) In actuality, we walked it.  Kerry could totally have run it.  The man runs half-marathons and enjoys it.  He's run a full marathon and didn't really enjoy it, but still occasionally says he might do it again.   The girls and I could have run it ........ if someone had been chasing us with an axe........and even then, it would have been iffy. This is before the race. This is after the race.  This is after the "after party" after the race. Let me show you some more. Before the race.  After the race. The girls opted to really wallow in the color which is why they have a lot more on their faces than I do. My arms were pretty blue though.  This is The Color Run and it's billed as the "Happiest 5K On The Planet".  There are four color stations alo...

This morning, I was getting ready upstairs, when I realized Emily would need me to spray some styling gel in her hair before we left for the hairdresser to get her coiffed for the prom. I called down the stairs, "Emily, could you come here for a minute, please?" She came pounding up the stairs, her eyes wide. "I need to spray some goop in your hair before it dries so it will hold the style," I told her. "Oh, good!  I thought I was in trouble!" she said with relief. "Did I sound like I was mad?" I asked. "Well, since you never yell when you're mad, I can't tell if you sound mad or not.  You sound the same all the time.  I never know if you're calling me up here to tell me a joke or to tell me to pick up my clothes off the floor.  You should yell at us when you're angry so we know.  You never yell at us and now I can't tell when you're angry and it's probably warped my sense of how people interact with o...