Thinks By Me

Saturday, April 29 was one of the more unusual birthdays I've had. Because John is going to be missing Eric's 10th birthday on Tuesday, we decided dad would take son out for a special day of birthday fun rather than us all spending the day together. They started with going out to breakfast, followed by a few hours of fishing, finalized with fighting a real-live brush fire together with the fire department. In between all the activity, he and Eric put some finishing touches on the famous castle that is due on Tuesday. In an attempt to make the castle 'authentic', the boys decided to spray-paint the sugar cubes a light gray to make them look more like concrete. My assessment is that it would have been better to leave them white, since Neuschwanstein looks like a white castle to me--but I am all for letting the people who do the work make the decisions, so 'mum' is the word. Meanwhile Little Chic and I went to a Narnia musical based on the story The Lion, the ...

Little Chic had a field trip to the Kopernik Observatory today with her 3rd grade class. These excursions are always great for me, because Science would not have been one of my more favored subjects in school. I generally remembered the facts long enough to fill in the answers on the test and then promptly forgot them. Therefore, my transcripts show that I should be brilliant enough to be a rocket scientist, but truthfully, I'm one of the duller colors in the crayon box when it comes to scientific data. I invited myself to go along and it proved to me that my kids are learning in grade school what I'm sure I didn't cover until at least middle school. Rather than talk about space as you would expect at an observatory, we instead talked about pulleys, weight, momentum, friction, energy, gravity and the such. The kids had two hands-on projects which they loved. They had to build a pulley system and measure how much force they used to lift some metal rings for the first p...

I left in a flash to escape to the tanning bed last night as my 41-year old kid got ready to "play" with my 9-year-old kid. Can you imagine how many sugar cubes fit in 5 boxes? Anyway, when I returned, 2 calm, relaxed males were making real headway with the castle project. Eric was perched on the counter snacking on popcorn inspecting each sugar cube to make sure it wasn't broken. John was alternating burning his fingers with hot glue and attaching "bricks" cube by cube. When they were finished for the night, they were both really happy with the outcome. I'm not sure if it's the gender or the personality trait, but I would've been a high-strung, stressed-out mess by the time I'd assembled all the materials. All I had to do was wipe and vacuum the sugar crystals all over the counter and floor. Thank goodness for Dads!

Eric recently came home from his SPARK group at school (gifted program) stating that he had to write a report and build a "to-scale" model of a historic structure. He had lots of choices. This is the one he made. I quickly informed him that even though Mom is the hero of all things to do with homework, providing help, gathering supplies, noting due dates and test schedules, I am NOT a builder, artist or anything of the sort. When questioned why he had chosen this particular building, he answered that he really preferred to have something "complicated" rather than chosing a simple, straightforward like say, the Great Wall of China. No, he was enamored with Castle Neuschwanstein which is the inspiration for one of the Disney castles and is one of the most visited historic buildings in the world. He really liked it because he thought it would be challenging. The problem is that this is not a fun project. It is a school assignment which means that it gets a grade...

NY State has become quite exuberant in its war against methamphetamine abuse. Because of this, a recent law was instated that requires you to show picture ID every time you purchase a product containing pseudoephedrine. Sudafed has come out with a substitute ingredient in its cold remedy products that you can get over the counter, but after trying these, I've found they don't seem to have quite the same effect. If you want the original formula, you have to ask for it behind the counter, and then sign and show ID to purchase it. As luck would have it, I recently got sick with an aggressive virus, and I was feeling badly for about two weeks. As the sinus symptoms progressed, I traveled to my local CVS pharmacy and purchased a 20-pack of 12-hour Sudafed (the stuff you sign for). Not surprisingly, John also came down with the virus as I was on the upswing. Between the two of us, the 20-pack of Sudafed didn't really last all that long. So a trip followed to the Apalachin...

Saturday night brought the exciting news that my mom is going to get married in July. Her beau is Ken, and they are the result of a success story from E-Harmony--you know the TV commercial with "This will be an everlasting love" theme song--the diddy that you can never get out of your head? Well, anyway, the news wasn't exactly a shock as we've all met Ken and some of his family and we really like him and them. And they seem to really like us which is always a bonus. We've been talking to our kids about the possibility of Grammy moving to Texas where Ken lives, moving away from Salisbury where we usually visit her and getting everybody all used to the changes that will take place. Anywhoooo, this is the second time my kids have been through this particular experience. Last July, my dad got married and although it was the first time my kids remember a new family member, circumstances didn't change too much since my dad stayed in the same town and lived in ...

Girls need their time together. Jokes have been made from the beginning of time about how we always go to the bathroom in groups, wear out the ears of our spouses with our zillions of words a day, chat on the phone while we are scrubbing the toilet and supervising bathtime at the same time and all that other jazz. But let me tell you, girl time is hard work. It begins with the illusion of a night away from home free of the responsibility of pouring bowls of cereal, making sandwiches, mediating sibling arguments, putting little people to bed, washing clothes, picking up messes....you know, the daily grind. Hours of planning where we'll go, what we'll do, how many clothes we'll bring, where we'll stay overnight make the wait almost unbearable. By the time the day comes, six of us are so ready to get away, that we dream all the way to our destination of an uninterrupted dinner out, a soak in the hot tub, a little doing of nails and eyebrow plucking (all the stuff we ne...

Thirteen Things about JENNIFER 1…. My #1 priority today is to get ready for my girl's overnight trip tomorrow. 2.... I'm also getting my hair trimmed. 3.... Since high school, I've changed my hairstyle/color at least every 2 years. 4.... As an adult, I've played on a women's soccer team and a women's softball league. 5.... In soccer, I was a halfback and in softball, I was catcher. 6.... My current favorite sport is American freestyle kickboxing. 7.... I am obsessed with books. And magazines. 8.... I've often left Barnes & Noble with 5 books or more. 9.... I'm not big on libraries except for fiction books--I like to keep my books. 10.. I rarely re-read books. Or re-watch movies. 11.. Other than my one morning cup, it seems I've kicked my coffee addiction. 12.. I detest cleaning my house, but I love to have it immaculate. 13.. I'm a great speller, but bad at math. Links to other Thursday Thirteens! 1. (leave your link in comments, I’ll add...

QUESTION: What's the difference between waking up to a rainy, dreary day and waking up with the realization that the holiday is over?!? ANSWER: You just cannot seem to get out of bed. This morning was a rude awakening, not an unusual happening for this household after a few days off our school year routine. Nobody wanted to get out of bed (well, mom or Eric, that is) and Little Chic luckily came to alert me that the morning prep time was dwindling with every push of the snooze button. If anybody could be considered an early bird in our family, she'd be the only one close. The day rewarded us though, with temps to almost 70 and sunshine. That's something we don't take for granted in April around these parts. I can testify that this winter has been surprisingly mild and we've had our share of pleasant, sometimes downright glorious weather at the most unusual times of the year. In fact, our new worship leader at church just relocated here from Colorado Springs, ...

There is a little girl who lives at our house. She is 8, and I call her Little Chic. Some say she's my daughter, but that can't possibly be so. She has a dad who is very analytical, not artistic and a mom who is the same way. This girl, whoever she shares her genes with, has got every artistic tendency that can be passed down the line. At 3, she was designing dresses out of Walmart bags, complete with spaghetti straps made out of the handles, with several connected together to make it floor-length. At 5, she was making 2-D life-sized sculptures of her dad with printer paper, and 8, she is becoming a balloon artist. Little Chic has always loved balloons--just the latex variety that you can bat everwhere. The Easter Bunny obliged and included a 50-pack of the long, thin type that you make balloon animals out of, with the little air pump so you don't have to pass out while you are blowing them up. She went through the entire bag of 50 yesterday, designing everything fr...

As it did to many households today, Resurrection Sunday brought the excitement of starting the morning with the focus on the the new life all around us. Caroline was buzzing around the house at 6:30 am searching all over for the hidden basket the "Easter Bunny" apparently brought, with clues of colored grass scattered around our carpet. For Eric, something about knowing mom is the filler of all cool baskets let him stay in bed and sleep a little longer than his sister. I suppose if I were a good mother, I'd have hopped out of bed with camera at the ready to watch the search. But I just didn't have the heart to make Caroline wait until I got up at 8am! Eric did remind me that he realized I was the one who gave him all the goodies and he thanked me for the cool Star Wars comic book I'd included. Besides the spring flowers coming up, the baby lambs born just down the road from our church and the birds returning to the warmer weather, I got to remind my kids that...

Just as I'm recovering from an almost 2 week sinus/ear infection, poor John has gone and caught a strain of it. His particuarly variety seems a little more like the flu with the body aches and feeling cold all the time. He's such the trooper, that he let me run out for about 2 hours this morning for a quick pow-wow with a couple of girls from the PTA (rather than discuss business, we got pedicures ;) I rushed right home, feeling bad for staying out longer than I'd intended, and Oh me, Oh my, the fire department had a call. So guess which sick member of the family loaded up two kids and hauled over to the action?! I wasn't feeling quite so sympathetic by the time I got him on the phone and realized where everybody was. He returned home with the kids in tow shortly after, and I fed the kids a quick lunch and toted them to the grocery store with me, under the guise of keeping them out of John's hair so he could rest. A couple of hours later when we returned, Joh...

With the kids off for the Easter holiday, I resisted the urge to pack in activities to keep everybody busy each day. Although I like to start my morning off relaxed, usually by 11am I am going stir-crazy as is Caroline. Eric on the other hand, craves days and days in a row of staying around the house, doing whatever he chooses. He would gladly stay in our house and yard, not venturing out anywhere the entire 6 days off school. Caroline and I are more alike, going a little nuts with all the free time and nothing planned. Sometimes conflicts arise with me trying to keep Caroline busy while not dragging poor Eric to and 'fro. This Easter break, I am trying to find a little balance and pleasure for us all. Thursday, the first day off, we did our favorite thing-staying in our jammies, reading, playing (me watching Dr. Phil) until about 10am when I told everybody to at least get breakfast, brushed teeth and dressed. We hung around the house until 2pm when I dropped Caroline off at...

For several weeks, Eric has been enthralled with the idea of buying a share of stock. We had quite the discussion about a week ago and he wanted all the details of exactly what it would mean if he owned a share of stock. Would he actually own that part of the company? Could he sell his share whenever he wanted? What if the stock value went down? Would he be allowed to use the employees that worked for that little piece of the company that he owned? For a flash of a moment, he considered using some of his birthday money that he'll be getting in a few weeks to purchase and follow the value of some stocks. This whole discussion was a couple of weeks ago and he didn't mention it again. Until tonight. He was out running around the yard, waving his light sword in his typical madman fashion when he came inside all excited. He had made the decision to make up a list of odd jobs he would be willing to do and he would assign a price to each job in an effort to raise some extra m...

One of my personality traits (do I have to say flaw?) is that I tend to take life too seriously. I would not generally be called the life of the party. If you are at the party, I am not the one providing all the entertainment. I'm the one running around making sure we have enough food, seeing if all the decorations are still up and generally having a hissy fit if anything veers from perfect. For me, it's all in the big picture. Since I tend to look at life through binoculars instead of through rose-colored glasses, I worry a lot about teaching the right values to my kids. And forbid should I miss one lesson...they only have a lifetime to learn everything they are supposed to know. But this weekend, I had the chance to revisit the lesson that if you don't enjoy and focus on the process of getting where you're going, you won't get as much joy out of what you accomplish. Case in point.... Eric was down in the dumps about not placing in the state competition for t...

Eric had his first experience of putting lots of effort in the form of hours of time, lots of brainpower and months of planning with his competition in Destination Imagination this week. His team of 6 fourth graders entered the State Finals to present their improv skit as well as compete in an on-the-spot creative problem solving exercise. I was fully supporting his involvement in this DI team since it offered a good chance for him to use his talents in a teamwork environment. He doesn't get a lot of opportunity to work on group projects since he doesn't care for any of the sports that he has tried so far. And he tends to be a little bit bossy. I'm sure he doesn't get that from his mother. The group worked together for approximately 4 hours per week since December 2005 to create their project from scratch. The main rule of the competition is that although there is an adult leader in the team, there is absolutely no adult help allowed - no ideas, no glueing, no st...

I found out yesterday that this acronym stands for "Moods in Mothers and in Children. Eric and I participated in a research project being done by the Binghamton University Mood Disorders Institute. They are conducting this research to better understand the relationship between mothers and their childrens' moods. Specifically, they are interested in how negative moods in either person can affect the other. The main hypothesis is that when either a mother or her child is feeling depressed, the other person will start to feel depressed as well. The study took 3.5 hours with each of us being interviewed, answering a 45-minute questionaire, taking a computer test and having a DNA sample taken. I have always been exceedingly interested in psychology and how the mind and emotions work in developing us as people, and I even thought at one point in my life that I might perhaps be a counselor of some sort. Without presenting the boring details of the project, I was amused at 2 th...

This is Brigitte in her earlier days (from my earlier post today). I'd like to teach my kids to present themselves the best they can, but really, it's just an afterthought, not the real deal like the inside is. Thanks bro, for the lead. I was going to look up a "young pic" of Brigitte when I posted, but was too lazy to do it myself.

This image popped up on my opening page of Yahoo this morning and I was really struck by the value of outer beauty our culture has. This is Brigitte Bardot (a famous actress way back when) who was outwardly a gorgeous woman in her time. I don't really know anything about her life but hopefully she has inner beauty and values that matter, because nature takes its toll on our bodies, no matter who we are. At this point in her life, it's hard to recognize who she was when she was making movies. Ironically I went to a hairstyling class last night (it was really fun and informative, by the way), but I have to remind myself every day that the outside is just decoration. If I teach one thing to Caroline as she is growing up, I really hope she owns the fact that if you put too much value on the outside, you're not going to have time to pay attention to the inside. The movie, Shallow Hal is one of my favorites because it's really funny, but it drives this point home like not...

One of the funniest phrases I remember is that John's grandma always described sickness as "feeling puny". Whenever she wasn't feeling quite up to par, that is how she would say she was feeling. For some reason, my "puny-ness" often comes in the form of laryngitis, thanks to the genetics of my mother. Whenever I get run down, I begin to get hoarse, progress to scratchy voice and end up with nothing above a whisper. The exact same thing happens to my mom. As luck would have it, tomorrow is the last rehearsal for our Easter cantata, in which I have a solo, and this afternoon, the laryngitis set in. By tonight, I can barely force a croak out. It's kind of a pain, because other than a slightly sore throat, I don't feel that poorly, but all the effort it takes to talk wears me out! So don't call me tomorrow. You won't be able to hear me on the phone, and I'll probably be in the bathroom anyway, due to all the lemon/honey tea I'm dr...

John is notorious in the fire department for always being at the front of the scene. This includes being the first to arrive at pretty much any fire, the first on the hose to enter the building, and definitely the one who gets interviewed by reporters and always photographed in the paper. Somehow he manages this not only with fires in his jurisdiction, but when he is assisting in other towns as well. Friday turned out to be a banner day for the small-town, all-volunteer department as they logged six fires (count 'em, six: 4-brush fires, 1- chimney fire, 1-structure fire) and were busy all day. I don't even know what time John rushed out of work to the first one, but he came home at 10pm after fighting one after the other, pretty much all day. The department was ragging him on Saturday when the Post came, and the picture of Rob, another firefighter buddy was in the newspaper along with Rob's name (somehow John's pic or quotes are always given, but he's never stat...

You know how it is....nobody's kid is quite as cute as yours. And you can watch your own little Mozart do their schtick 50 million times and think each performance is better than the last one. On the contrary, even once through somebody else's kids' performance can sometimes be torture. Imagine that times almost 60 kids, 2nd to 6th grade at the District Praise & Talent showcase for our church. Thus I figured I would spend my Saturday suffering through a ba-jillion performances of somebody else's little darlings in order for the audience to have the privilege of hearing my own little angel. I figured that at least as soon as Caroline was done performing, we'd wait for her friend, Madison to complete her two events and then we could at least duck out for a quick jaunt to a nearby coffee shop or maybe even head home early. I realized that we would all be staying for the duration of the event when I was handed a judge's folder with the accompanying instruct...