Ok - So I allowed Bill to talk me into buying the Topsy Turvy, and drilling a hole into the deck to hang it. I also got suckered into putting the thing together and filling it with the plant and dirt. I'm now also having to water the thing this week while he's out of town. I had my reservations about the thing even before tonight, given that the design expects to hold 30 lbs of beautiful tomatoes with a 2" piece of foam in the center opening - Ha! My absolute breaking point (pun is intended, read on) was when the plant did in fact start growing, but UPWARD toward the sun (duh) rather than toward the ground like in every advertisement I'd seen to date. Then finally, the poor plant's backbone had enough. The base of the plant growing toward the sky became too heavy, twisted and snapped. It was growing full yesterday night, and by tonight was one big nasty plant of wilt. The bright side is that the second shoot of the plant, still growing upward, has 3 tomatoes growing. I'm sure any bigger and that little branch will break off as well. It really is topsy heavy, turvy curvy down. The scam-wow (play off sham-wow, the other obnoxious infomercial) is the perfect name for this ridiculous product.
Emma's school held their father's day picnic today, a little early so that all the kids could participate before school ends for the summer. Bill is out of town (and oddly was last year too), so I came and watched Emma do classroom work and eat a sack lunch with her and her friends on the playground. Last night I asked Emma if it was OK that I come instead of daddy since I'm not a dad, and she said "Well, I'd better ask my teachers in the morning if you can come." So, sure enough, this morning when I walked her into school, she asked her teacher if I could come. Thankfully, they said it'd be OK this time :-) He had a really fun time. Bill was bummed, but I guarantee he didn't mind missing out on the pre-made sandwiches...ham and cheese with mayonnaise...mmm, good!
He usually hangs out in the big tree in our backyard, then scurries under the deck most days, but lately this week he's found a semi-secluded perch on our deck railing. The vine keeps him hidden but with all the flowers blooming, the location brings in a lot of tasty bugs. Emma has named him Spike.
We've been really bad about keeping up with posts. It's not like we've had nothing going on, it's that we've had too much lately, and the blog has suffered. I realized I'd had an Easter post in draft since that weekend, and so everything after Easter has also not made it to the blog. So, grab a cup of coffee, use the little girls/boys room, and hope your computer chair is relaxing, because here we go....
Easter Weekend Fun filled weekend with a visit from the Easter Bunny. Left two really nice baskets for the girls (forgot about mom and dad, although he did put a few Reese's peanut butter eggs and Cadbury cream eggs in...hmmm...I wonder how he knew?!?), and also left cracky eggs as well. These must be a southern thing as I'd never seen them growing up in the Midwest. They are like little pinatas made of real egg shells filled with paper confetti. The girls love them. They make a mess of your driveway. Church was great, we had 3 Easter lilies and brought them home to plant in our front flowerbed (4/19 side note - they are still doing well). They place a large wooden cross outside and the girls thought it was really pretty. In the afternoon we dyed Easter eggs and had 9 different colors to choose from. The girls decided to create an assembly line and dip their eggs in every one of the colors. One Giant Step Emma made the decision on her own to transition from being a "napper" to being in "bridging" at school. She saw a friend's work and when the friend said Emma could start doing the work once she moved into bridging, she asked me if she could make the switch. I told her to talk with her teachers the next day. She did and they said she'd need to talk with the master teacher when she returned from vacation. I don't think the woman had two feet in the door before Emma asked whether she could make the switch. Nothing like taking your career into your own hands! It's been two weeks now and Emma loves bridging, and is bringing home what she says is "challenging work". I still think she's adjusting a bit to the no nap thing during the school week. Tooth Fairy, 2, Mom, 0 For the second time now I've been traveling on business when Lauren loses a tooth. This is a big deal for me and it's now quite humorous to us all that her teeth are just waiting for me to be gone to let loose. Lauren's second tooth was hanging on by the tiniest of root the morning I left, and I kept prodding Lauren to just yank it out (I'm sure my mother would be proud). But, it just would not budge until I was 1500 miles away in a Minnesota hotel room (I'm sure my father can sympathize). Roll Call Lauren loves playing school, and especially likes being the teacher. I'm so glad she wants to play this and that school has become such a positive experience for her, as I'm a school junkie who if I'd had infinite time and money with zero responsibility, would have probably been a professional student. Here she is taking roll call Sunday morning. The frog and I received a check mark for being present, Emma overslept and missed school, and daddy was marked absent even though he was on his "field trip". Daddy/Daughter Dance Lauren's girl scout service unit sponsored a daddy/daughter dance Saturday night. The theme was diamonds and denim. Lauren was excited to wear a dress that we'd had in her closet since last Christmas and had Grandma Luci take in while she was visiting. She even had jewelry from her garage sale purchase earlier that morning (spent her tooth fairy money on a basket of jewelry from the neighbor girls). They went to the dance while Emma and I went out to dinner (Thundercloud Subs) and planned to hit the grocery store to stock up for the week while Bill would be in Boston. But, we instead navigated through a torrential downpour and through small lakes of flood water to get back into the neighborhood. We had over 2.5" rain fall in a matter of minutes! Hey Cupcake Sunday afternoon treat. They have some cute names for their cupcakes. I had Red Velvet (white cream cheese frosting, red velvet cupcake), Emma had Vanilla Dream (pink buttercream frosting, vanilla cupcake), and Lauren had the Michael Jackson (white cream cheese frosting, chocolate cupcake).
I've added a few new links to the right, giving props to some of the ladies in my circle who write on either a personal blog or a conglomerate (see Deep South Moms). The Stiletto Mom blog just cracks me up because here's a woman trying to balance it both (I see me there, just not in stilettos but trying to rock it in the corporate world with mad engineering skills while in a cute skirt) and wondering why sometimes the luck scale seems to be off balanced (see her spring break post). Just some additional sites to fill up a few minutes of your day.
