Life is good.

Today is Maria's 14th birthday! I can't believe I have a 14 year old daughter already. We are so excited, and to add to all that excitement, Aunt Andrea is 40!!! I'm about to bust open.
One year, their mutual birthday actually fell on Easter Sunday and we were actually together in Celeryville to celebrate. Talk about God lining up all the planets in a row with a blue moon that year! I had to take a picture of the grand event...

So have a happy 40th Aunt Andrea. We will be having angel food cake(Maria's favorite) and eating ice cream(Maria's true favorite) and opening presents and having Maria's best friend sleep over and watching movies and singing happy birthday and laughing and remembering the day you both were born all that long time ago.

The Cat and his tongue

Poor Leo, a.k.a. Kitty, lost his voice for almost a week. He looked so sad when he couldn't communicate with me anymore. Nobody in my family could believe that we carried on conversations every day.

Just when I thought he was going to break out in a mime, he started meowing again, albeit softly. And now, he's back to waking us up at O'Dark-thirty in the morning.

Choose Life, Part 2

I love these pictures! These are worth at least a thousand words, but I always have to add a few more. Thank you to the Deltabravo blog where I saw them!

Choose Life

This was something cool John saw in Washington DC and is one of the only 5 pictures he brought home:

These are people who are standing out on the front steps of the Supreme Court with red tape on their mouths. And they are standing there for the millions of unborn babies who don't have a say in whether or not they will be able to live on the outside of their mother's body. I wish that people could see that there are alternatives to abortion, and I hope the day will come when they are rare.

The Hair Cut

Maria had a haircut appointment today which she has been looking forward to for a long time. I knew she had wanted to get a new style for some time but I was trying to talk her out of it. Finally, I decided that I shouldn't keep making her carry the weight of my past around on her head....just because I had to get mine all cut off in the 7th grade...(long story having to do with a car and a few surgeries). Besides that, I could always tell when the Big Head of Hair was in my shower because the bottle of conditioner would be suddenly empty. Here is the long wavy hair we were talking about:

So we went to the haircut, I with my camera in hand to record this momentous event. And we proceeded with the haircut:

I even took a movie of the hair falling to the floor:


And she lost quite a load of hair:

But it turned out pretty sweet in the end!

Clark Goes to Washington

John is in Washington DC for a few days now at a computer geeky kind of conference. I love to hear the things that happened to him during his day. Like last year, he got shewed away from the White House when he was running by some Secret Service guys and then he saw Jordan's King Hussein. He didn't actually see him but saw a big motorcade going in to the White House and later heard who it was. Yesterday, he said he saw President Bush's dogs out on the White House lawn.
Last summer, we were there with the kids.

We rode the subway all over town looking for what John claimed was the Mother of all Escalators and we never found it. When John called last night, he told the kids he had found it... it was right by the hotel where he stays! So maybe this summer we can go find it. Yay for the Griswalds.

Odyssey

Maria's Odyssey of the Mind team competed in the regional tournament today and won 1st place! So they are headed to the State Finals in Traverse City. They are pictured above after they won their medals. And no, you are not seeing double on the end there, those two really do look alike. The props they made were phenominal but I forgot to bring my camera to the actual performance(duh!). I'll bring it to State.

On a much lesser note, Leo won the Kitty Odyssey at home according to Edward. He did a stunning performance as a beach kitty. Some points were deducted however for the improper fit of his sunglasses.



Edward actually did go to a Math tournament thingy today and he won a Sudoku book and a Mancala game. South Christian took 3rd place, but for the Sudoku contest, he found himself in with a group of "Sudoku geeks" which I never before imagined being found in groups.

Run Eddie Run!

Edward started track practice this week after school. He has been running through the winter, actually almost non-stop for a year and a half through rain, sleet, snow, beating sun, high humidity and hail. Maybe not hail. Wait, he said he has run in hail. Yesterday, his coach told him to take a nap today for track practice so he might get rid of his cough. So he is home now helping me fix something on this blog. For some reason, the quote of the day was stuck on a Buddha quote which was one I didn't flag to show on my site! Must be some kind of bug. We changed it to show a quote by Gandhi until they fix it. Our very own non-violent protest.

Ava and the Chips

Let me just say Baby Ava that you don't know what a lucky little girl you are to have a big bag of Ballreich's. We can't get even them in Michigan. I didn't know they came in BBQ flavor but I would settle for that.
Great Aunt Michaela, the adoring grandmother, sent me this cute picture today. She must be sleeping on Uncle Ray? He's skinny.

RJ

Andrea sent me this great picture of her grandson, RJ. He is very handsome. He looks so serious in this picture, but he's going to be having surgery in a couple of days to have a shunt in his head replaced. Please pray that it goes successfully!

The Story of the Wax Museum

This past week, Bridget's 5th grade class had a Revolutionary War Wax Museum. Each student had to pick a character, dress as the character, and write and perform a speech said by the character when you "pushed their button". They actually remained as frozen as a wax statue until you pressed the small circle drawn on their sign! Bridget was Molly McCauley who was known as Molly Pitcher, because when the soldiers would call "Hey Molly, pitcher", she would bring them a pitcher of water to drink.

The students were lined up around the gym and it was kind of like walking through a wax museum.

Below is a picture of John listening to her speech. When the whole thing was over, she said she was glad it was over because she was tired of giving her Molly speech.

She took it soooooo seriously and stayed in character the whole time even when John stood behind her. She had reprimanded me earlier for coming behind the line.

She made an excellent Molly and we were proud of her!

The End.

Hot Dog

Today is hot dog lunch day for Edward at our house because it's Saturday and he loves hot dogs. He always has 2 hot dogs and I had to make one out of an old package and one out of a new package. One was a bun length hot dog and the other was regular size. One was Ball Park which plump when you cook em (actually plump and burst open in the microwave) and the other was Oscar Meyer which cook pretty normally. So one was short and fat while the other was tall and skinny, and Edward said that we have had an odd number of hot dogs ever since Grandma's dog Beatrix came in January and ate one.

Yes, she likes hot dogs.

Picnic in the Park

Last night, Maria and her friends performed in the middle school variety show and it was really fun. They did a silent skit called "Picnic in the Park," and the following video shows the end of it where they catch the pie thieves and they all get a pie in the face. Who doesn't love a good pie in the face routine? Maria is the one with long flowing hair. You might want to pause it while the whole thing loads, or else if you replay it, it will play straight through the second time.

Happy Monday!

This movie is soooooooooooooooooo funny!

It's twice as funny when you listen to what the dad says at the beginning and what the mom says at the end because things seem funnier when they are said with a southern accent.

Broken Hallelujahs

Today, at church, the pastor announced that a woman who is around my age (maybe not as old) had broken her leg. I wondered how that could have happened, and after church, there she was in the narthex, so I asked her. She said she slipped and fell on the icy parking lot. And I thought of all the times that almost happens around here in the winter and all the times it actually does happen but no bones get broken. It was something how soon everyone was gathered around her asking about her prognosis and so on, the softball team wanted her good for the season, and the lady who helped her up felt bad that she didn't do more. It turned in to a real chorus of concern, and God's light was shining through even in this simple moment.

Yorkies

I saw a car on my way home from work the other day with a bumper sticker that said Yorkies are like potato chips...you can't eat just one. I looked in the back seat of the car and the lady had 3 Yorkies in there. I immediately experienced a flashback right there on 68th Street to the times I've spent with my friend in New York riding around in her jeep because she also has 3 Yorkies. They were always so excited to be riding in the car with their master driving them around and you could just tell the 4 of them were used to being together like this because I would just end up with 3 little doggie butts in my face.

Surfer Math

This week Edward went to Math Field Day at U of M with 4 other kids from South Christian and their team came in 2nd in their division. I thought that was really awesome. They won a book called Mathematical Fallacies and Paradoxes. Doesn't he look like a surfer dude here? That's kind of a paradox, too. He's not a math geek, just a mathematically inclined beach boy.

Still a Space Cadet

This morning was just so smooth at our house. It was a typical gray Michigan morning. John had left at 6 am to go running at Calvin and I was looking out the window with the girls for the bus to come at 7:25 am. Bridget was telling me about how she heard rain on the window when she woke up at 5 am. I was so happy and calm not to have the TV on and I recalled how one of my coworkers was giving it up for Lent and yes, I would do that, too. Finally, at 7:43, I thought, what in the world? I said maybe we missed the bus. So we all piled in the van and I dropped Maria off at school. Then I took Edward to the high school. The guy standing there told me school was cancelled, so I left and pictured in my mind how I just had left my dear Maria at a dark school with an empty parking lot about 30 seconds prior to this. Evidentally, it was too icy to have school and that never even occurred to me on the way to school. Sharon later told me that her TV fast did not include the news.

Ash Wednesday

Here is a part of a poem by Edward Shillito called "Jesus of the Scars":

...The other gods were strong, but Thou wast weak;
They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne,
But to our wounds, only God's wounds can speak
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone

There's a Gillian Welch song that goes, "I will know my Savior when I come to Him by the mark where the nails have been."

So there are a couple of things to think about as the season of Lent begins.