Rain, Rain Go Away

A picture is worth a thousand words... Will it be summer soon?

A Year as a Coffee Drinker

Thank you, coffee. You have shown me that I can sleep less and do more. I've gained an entire extra hour of my day.

I get up, drink you, and I'm on warp speed for the next 90 minutes. That's enough to get three children out the door, to school and unload the dishwasher. Even more if I'm lucky and play my cards right.

On days when I'm feeling blue, I think about why I might be having these feelings. Then I realize, I haven't had my morning coffee.

I used to be in trouble if I ever had a double shot. Now, double shots, as in the caffeine kind, are the only thing propping me up throughout the day.

I've become a coffee robot. I am a slave to my Nespresso machine. Will Nespresso ever make organic coffee? It's the only thing I drink in my life that is consistantly not organic. This is one of the downsides to my habit.

I did not drink coffee until I was 40. Now at 41, I am afraid to face my day without it.

Better Friends

There are some friends that you will always be close to. You can not see each other in ages, but you can pick up like you haven't missed a beat in milliseconds when you get together again. With some friends, there is a natural connection that is always there like an invisible telephone wire from soup can to soup can.

I have spent a lot of my adult life moving away from friends--or having friends move away from me. The tearful good-byes, the frequent e-mails and holiday cards that dwindle to barely a blip on the radar. Sometimes, there is good-bye and a direct flat line. It often isn't any one's fault, it's just how life rolls.

Some friendships you fight for. Some friendships don't require fighting, they just ARE and they are REAL. We do our best to maintain, and like an overgrown lawn, some of the very best quality roots are settled deep.

Other friends are BETTER friends after you move away. How is that, you might ask? Well, seriously, I've had friends that I barely talked to or saw for years when living in the same town, but as soon as I moved, the incredulous waterworks began. Then the e-mails, the phone calls and the visits were ignited like a blazing wildfire.

When we were visiting? When were they visiting? Not to be mean, but if I have 24 hours in a location, I am not visiting the friends that I only saw once a year in a good year. We had a couple of situations where I've seen some people more in one year of living far away than in five years of living in the same zip code.

Friendship takes patience and good chemistry. If you can drive a person crazy from another continent, maybe it just wasn't meant to be. Or if friends move back after they have moved away, and didn't bother to ever call, send an e-mail, or give you details about their new address, are you really friends? I once read a quote that said, "friendship is of time and place." I guess this refers to that group of friends.

Thankfully we have friends that are constants throughout our lives. These are the friends that we call for no reason at all. These are the friends we call when the reason is so big, we can't bear to share it with anyone but our closest of pals. These are the friends we think about calling all of the time, but our time is snatched away before we know it's gone.

You all know who you are...

Prepare to be Amazed!

Birk always has "one more thing" to tell me. She always has to "show me" something. Her most interesting and famous catch phrase is "prepare to be amazed!"

This statement is always full of theatrical drama. You also know that you are probably in for something good.

Sometimes it's a magic trick. Sometimes it's a website. Sometimes it's a piece of art.

It could even be a knock knock joke.

Sometimes I am too busy or lazy to "prepare to be amazed." These are the times I kick myself in the butt, get off the computer, stop stirring spaghetti sauce, or get off the phone and follow Birk.

She "amazes" me every time!

Ahhhh, This is the Life

You know, when I get into the crunch period, I have a hard time seeing the forest for the trees. Maybe sometimes, it's as easy as seeing each tree.

May is for Mayhem

Once we hit May, it's all downhill until the end of the school year. I have to color code and continuously update our calendar. My evenings are filled with extra carpool shifts and dinners on the run. Who said a bagel isn't a complete meal?

My normally messy house turns into a disaster zone, and I'm swamped by paper, re-enrollments, and camp forms.

Hold onto your hats, we are on one wild ride! It ends for us this year with 8th grade graduation, which is becoming a bigger event day by day.

Cross your fingers for me, I'm hitting the high tide of parenting. Hopefully no waves will wash me under, or undertow pull me down. This is when I'm absolutely sure a theme song would help.

Juicer Angst

I've been hearing the hype for weeks. A friend of mine just bought the most awesome juicer. She juices for breakfast things I only eat at a Sunday dinner. She is feeling great and she just goes on and on and on about the marvelous benefits of her wondrous juicer.

Well, I'm a gadget girl. I'm not a natural cook, but if you can make a blender that turns frozen peas into soup, I'm on it. I like recipes, I like fresh fruit and veggies, so I was listening to the juicer tales with rapt attention.

I asked my husband about it. He said to go for it, as long as I thought I would really use it. I make fresh orange juice almost every morning with my little, rickety citrus juicer, so why wouldn't I be a juicing queen with a commercial motorized contraption?

The price was not an easy thing to swallow. There were many options, and my friend had done the heavy lifting research. She explained why I should pay the extra $50 or even $100 to get the longest possible warranty with the sturdiest motor.

I went to my go to website, Amazon, and gazed and read reviews and had added and deleted said juicer from my cart at least 7 times. The questions were in my head: Would I really use it? Would it be worth the hefty price? Would my family even like carrot juice with parsley?

I finally just did it. I clicked submit and before I knew it, the big box arrived on my doorstep. I knew there was already a problem when I didn't rip the box open immediately. I watched the box. I walked by it. I moved it from place to place. I had fear of the brown box.

My daughter was so excited that she got the scissors and opened that baby right up. She is 8. She was ready to hit the juicing scene. I tried to downplay the excitement and told her we would make juice after dinner.

(Please remember, this is the girl who tivo'd the Big City Slider informercial and watched it over and over and made me watch it over and over until I finally ordered it!)

I knew as soon as I saw that beautiful, shiny, sexy chrome juicing machine that I had made a huge, expensive mistake. There were pieces and parts and bubble-wrapped attachments that made my head spin. I was in juicer shock. I put off juicing until the next morning at breakfast.

In the light of the day, with eager Birk by my side we finally did it. We turned two apples into two small, small glasses of apple juice. Firstly, I was mystified that I had to cut the apples up into tiny pieces to even fit them into the tube. I was not instantly the "Juicing Queen" lobbing full-size apples into a cider press.

No, I'm not even the "Juicing Jester." I'm still staring at this machine wondering "What have I done?" I hope my fear of juicer subsides and that I get more adventurous, but right now I'm wondering how to hide it and I'm grateful that my husband never reads my blog.

P.S. It was easy to clean, though.

Top 10 Scary Movies

I am a Halloween girl. I've always enjoyed it, but over the years, it's become the one holiday that I actually really can celebrate in a silly way with no stress--it's about candy, chocolate and costumes, hello???

I am going through clutter at my house and found two Top 10 Halloween Movie lists from Canadian Living Magazine...

Top 10 Great Family Halloween Flicks

1. Hocus Pocus (1993)
2. The Addams Family (1991)
3. Casper (1996)
4. Halloweentown (1998)
5. It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966)
6. Double, Double, Toil and Trouble (1993)
7. Ghostbusters (1984)
8. Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
9. Beetlejuice (1988)
10. Young Frankenstein (1974)

Top 10 Scary Movies

1. The Silence of the Lambs
2. The Nightmare Before Christmas (twice, I know!)
3. Zodiac
4. House of Wax
5. Willard
6. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
7. Rosemary's Baby
8. The Shining
9. Gremlins
10. Rear Window

Where is:

1. The Exorcist
2. Nightmare on Elm Street
3. Halloween

Sunny Mornings

I just wanted to quickly share with you the breakfast Birk prepared for me on the weekend. I love this age so much!