Fun Friday

Grace's teacher has a system where the class received paper chain links when they act good or do something extra special. When the class paper chain reaches the floor they are allowed to select as a class something special to do. The last reward was "pajama day." This time it was "crazy hair day" and "sports shirt day" (I guess two because it's harder for boys to do crazy hair). Here's Gracie yesterday - we figure she was the only one that showed up in at Texas Ranger's shirt (thank you Aunt Kim!).

Lucky girl!

Grace is the lucky one, not me.

Next week her school is having Author Day. They are welcoming Lisa Funari Willever, a native of New Jersey whose books have apparently been honored by Rosie O'Donnell and Laura Bush. I suppose they will have an assembly that afternoon for the author to speak to them, but they also had a raffle to choose two kids from each grade to have lunch with her. And Gracie is one of the two first graders to be picked! I picked her up from school today (late since it was practice day for her upcoming Spring show dance), and she was rushing down the hall, squealing with her letter held high over her head. So very excited.

She can't wait to meet the author and tell her that she hopes to be an author too when she grows up. I'm so happy for her!

Brownie weekend

Grace had a big Brownie weekend, with an activity each day. On Saturday there was a city-wide Girl Scout Day of Service. It was set up quite nicely - all girl scouts were invited to participate. Troops were assigned one of three 1 1/2 hour shifts to participate. There were probably 10 tables that each troop spent probably 8 minutes or so on each one doing a different craft to benefit some group in the community. The girls made dog toys for one of the animal shelters, jar grippers (that you use to open stuck jars) for a retirement home, bookmarks for the library, care packages for soldiers overseas, and other projects. A very fun way to teach the girls to do something for others.

Sunday had a cooking class at a local cooking school for the Tamaques Brownie troops (I think there are two of them). The beauty of that event (for me at least) is that I discovered they sharpen knives for $2 a blade. So I can finally get my kitchen knives back in shape!

Here's a couple pics from Saturday:


Making play doh, maybe for a day care?


Making cards to go in the toiletry bags for the troops. Each girl was to bring three travel size toiletries with them which went into a big bin for use at this table.


Grace and Anna (one of her two best friends here in NJ) showing off their packages for the troops ("Mom, be sure and show this picture to Granddad!")


I'm so glad she is having such an incredibly positive girl scout experience. Now hopefully Jim will still have a good experience once Cookie Mom here gets all those cases of cookies in our house this Wednesday!

Sunday paper tidbits

- The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation headquarters in Morristown, NJ, have installed a "bio-wall" to help filter the air in the building. The bio-wall is a three-story (38 feet) tall by 14 feet wide wall composed of plants like ferns, mosses and flowering foliage. Air is drawn through the plant mass where the roots act as a natural air filter, and the purified air is then recirculated through the buildings ventilation system. So not only do they have the benefit of having Mother Nature filter the air, they have this amazingly beautiful wall of plants to look at every day. Video of the installation of the wall can be seen here.

- Colorado Springs has apparently had enough of rescuing tired hikers from Pikes Peak. The city council will vote on Tuesday on a proposal that will charge uninjured hikers $100 for a ride down if a call is made before highway crews go home for the day, and $500 if a call for assistance comes through 911 after hours. Additional fees could be charged if the road has to be plowed. Pikes Peak is the second-most visited mountain in the world behind Mount Fuji. As the highway manager told the local newspaper, "Some of the people just say 'I want to get to the top of this (14,000 foot) mountain,' and they don't realize they have to get back down."

- Academy Awards airs on ABC tonight, so I hope everyone enjoys the show. I'll be watching for the outfits, of course. Sadly, other than the three films nominated for Best Animated Picture (Bolt, Wall-E and Kung Fu Panda) the only other movie I've seen out of the ENTIRE list is In Bruges, whose sole Oscar nod is for Best Writing (original screenplay). How things have changed since we have had kids.

But it worked, right?

I'm with Alex in his room getting ready for bed when I notice a fairly large hole (quarter inch?) right in the middle of the chest area of his FAVORITE super hero shirt (that he got from his awesome godmother for his birthday). As I'm lamenting the hole and asking if he knew how it happened, he is answering "I don't know, Mama." Then when I start musing about what may have caused it - jacket zipper, etc. - Alex buries his face and starts saying "I don't want to tell you" to me.

Dead giveaway that something was done that shouldn't have been.

So I finally get the story out of him. There was apparently a spot on his shirt that he didn't want, so he got his scissors and just cut it out. I then explained that even if he can't find me (his excuse), that he will never be at home alone and needs to NOT ever do that again and just let me fix it. He got so sad when I told him that the shirt was ruined and we'd have to get rid of it ("But Mama, can't you just put a patch on it like you are going to do for my jeans?") that I'm going to use my stuff that stops fraying on it and hope it doesn't get any bigger. At least in the winter he wears the shirt with a long-sleeved one underneath.

The boy actually pointed out that I hadn't noticed the hole all evening, which is right. Though I think I drilled the "scissors are only for paper" message into his head enough this evening that maybe he'll remember.

Beautiful things

One of the fun things for us this Spring will be seeing what pops up out of the ground in the gardens. The wife who lived here before us was an avid gardener and I remember when we first looked at the house there were lots of plants around it. So our first surprises have been popping their heads out of the ground:


Pretty little crocuses. Only a few blooming right now, but LOTS of little plants are shooting up around here. I can't tell yet if they are all crocuses or if we will have some other color showing up too. The only immediate changes we will do to the landscaping is adding some shrubs in front. There are a lot of plants that I think will show up there, but they died away during the winter making the house look a little barren. I have to see if I can keep track of them all and relocate them to other parts of the yard (waste not, want not!).


Another little bloomer here. Sweet Grace in her Brownie uniform. All the troop wears for uniform is the sash and pins (that can just barely be seen in this photo on her left side of her chest). She does have her rockin' Brownie shirt on that Gramma got her during their visit to the Westfield girl scout store. She LOVES going to Brownie meetings, especially since her two best friends Anna and Annie are in the troop with her.

Sunday paper tidbits

I find I read the paper with a different intent now that I'm on the lookout for items to post.

- New Jersey has earthquakes. In Morris county (the county just northwest of Union county where we live) there have been two earthquakes in the past two weeks. Both have registered 2.5-3.0, which is enough to be felt and shake things in a house, but not enough to rattle windows. The last serious earthquake in New Jersey was a 5.5 level one in 1884. Scientists believe that a 5.5 magnitude one could happen every 120 years, so I guess we are due for another of those, but they predict a 7.0 magnitude earthquake every 3,500 years, so hopefully we'll be safe on that one.

- In the weird category, a 41-year-old transgender woman has been accused of exercising her 73-year-old husband to death. While it is easy to laugh at that sentence, when you hear more of the story it is actually very sad. S/he refused to let him get out of a swimming pool until he finally had a heart attack. Apparently the surveillance video was horrible to look at. As a side note, the couple got married in Kentucky, where people can change their gender on their birth certificate. Who knew Kentucky was so advanced in trans-gender rights?

- Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled that cheerleading is a contact sport. Because of this, teammates, schools, etc. cannot be sued in the event of accidental injury. In New Jersey (as I'm sure it is in much of the country) cheerleading does not fall under the Interscholastic Atheletics agency, so it is not regulated like other sports are. The upside of this is that the teams don't have to practice within a defined season, which being on drill team all those years ago I see as a plus - you don't do competitions the same time you are performing at football games, etc. But on the downside it means there is no regulation by a statewide or national code of rules. And according to the article cheerleading stunts have gotten much more difficult over the past few years (I can't imagine how they compare to when we were in high school, and even those I was impressed with at the time). The final quote in the article by Jim Lord, the director of the American Association of Cheerleading Coaches and Administrators is chilling: "If we have a catastrophic injury and there's a lawsuit, the question is going to be: 'Why weren't you following the rules?' The answer, 'Because we didn't have to' isn't going to be good enough." Think I'll be pushing Grace toward dance team.

Today

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

If it is like the Hutchinson household, it will be very low-key. Maybe I'll give Jim an extra kiss today. Especially since the kids have arrived, we just haven't felt a need to do anything big and out of the ordinary on days like this. Shouldn't be too much of a surprise to many of you - we are the couple who regularly forget our wedding anniversary (BOTH of us do this).

Now when my birthday rolls around I may demand a little special treatment, but for now I'm just going to go make my daughter her regular Saturday french toast. Maybe I'll cut it into a heart...

Sunday paper tidbits

Just a few...

- Many states on the Atlantic coast are sinking old subway cars in an effort to create artificial reefs for marine life. But some recently sunk stainless steel cars, thought strong enough to last 30 years, have already begun collapsing off the Atlantic City shoreline after only a few months. No one knows the cause, and environmental groups were more supportive of these cars than earlier "Redbird" cars that were carbon-grade steel and thought to not be able to last very long. But the Redbirds are still standing up, while the new stainless ones haven't. It is too cold for the Department of Environmental Protection to dive for inspections of more sites, so it is unknown if the problem is due to durability of the cars or something else such as deployment difficulties, damage by commercial fishing trawlers, or something else. A spokesperson for the New York MTA says "We're looking at anything and everything, including Godzilla" as to why the cars collapsed.

- Apparently the police blotter for Dutch Harbor, AK, is an entertaining read for people all over the world. As any of you Deadliest Catch fans know, Dutch Harbor is a fishing port off the Bering Sea, and the weekly police report details what happens when thousands of fishermen from around the world come together in one tiny town for shore leave. Written by a former wildlife biologist from Texas who is now a police sergeant up there, it looks like I may need to add this to my weekly "must reads" on the internet.

- So A-Rod is outed by Sports Illustrated as testing positive for steroids in 2003. Of course it's a big story up here since he now plays for the Yankees. But sadly there was a sidebar in the Star-Ledger highlighting "Team Tex-tosterone" detailing the six MVP-caliber players on the early-2000's Texas Rangers team under what are at least clouds of suspicion with steroid use. My poor Rangers - just can't get no respect (at least up here in Yankee land).

- Tonight is the Grammy Awards. And for as much as I miss my dear husband who is still out of town, unlike his wife he is not an awards show fan. So I'll get to look at all the pretty (and not-so pretty) dresses tonight without driving him crazy. Yay!

Another kitchen tip

You gotta love the Internet. As I struggled with two plastic tumblers that were completely stuck together - pulling as hard as I could didn't make them budge - I thought "let's google it."

Sure enough, a very easy remedy to this involves science in the kitchen. Cold makes things contract; heat makes them expand. So the inside tumbler gets filled with ice, then the outside one is dipped in warm water. Sure enough, they slipped right apart.

Now it should be noted that I tried just running hot water over the outside one, but didn't see any results until I actually dipped the outside one in my stock pot filled with hot water.

Now I'm sure I'll hear a collective "duh" on this tip, but I certainly didn't think of it, even though it is obvious once you hear it. Just hoping to make everyone's lives a little easier!

Sunday paper tidbits

In my paper today:

- The woman who recently birthed octuplets in California, who already had six kids at home, used in vitro for all of them AND is a single mother, according to the grandmother. That woman needs help, and not just with the kids.

- Albania is becoming a literal treasure trove for shipwrecks. The country was closed off from the rest of the world for so many years due to Communist rule (they had bunkers all along the coastline to be vigilant for attacks on the country that never came), but that regime was toppled by a student revolution in 1990. Since then enough artifacts on sunken ships have been found that if they were to all be excavated they would need an entire new museum to put them in, and that is after only 84 square miles have been explored of the 220-mile shoreline. Apparently Albania was on a key trade route in ancient times, receiving traffic from Greece, Italy, north Africa and the western Mediterranean.

- In the various themed-cruise travel options you have to choose from, one is for "social nude vacationing." In addition to ME not wanting to be nude in front of everyone (especially on an Alaskan cruise - they actually had a shot from that one at the top of the story), I am sure I don't want to see most of the OTHER cruisers in the buff either (ick).

- Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs is a former opera singer.

Happy Sunday!