Summer Charity Project

So, it's going to be a long summer break. I am trading kid-watching with another Mom, whose daughter is June's best friend. They spend so much time together, though, that they act just like siblings. In other words, they get in fights constantly over nothing, and make up before I can even figure out who started it. So here's the dynamic. Anna (I'll call her that to protect her privacy) naturally tries to follow March in everything she does, because she's older and more mature. This completely aggravates June, who tries to keep Anna away from March, due to an also natural sibling rivalry. So, the long and the short of it is that these three will be spending Mon-Fri together the whole summer. Two days at my house, two days at Anna's mother's house, and the fifth day with a teenage babysitter.

I started coming up with a list of summer projects they could do about two months ago, of course. So here's what they worked on last week and hopefully will finish today. They're writing a neighborhood newspaper. They interviewed a neighbor who's lived here for 45 years and asked her about her life and about how the city has changed. They interviewed a neighbor with a very crazy statue made out of a tree in her front yard. They are collecting some interesting tidbits about events going on in the neighborhood. Then they're going to put it all nice and neat into the computer, and make a bunch of copies.

They're trying to raise money for Meals on Wheels, a charity that I explained to them is suffering greatly from rising gas costs. So they asked several local small businesses to contribute to the charity in exchange for an advertisement in the paper. Wow, what a nightmare! You'd think they were asking for a million dollars the way they've gotten the runaround. Sigh. Well, I guess at least they've learned something about the way the world of nonprofits works!! They'll still ask for donations as they pass out the newspaper, so they'll be able to raise some that way.

That's one week down, 10 to go!!

June's Birthday Party

Tomorrow is my 10 year old daughter's birthday party. Originally she wanted to have a "movie making" party, where she and her friends acted out and filmed a story. I did everything I could think of to talk her out of this, because I could only picture eight little girls screaming at each other arguing about what the story should be, never even making it to the filming stage. After we bought an above ground pool last month, she decided to have a swim party instead, thank goodness!

So tomorrow, she and her friends will be screaming and splashing in the pool. We're ordering pizza. My daughter has never liked cake, so every year we have a great challenge coming up with a substitute for the birthday cake. One year we frosted and decorated a cut up watermelon to look like a cake. This year, we decided to make fake cupcakes out of frozen whipped cream. We'll have vanilla and chocolate. All I need to do is spray the whipped cream into cupcake holders, stick in the freezer, and frost and decorate when they're solid.

Instead of the traditional goody bags, June decided that she wanted to make a little mini shop where her friends could buy things to put in their goody bags. So she's giving them monopoly money, and I bought a bunch of little toys from the $1 section at Target, plus just a few $2-$3 Littlest Pet Shop and girly lip glosses for them to "buy." June's sister, March, has agreed to run the shop.

A couple of her friends get to spend the night after the party. Okay, I really should have put my foot down and made her choose either a sleepover OR a party. My husband has pointed this out to me. And he's totally right. But sometimes SuperMom is too busy flying around to stop and put her foot down!!

Why do we blog?

So here I am, starting a new blog. I should probably mention that I've tried this several times and felt funny talking to myself, and got kind of bored of it. But some friends have been blogging a lot, and I do love reading other people's blogs. So it seems that it might be satisfying to write down the fun things I go through. Will they be helpful, useful or even interesting to anyone else? Who knows. I think maybe that's why we blog--to find out if our lives are interesting to others. Or maybe we're reaching out to an electronic sense of community that we no longer feel in our neighborhoods? Anyway, here goes...

So, I love doing crazy things for my kids, trying to be SuperMom. For my daughter's birthday (I think I'll nickname her June to maintain her privacy), I gave her a Webkinz tiger snake. A few years ago, she asked me why she and her sister always make gifts to give to me, but I always buy gifts to give her. Feeling bad, I've tried to make her at least one gift for each holiday. So for her birthday, I took a Littlest Pet Shop owl, chopped off a few parts, attached some clay, did some painting, and, voila, I re-created the tiger snake in a bobble-head. (Pictures to follow)

Here's the finished bobble-head snake I made:


Here's what the Webkinz one looks like:


And here's a bobble-head replica of our cat Lucky that I made: