Mama Ball Says

Parenting Lesson #729: Never, EVER take a not-quite-two-year-old bowling with 23 five-year-olds. You will be suicidal, homicidal, or an alcoholic by the time it is over. Aside from Sadie wreaking havoc every three minutes for two hours, the party went very well, and Jake and all of his friends had a great time. The parents had fun too, at least from what I could tell. On the good side of doing the party this way, all we had to do for the party was bring the goody bags and balloons (and write the check to the bowling alley). They did the rest (sometimes with a lot of prodding from me ... should have threatened to sic Sadie on the skinny kid they assigned to be our "party host"). I did manage to get a lot of fun pics.
Charlotte's party was Sunday, and Steve stayed home with Sadie as neither of us could stomach chasing her around that much again (plus party time was also during naptime, and no way in hell were we screwing that up two days running ... that's like inviting Satan in for drinks and hors'd). I got a lot of really adorable pics of Charlotte. I took the new school camera home (Nikon digital slr) to practice using, as I am scheduled to go photograph the 7th grade's recreation of ancient African trade gold/salt trade routes early next week.
Anyway, the pics were fantastic for the most part, and the ones that weren't were all my fault. I love being able to take a bazillion pics and the delete function is exceptionally easy to use, so I can ditch the crappy and soso pics and just keep the better ones. I did find that sometimes the ones I think look all right on the LCD screen actually are a tad out of focus once downloaded, but there weren't too many of those.
Ah, maybe next year or the year after I will be able to afford one of these for my very own.
Still on pins and needles about where Jake will go to kindergarten...couple more weeks before the big guns come out. I'm meeting with Carm and the admins at EMS end of this week to talk about the direction of the media center there for next year and the near future. We'll see ... I was thinking I should go talk to the teams there and explain a little bit about where the media curriculum is going and what they would like to see the media center doing for them in relation to that. I'll see what everyone at the meeting thinks of that idea ... we'll see where things go.
Kristen sent goodies that included a cookie mix in a bandanna with a cowboy boot cookie cutter, so Jake is now asking when are we making the cookies every five minutes. It reminds me of the Dunkin Donuts commercials from many years ago: "Time to make the donuts." Maybe this weekend we will get to that.