Where in the World Is Beth San Diego?

I always loved Carmen San Diego. She hid out in exotic places around the world and us gumshoes had to go sleuthing until we could find her....and we found a world of exciting geography at the same time! (Yeah, groan all you want, but really is the reason I know were countries like French Guiana are.) I love PBS television and I love Rockapella and there's nothing you can do to change my mind! Nothing, I say!

To bring yet another outdated reference into this post, I have decided that this post will be like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Sometimes you don't have time to read my personal ramblings and something short will have to do. Choice one is for you, my friends. Sometimes you are procrastinating writing a thank you letter to dear Great Aunt Helga who sent lovely knitted capes to your children in various pastel hues...and you will hang on every word just so that you can stay on the computer a little...bit...longer. Heck, you'll probably read BOTH endings.

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Turn to Page...uh....well that doesn't really work on the computer. Crap. The short ending: Watch the video and relive the AWESOME that is Rockapella. Be careful...the blond guy might make your dog howl during those high notes! If you missed out on the whole Carmen Sandiego/Rockapella experience, now you too can have a taste of the early nineties. Back then it was all about the acapella bands, baby. Acapella Vocal Band or Take Six, anyone???




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The long ending:

So where in the world have I been this week? I only wrote one post and I actually wrote that at the end of LAST week!
Well, I stayed within the borders of Indiana...but here's some of the highlights.

Monday: The usual. Hang around the house with the kids. Do some blogging and watch the kids play Wii. Try to be moderately productive and do a load of laundry and the dishes. Play some Chutes and Ladders. Make sure the kids and I are dressed by the time Frank comes home from work and dinner is started. We did our taxes after dinner. Woot. At least we get a refund. Although we need to double check the rental house end of things. That's new to us, and you would think two people with college educations could figure out such things, especially since we have "people" with H & R Block and all...but it seems as though their "people" don't appear as a holograph in your living room and explain tax jargon at a 5 year old level, which is really what we need....

Tuesday: Day of Birthday Fun! Since we had a lot going on Wednesday, Frank took Tuesday off work. We had a pretty relaxing morning and went to IHOP for lunch. On national pancake day no less! And we ran into a guy who goes to the local International House of Prayer (the other IHOP!). I think God had a good laugh about that. I certainly did. The irony was sweet. And so were the pancakes. After that we road tripped to Columbus, IN and dropped off the kids at Frank's parents. They entertained the kiddos for the night which was pretty last minute...I appreciate them so much! Frank and I went to Indianapolis. The plan was to visit the big electronics store there and check out the new IMAX theater. We ended up going to the store first. It was pretty cool, even for an electronically challenged person such as myself. We went to the theater and found that even though they show IMAX movies, they don't do it very often and next one wasn't worth the money or the wait. So we browsed the new shopping center near the theater and ended up having a nice dinner. I know! That's MY idea of a night out, not Frank's! I was feeling kind of wild and had some kind of Vietnamese salad with shrimp and mango and cucumber and what looked like little clovers...but it was good. We even got free dessert because they had a promo that when the stock market is up, every table gets free dessert. So of course Frank breaks out the computer/phone/furby and looks up the info...stocks are up! Dessert for us! We got back home pretty darn late for a weekday and drove quite a bit, but we had a lot of fun. If nothing else, it was nice to have conversations not interrupted by "Mommy. Mommy. Moooooommy. MOMMY! I want juice."

Wednesday: Got up early for pre-school. Drug sleepy children out of bed. Everything went pretty smoothly despite the lack of sleep for us all. I did a little easier lesson than usual about numbers just to make sure I made it through the morning. We did a little worksheet on our favorite number and then I helped them write it out in Spanish and say it. Most of the kids picked their age...3, 4, 5. Then I got to the last class and they picked numbers like 4,800 and 10,000 and 1000780278. I just wrote "muchos" on the paper of that last kid....
After preschool we have lunch at "Miss Amy's" as the kids call her. I hate calling her "my pastor's wife" because she's so much more than that. She's my friend, my pastor, my spiritual mentor and more! But she is also married to my pastor. As always, our kids were a little wild and my kids throw a fit every time they have to leave, but we had a good time, good talks, and her food is always delish. We came home and vegged for a bit in front of cartoons. Then it was off to church in the evening. When we got home, we put the kids in bed and laid down for a few minutes, and fell fast asleep at 9:30. Oh well. So much for an exciting birthday for Frank! Welcome to your thirties.

Thursday: Baby Jay had his 6 month check up at the doctor. Even though he's 7 months old. Yeah, I'm slow like that. He checked out fine. He's made it back on to the big side of the "normal" range for height and weight now. For awhile he was off the charts big! He got three shots, which he wasn't too happy about, but he got over it quickly and took a nice nap. It's funny. I cried and cried when Annabelle got her shots as a baby, and now I almost have to keep myself from laughing because Jay just gets SOOOO mad and it's cute. Anna and Joey got stickers from the nurse, so they were happy. I'm surprised she was that nice...Annabelle got a little TOO curious at one point when the nurse and I were distracted and almost took one of the syringes off the table. We celebrated a good doctor visit by going to Little Caeser's at Kmart for the$5 large pizza special and indoor playplace. Spring come quickly! Almost 5 year olds and 3 year olds need some outside time! And so does their mom! After play and pizza we picked up a couple things at Kmart before Jay started to wake up from his nap and realize that his poor legs were sore from the shots. It was spaghetti for dinner and playing Frank's new Wii game before bedtime.

Friday: Time to clean! The house was a mess from the hallway project plus being in and out all week, so I cleaned as much as I could. Plus I am going to start being the back-up babysitter for one of my friends when her regular sitter cannot watch her little boy. She was coming over for a few minutes after work to talk details, so I wanted to make sure she felt like her son would be with a competent and put together person who could keep the house clean. Yeah, she probably could see right through that...but it WAS nice to have a clean house for about 3 minutes. For dinner I made pork chops and fried potatoes. It was a kind of vindication because my last couple attempts at them have been pretty horrible. It seemed like I did the same exact thing as the other times, so why do they turn out so different? Annabelle and I also had a very nice conversation about the fruits of the spirit. Yeah, I know. She's FOUR. But she memorized them for kid's church, but I hate to have her do that without knowing at all what it means. So I found my self giving examples of "self-control" and "faithfulness" at a four year old level. Not easy, but I think she got most of it.

Saturday: Both Annabelle and Joey climbed in bed with us and at about 4 am I got sick of the clingy-ness and went and slept in Annabelle's bed. I then proceded to have a dream about a girl I knew in college being in prison. I guess I was going to visit her and there was this scary school marm of a lady who kept yelling that I wasn't supposed to be there and got mad and started beating this girl up and for some reason my parents were there and I was afraid they were going to get yelled at, too...
Ahhh well. It's better than the dream where Frank turned into a zombie.

Anyway, I was glad to get up and get the kids some breakfast. After that I braved Wal-Mart on a Saturday because we were completely out of food. I saw one of the kids from the youth center, so it was good to see how she was doing. After getting home and putting everything away, we had a little time to rest before getting everything ready for church. I took a little nap and watched Notre Dame lose a basketball game (darn U Conn). Then we started the Great Church Prep. No matter what time we start to get ready for church we seem to always be late. Not late to church...we, as the music peeps, tend to get there way early to warm up and do a little practicing before the service, but it always seems to be later than we want it to be and we get rushed. Which always makes me grumpy. It's so nice to try to lead worship after yelling at your children...especially after you explained self-control to them the day before. But today I was determined to not let the little stuff make me angry and I would just give it to God. Breath. Pray. Ask God for help. It worked pretty well. We even did a little devotion in the car on the way there to get us ready for worship. Hoorah!

We had a little bit more responsibility than usual since our pastors were gone for the night, but it went really well and it's nice to see the unity of the group even when the pastors are not there. God was definitely in it...things just flowed today. Props to Frank, Larry, and Holli for doing the extra stuff to make the service a go...I didn't do a whole lot of extra stuff except for find the communion stuff and buy grape juice and bread. Strange that I've pretty much been a Christian my whole life, but this was the first time that I had any part of arranging for communion.

So there you have it. A slightly busier than usual week in the life of me. Are you wishing you would have chosen the short ending now? Yeah, I always felt that way about Choose Your Own Adventure, too. Now Encyclopedia Brown, that's a whole different story....