I highly recommend having a cookoff.  Buy a silly prize and then everyone brings the best dish they can so you have to do very little work and still get to eat very well.  I also recommend having your 16 year old sister entertain all the children so that you can enjoy yourself.  But if you can't manage the second one, definitely still go with the cookoff.

The first thing out of the bored bucket today was "Make Cool Bookmarks". The boys were definitely not into that idea, but I told them they had to give it a try. I knew they would get into it if they got started. They have been playing Lego Batman on the Wii lately, so I suggested to Reed that he make a Lego Robin. Dean wanted to make his own bookmark, so I concentrated on helping Reed.

( Day in pics.... )


My sister is coming tomorrow to move in for the summer!  Hooray!

Does anyone here go to SVA? I'll be visiting New York for a week with my mom's boss's daughter and am going to check out the school while I'm there. How do you feel about the school acedemically and socially? I'm looking at animation or illustration.

I'll be in Manhattan on that side note. where are some cool places to eat, shop, visit?

Hi! Wanted to let you know about Animal Rights Awareness Day in Union Square on Sunday, June 3rd. Here is a trial run of a sample dance and poetry performance (I'm speaking the poem).

Hope to see you at this amazing event. :)

Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/180330305423745/

Next Monday we are having 4 families over for a Cajun Cookoff party. Everyone is bringing their best cajun dish and the winner gets a rockin' crawfish hat :). When we were in NOLA with carrie9142 and her husband, I had the best food I'd ever eaten.  We are trying to recreate (or at least approximate) my favorite thing I had there which was a pasta with a tasso cream sauce.  Tasso is cured and smoked pork that is used in gumbo and other cajun dishes.  I cured the pork for like 5 days, and then Derek smoked it on our Big Green Egg for 5 or so hours on Monday night.  In a stroke of genius, he set up one of the cameras on our baby monitor on the temperature reading.
( Read more... )

Geez, this is long.  Maybe I should start doing "Day in pictures".  I could single-handedly double the action on LJ ;)

I have a spare ticket for "Don't Dress for Dinner" tomorrow night (Friday) at 8:00pm. I paid $12 for the ticket.

The only catch is that it has to be used by someone who is 35 or younger, since the tickets are part of the HIPTIX program. Anyone interested?

For anyone on my FL who is interested, I'm copying this from Julie's journal. We used the ones that sounded interesting and then added some of our own.

( Links and list )

peever shared about making a "I'm bored" jar for her kids for the summer.  We took her list of ideas and added some of our own and started making these idea cards. 


I put them in an Easter egg bucket to make our Bored Bucket.  I'll post about it more in my WIP, but "Make Pirate Hats" turned into two adorable photos, and I want to give them their own post.  We didn't have any newspaper, so the boys taped 4 of Dean's old worksheets together.  Once they were done, they decided that they looked more like Robin Hood hats, so Dean got the idea to add a little feather to the top.  

( Me and a baby in a funny hat )