Cheeseburger in blender, diced...

If there's Harris Teeter cake, it must be birthday time! Yay! Earlier this week I celebrated my birthday. Isn't that a rockin' cake? Family tradition, you know. Gotta have the cake from the Teeter. I loved the colors. If I could decorate my whole house in bright colors like that and possibly get away with it, I most certainly would.



See how I'm switching it up on you? Last post I put the comments BELOW the photos. This post, I'm commenting ABOVE the photos. Ooooooohhhh... tricky! Trying to switch it up to keep your summer from being boring.

Jimmy brought me gorgeous roses. In this photo you can also see the new columns that are keeping our master bedroom from falling into our family room. They are still unpainted, as no one will let me paint them orange and blue like the cake. So now I have to decide whether we are going to keep the painted trim color we have now for the long haul or whether we're going to start the transition to white trim with these columns and the stained beams. Any suggestions? (I can hear my dad now... Why would we give you suggestions? You're going to do what you want to do anyway. Ultimately, true. But I do value counsel along the way!)

You can also see the mugs that go with our new dishes. Had to get new everyday dishes as the old ones were plastic and it was driving me and everyone else in the house crazy that we couldn't microwave in them. Didn't want any added toxins messin' up our dinner. So I ordered new dishes a couple of months ago. They're happy dishes. :)


And then there was the traditional take-out for birthday dinner. Last year, we got take-out from Kemps, which led to an anaphylatic reaction to shrimp on Zack's part. That was a little more excitement that we were up for this year, so we got Outback. No shrimp.

Who loves the cheeseburgers most? Kelsey-girl. And since she was a little less than 36 hours post oral surgery, she was bummed everyone else was eating her favorite. Poor, poor Kelsey! Quick... what can we do to include Kelsey in the birthday fun???

I know! Let's get her a cheeseburger and put it in the blender. A cheeseburger shake!!! So... per Kelsey's request, we blended the WHOLE think together: burger, cheese, bun, lettuce, onions, tomatoes.

And the end product looked not unlike Pepper's dinner. Bleh! But Kelsey said it tasted good. I hope so. I sat diagonally across the table from her and carefully avoided looking at her cheeseburger shake directly.

We made it through dinner to Harris Teeter cake time. Woo Hoo!!!

And EVERYONE was happy. Even Kelsey, who had to eat cake like ice cream. Ya know, eating utensils are usually not optional when eating cake that isn't cupcake. But for this birthday, we were adapting, improvising and overcoming.

Maybe next year we can have the most boring birthday dinner ever. That would be nice.

Nothin' like a little oral surgery to kick off the summer...

So on Monday, Kelsey had her wisdom teeth extracted by an oral surgeon. Four of those babies. All impacted. Nice. She will attest that surgery is a breeze. Recovery, on the other hand, well... not so simple.

Under the heading of hilarious was the ride over to the appointment. During the consultation, they asked Kelsey is she was nervous about having oral surgery. Sheesh... what do you say to that? Heck yeah, I'm nervous! And bam! In addition to the scripts for antibiotics and steroids and pain pills, Kelsey got one for Valium. No one asked ME is I was nervous about her oral surgery. I suppose they figured someone had to drive.

Oh yeah... the ride. At one point, Kelsey looked at me and said, "For some reason all I can think of to say is, 'I want a pony.'" So I told the nurse/assistant (what do you call them in an oral surgeon's office?) that if she asked for a pony, tell her she'll get one later, but they aren't allowed in the office. I'm still dealing with the fallout from Chauncy the imaginary unicorn who lives in our backyard.

Normally I hate meds of any kind. I scoff at notion of better-living-through-chemistry. But on Monday, I was good with it, and I have been ever since.

Why? Well... take a look...


We had just gotten home and gotten a little food into Kelsey so she could take her pain med. Facebooking all the way. Still under sedation from the procedure.

Still on Facebook on her iTouch. Pepper sensed something had happened to Kelsey and was absolutely set on sitting as close to Kelsey's face as possible. I think she was taking care of Kels in her own little sweet doggie way.

With a mouthful of gauze, Kelsey sat up and posed for a picture. She wanted to capture her chipmunk cheeks. Sadly, they weren't very swollen at the time.

I mean, I totally admit I'm biased, but I think she looks pretty cute in this picture. It was still early in the afternoon. She'd had a nap. We were just rolling along...

Then around dinnertime, she ran out of gas. Bless her heart, she fell asleep sitting up at the table. That's a chocolate milkshake. Her throat hurt something fierce after the surgery, so milkshake = good.

Is that the most pitiful look you've seen in a while or what? She woke up and not long after this picture, she headed for bed with her ice packs.

And that's about how the whole adventure has gone. She wakes up. She's feeling pretty good once the meds kick in. She interacts with the world for a little while. She crashes. She wakes up. She's feeling pretty good. She interacts with the world for a little while. She crashes.

There was one moment on Monday where I would have regrown my own wisdom teeth and had them removed again if I could have saved her the pain she was in. I sat on the stoop outside and cried. Then I got my act together and came in and made another chocolate milkshake. I think I made four that day.

Thanks for the prayers. There are great moments and not-so-great moments in her recovery, but overall she's getting better and better each day.

Desperately seeking summer...

I am tired. Thursday was our last day of school. It started with awards day. Kelsey won the hardest-earned AB Honor Roll she's ever gotten. We are not math people. Zane got AB Honor Roll and the Timothy Award for his grade. The Timothy Award is the only one the students vote on; they choose the boy and girl in each grade whose lives are examples of what it means to be a young believer. Zack got perfect attendance, though we are still not quite sure how we managed that. So we are thankful -- for the end of a long, rigorous school year, for the Lord's protection and provision, and for summer!!!

We left school and headed for the party... a little fun time playing putt putt and laser tag.

Although we have a bunch of summer projects underway at our home -- a ladies' Summer Bible Study each Wednesday night, Fun Fridays for high schoolers and middle schoolers every other Friday night, Impact Camp, volleyball team camp, mega-landscaping and fence repair, editing for the 4th issue of the school magazine, and planning for brand new classes next year -- we plan to extract every ounce of summer fun we can out of every endeavor we try.

We'll let you know how it goes...

Daddy, you'll never believe what we saw at the BB&T drive-thru...

Being the city girl I am, I had to ask some questions and then come home and do a Google images search. But if I've got a lick of sense in poultry-identification, I believe this is a guinea hen. Yes?

I researched it a little on the regular Google. Evidently, more and more areas are using guinea hens for tick control, of all things! I guess she didn't read the city ordinance about not having free-range poultry within the city limits. I have no idea how she'll pay the fine. She was in the drive-thru lane when we spotted her, but she squawked away... without even making a deposit. ;-)

Dinner Fail...

It was supposed to be a pizza roll. Something went very wrong and it came out looking like an entree from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Seniority...

As the school year winds down there's the giddiness of summer, for sure. And then there's the bittersweet goodbye that comes with graduation.

My foray back into teaching has been amazing. That there were ups and downs is almost an understatement. After many trips down to the administrative suite at the beginning of the year to make sure we were all "on the same page" about the role of the student publication, I almost quit. I wanted to teach ground-breaking journalism from a Christian worldview and I felt like we were publishing a mini-version of the yearbook.

Then two things happened. First, one of my students, JT, wrote a story on Jon Foreman (Switchfoot). It'd be a LONG story to tell all the details, but the short version is that JT wrestled through the process and brought forth a piece that left me speechless. "This is why I teach," was all I could say for quite a while after reading it.

Second, I was down in the administrative wing yet again at the beginning of the second semester, this time trying to determine whether we were allowed to publish "Best of 2008" movie review of The Dark Knight. The answer was no. The surface reason was that the school doesn't condone PG-13 movies. The real reason... administration didn't want to offend families that feel like they must walk a very narrow road in order to remain in God's will for their lives. It reminded me of Romans 14 and 15, and for the first time, instead of wanting to quit, I "got it" that there are many modern day equivalents to eating meats sacrificed to idols. And for the sake of the weaker brother, I'd rather not eat meat again. MB was the student writer for The Dark Knight. He didn't like sacrificing a piece he'd worked on so hard, but he (and I) submitted to those in authority. No regrets. (On a happy-ending note... MB loves film making and he took his passion for movies and entered a film festival where he won three awards.)

After The Dark Knight incident, I was cool, and instead of pining away for the end of the school year (Read: my contract to be fulfilled so I could get out), I couldn't wait to go to work each day.

I am so proud of our kids. They did an awesome job. And the seniors... wow... I'm going to miss those guys so much. I can't wait to see how the Lord is going to use them as they go to college and get on with life outside the walls of our little school.

Our Editors:

JG: Editor-in-Chief

KW: Assistant Editor

MW: Copy Editor

JM: Design Editor

JM will serve as our Editor-in-Chief next year. Yay!

MW and KW are headed for the same college at the beach.

JG is going to my alma mater and planning to major in journalism, though he is the quintessential English professor in the making. He'll figure it out, though. :)

These are the seniors. All of them are in Europe this week. Join me in praying for their safety and that they'll have an amazing time.

JG, KW, MW, MB, CD, KA, JT, AE, JM, AC

And creeping in the background is KO. She's just a sophomore, but she's not returning to our school next year. I'm going to miss her too!

What an amazing time of life... full of possibilities, packed with dreams. I pray the Lord will guide them and protect them as they travel the next steps of their journey.

I am blessed to have taught them all.

If you give a mom some fabric...

My favorite children's books that have been recently published are the If you give a _____ a ______ series. If You Give a Moose a Muffin, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, If You Give a Pig a Pancake... If I were a little more creative and a little less sleepy, I'd write a lovely curtain-making parody.


But my brain is fried. I've been making window treatments for the past week. And, in case you haven't made window treatments in a while, it forces you to combine right-brained creativity with left-brained math. I hate math. We are not of the math tribe. It is foreign to us.

My friend, Angie, got the ball rolling on my curtain-making frenzy. She teaches Domestic Arts (Home Ec) at our school. She helped us redesign our rec room area this spring. (Pictures will come shortly; we're not quite finished.) Angie picked out the cutest fabric, and for some reason, I can't seem to sort-of do anything, so I took everything that was left and bought a little more and now our entire informal living area on the main floor is bedecked with window treatments.

See...

Tomorrow I'm making coordinating pillows! My brain should be completely mush by the time I'm done.