Anatomy of a Sleepover

Purchased at the grocery store today:

1. gummy worms
2. sour gummy worms
3. Hawaiian Punch
4. microwave popcorn

The plan is to let Bug, Bear, and Bear's friend watch a movie (or two) downstairs, put bowls of sweet & salty treats in front of them, then slip away and watch the Presidential debates upstairs in peace.

I'm Confused. We Moved to MAINE, Right?

Not Florida or South Carolina? I ask because today, tomorrow, and, oh what the heck, probably Sunday, too, we're going to be in the throes of a tropical storm. Complete with monsoon-y rain (2 -4 inches) and unseasonably warm temperatures. Yippee.

If that weren't bad enough, Hurricane Kyle, currently swirling ominously around the Bahamas, is tentatively scheduled to make landfall in Maine or Nova Scotia.

You read that correctly. A hurricane may be making landfall in Maine.

Maine.

Land o' blizzards and ice storms.

And apparently hurricanes.

I'm not sure whether to be alarmed or amused.

Volunteering Is Its Own Reward

This morning I volunteered for an hour in Bug's class to help the kids make fruit kabobs for their snack.

Cutting up ninety squijillion cubes of various fruits ... boring and sticky.

Overseeing the little buggers as they each made their own fruit kabob ... fun.

Overhearing one kid tell Bug, "Your mom is the BEST cook." ... PRICELESS.

Can You Say Overachiever?

Bug came home with a project assignment from her 3rd grade teacher last night. As part of their unit in nutrition, they had to design a balanced meal, then create it artistically using a paper plate as the background. As Bug solemnly explained to me, it was acceptable to just draw on the plate, but her teacher said that the more unique it was, the better the grade would be. Oh, and she needed to turn it in tomorrow. Plus she had math homework.

Fabulous.

The timing could not have been worse. I was smack in the middle of preparing for a book club meeting that evening. I already had the tablecloth ready to go on the table, the nice serving dishes out ready to be filled with appetizers, and I was frosting a cake.

We swept all of that aside and gathered glue, paper, markers, and the stapler. For an hour and a half, we cut curls of paper for spaghetti, wadded little strips of green paper into peas, cut out chicken nuggets, and watermelon, and rolled paper into a cylinder to make a glass of milk. Then Bug painstakingly glued everything to the plate and decorated the edge with markers. It was lovely, time-consuming, but lovely.

I swept the bits of paper off the kitchen floor and scrubbed the table free of glue, with barely enough time to get ready for book club.

This morning, as she carefully laid her project in a plastic bag, Bug said to me, "Mrs. M. will be so proud of me for getting this in early!"

Wait. What?

"I thought you told me it was due today," I said slowly.

"No, it's due in a week, but Mrs. M. said she'd really appreciate it if we could get it in during the week," Bug said casually, "I bet I'm the first one to turn it in!"

Type A, anyone?

A Banner Year for Apples

Sunday after breakfast, we drove out to Lemieux's (pronounced "LEM-yerz", I kid you not) Apple Orchard. They have 3,300 apple trees in their orchards. We had heard that our favorite variety of apple, the Macoun, was ripe for picking. Have you ever seen trees loaded with apples like this? It's a bumper year for apples in Maine.
Bug loved using the apple picker. She just wanted someone else to carry it for her when she wasn't using it. She wasn't too keen on carrying her bag of apples either. Or her sweatshirt.
Bear in a crate:

Hands down, the best part of picking your own apples is that you're allowed to eat all you want while you're picking. And NOTHING tastes better than a Macoun apple straight off the tree. Even Daddy Shortbread (Mr. Fruit Textural Issues) ate one.
This is a "Wolf River" apple. Note that it is approximately the size of Daddy Shortbread's head. A bit scary, no? I'm thinking two of these babies would probably fill a pie crust.

The girls were delighted to round the corner on one of the rows of apple trees and discover a pen of cows. The cows were pretty interested in them, too, and came right up to the fence to check them out.
We bought several of these pretty gourds they had for sale and two 5 lb. bags of apples. Total price = $5.

Life Fact #214: Burning Stuff Is FUN

For about two years now, we've been chucking all manner of fallen branches, rosebush trimmings, and whole young trees we've cut down into a brush pile out back. We intended to burn them last summer, but it never happened, and subsequently the pile continued to grow. I began to feel that the pile was in danger of going from genteel brush pile to white trash crap pile, so yesterday Daddy Shortbread obligingly fetched a burn permit.

He was, however, NOT very receptive to my ideas that we haul the brush out into the middle of the old vegetable garden and really torch the sucker. He had very stodgy ideas about burning it a little at a time, with garden hose at the ready, and not moving the pile from the edge of the grass where it sat. The kids and I went out to watch anyway, though it didn't sound like it would be the dramatic bonfire I had envisioned.

None of us had really considered the fact that this brush has been sitting for two years. It was, shall we say, tinder dry? My back was turned when Daddy Shortbread touched a match to it, but it was with delight that I heard the unmistakable WHOOOOMP of conflagration. Delight that turned to holy-crap-what-have-we-done? when I turned and saw this:
Let's just say that in the first ten minutes or so, that garden hose came in darn handy. Also, that we FRIED the leaves on the branches unlucky enough to be above the fire site. Not to worry, we kept it under control, and it quickly became a manageable size once the smaller pieces of brush burnt off.

The peanut gallery was impressed. And by impressed I mean that Bear squeaked and ran to hide in the playhouse, while Bug whooped it up from the safety of the picnic blanket.
And in the time-honored tradition of children everywhere, they eventually started the chucking of everything they could find into the fire. Grass clumps: not so exciting. Fallen apples: satisfactory high-pitched whining, followed by a pop when they explode.
When that was no longer fun, they began dragging chunks of oak out of the woods, left there last fall by the tree-cutters.
Once the sun went down, the air quickly became chilly and Daddy Shortbread selfishly curtailed the further adding of fuel to the fire, saying he didn't want to be tending it until 11:00.

We hauled the picnic table out back and ate dinner by the glow of the fire as it burned down.

(Followed by showers all around, since we REEKED of woodsmoke).