If you take a mouse to school, he'll ask you for...

Two Saturdays ago Julianna and I went to see a play at the Children's Theater of Winston-Salem.  It was If You Take a Mouse To School and it was really cute.  There were only four actors playing at least seven rolls (but I may have missed one somewhere in there) and that's always impressive to me that actors can just switch characters so seamlessly like that).

The night before Julianna randomly let me roll her hair in curlers.  She never lets me do that so I was pretty excited.  We had the play, a birthday party, and church to go to the next day so that may have been her motivation but who knows really. I just jumped at the chance.

before we left the house we had Daddy take a few pictures

I'm not sure why b/c it's not really like her, but she was excited about dressing up. She wore her new coat and shoes.

Here's a horrible camera phone picture right before the show started.

We've also got tickets next week for another show and this time I think it's going to be a Daddy-Daughter Day.  We are fortunate that we live in a city with so many kid-friendly activities.  I hope someday we'll get to take Jules to see a couple of Broadway shows.

Jonathan and I agreed a long time ago that we would go on a semi-big trip every five years to celebrate our anniversary.  For our five year anniversary we left 1.5 year old Julianna with Mamaw for a short trip to New York City.  Jonathan had never been there before and I was eager to go back.  Here are some pictures from that trip.

outside our hotel

We took a ride on one of those double-decker tour buses and Jonathan took a picture of our reflection in a building as we went by.

This is the church near the Twin Towers where victims were taken during the attacks on September 11th.

This is the World Trade Center viewing site.

We didn't actually make it over to the Statue of Liberty but this is a picture we took of the harbor.

NBC Studios M&M peacock

ice skaters at Rockefeller Plaza

Grand Central Station

our hotel room

Harry Potter made out of Legos!

Our ten year anniversary is in 2012 and I know it's early, but I'm so excited that I'm already ready to start planning it. We know we want to go someplace warm. I don't want to drive, although I'm sure Jonathan wouldn't mind, and we'll be going in mid-October.  I'd like to spend 5 days or more.  Suggestions?

One of my New Year's Resolutions this year was to set aside $300 each month in a vacation fund and end up with a total of $3600 by the end of 2011.  My college loans will be paid off at the end of March and I'm going to roll that payment over to my vacation fund. The hard part will just be trying to come up with the extra hundred dollars each month.  That and figuring out how to save in January, February, and March.

So what say you? Got any specific ideas for an anniversary vacation for us?  Please give me as much detail as you can, like hotel or resort names, things to see and expense amounts.

finally Friday

We've had the week off from school pretty much.  Well, we had Monday through Thursday off and today is delayed.  It's been *difficult* to say the least.  I think parents everywhere in the county are going crazy.  The funniest Facebook status I've seen to date was my friend Julie's.  She wrote, "Dear WSFCS: If there's no school on Friday, plan on sending DSS to my house. Just a head's up."  I think that sums it up nicely.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for being out of school. As a teacher I think I'm programmed to like snow days at least somewhat. And I'm definitely all for keeping our kids safe and taking every precaution possible to make sure our students aren't injured or even killed.  Quite honestly, I'm pretty sick of hearing and reading people's comments and complaints about how they can't believe we're out of school again and how pathetic we Southerners are for canceling school for one or two inches of snow.  I am thankful for those people who made positive remarks about the whole situation.

At any rate I'm still glad to be back in a semi-routine this morning.  I actually got up and ran today for the first time since Sunday.  Yay me!  There's just something about knowing that school is canceled that makes you want to sleep every minute as late as possible and made me stay in bed Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

I also spent last night with a child so stir-crazy that she's misbehaving like you wouldn't believe.  We spent a good 30-40 minutes sitting in the car in the driveway freezing our "knees" as she put it.  You see, we had to wait for her to pick a bunch of stickers off of the inside of our car window.  Somehow she got the wild idea to decorate the window with a handful of stickers and they were stuck pretty good.  I was so mad at her I could have screamed for days, but instead I just had her scrape them all off bit-by-little-stinking-bit with her fingernails.

So yeah.  That's how my week has gone. How was yours?


 

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Snow Day Overload

Making cinnamon sugar snowflakes

lazy snow day

"Mom, can you put my robe on me?"
"Jules, you can stand up and put your robe on yourself."
"NO I CAN'T! IT'S FILLED WITH POLKA DOTS AND I CAN'T FIND THE TOP OF IT!"