This weekend was the Walk to Defeat Juvenile Diabetes in North Carolina.

As a recap I thought I would share my weekend with you by the numbers. 

Why?

Because it's fun to do that and I want to.  LOL

Number of kids I traveled with: 3

Number of dogs I traveled with: 1

The Prompts this week at Mama Kat's were all so creative it was hard to pick so I decided to do them all.


1.) Grab your current read. Let the book fall open to a random page and share two “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. (inspired by Heather) Currently I'm reading "Sloppy Firsts" by Megan Mccafferty. It is Mccafferty's first novel and it is in the young adult section of the library. The book is about a young girls struggle with adolescence and how she is coping with the move of her best friend. I can't believe this is the random page and "teaser" that actually came up....LOL

"Manda thinks that reading feminist manifestos makes up for her borderline ho-bag behavior. I'm pretty sure that's why she wears Poindexter glasses instead of contacts, so she seems less sexual and more intellectual. She's not fooling anyone, though. Hope and I called her The Kissing Slut because she'd made out with thirty-one different guys by her fifteenth birthday. That's when she decided it was time to move on to manual stimulation, so we christened her Lend-A-Hand-A-Manda. And when she turned sixteen, well, let's just say she earned the title The Headmaster."


2.) What do you aspire to be? (Inspired by The White House) When I was little I used to write story after story after story. I don't think any of them were ever about school board budgets and graduations. However, that being said, I still get paid to write and that is what I always wanted to do. Will I ever complete that allusive young adult novel?...that remains to be seen.

3.)Share a piece of unsolicited parenting advice...only I'm soliciting it. I have come up with a way to make tattle-telling much more fun for the adult than it is for the child. Thereby, eliminating most tattling because the child becomes more annoyed with the parent than the person they were tattling on to begin with. Make them sing. You pick the genre and they have to sing their tattle. Let me tell you, this is a fun game....especially in a large group of kids. My favorite genres...opera, rap and the country ballad. Try it....you are gonna love it. See the video below!

4.)Tell us about your blogline...how long have you been blogging, when did you start, what were/are your goals for your blog, etc. (inspired by Corn) I started blogging in February 2007 for about two days and promptly forgot about it until the following February. Originally, I was going to show off a lot of my crafts, but lately I find myself just rambling about nonsense. Who knew you were suppose to have a goal?

5.)If you had 5000 dollars to give away or donate to a charity...explain what you would do with it and why. (inspired by Hallie's letter) I would probably split it up between the ALS Association, JDRF, and PANCAN. My mom's sister died from ALS and it is a terrible disease. It strips you of all motor function, but leaves you mind intact. As for JDRF, regular readers know that my nephew is diabetic. PANCAN does research solely in the fight against pancreatic cancer. Most people diagnosed with this disease are given a 1 percent survival rate. My mother-in-law is part of that 1 percent.

Wow!  My weekend was a blur--a fast whirlwind adventure that I'm so glad my kids and I decided to undertake.

We had safe travel to and from North Carolina.  We arrived at my  mother's (in Virginia) around 6:30 p.m. on Friday.  We had super and tried to get the kids to bed at a reasonable time, but you know how that goes when you are sleeping away from home.

At 7:30 a.m. we were on the road again!  I'm happy to say that we made it to my sister's by 1 p.m. and that included a nice sit down brunch at Denny's.

On Saturday evening we went to a very informative and impressively well planned JDRF event that included a meal and some speakers and lots and lots of kids activities.


Here she is smilin' like a girly girl getting ready to blow out her candles.  The party had a cooking theme and each child got to make their own apron and pizza and icing their own cupcake.  It was a lot of fun and the kids really seemed to enjoy it.

After the party, the Pittsburgh Steelers took on the Baltimore Ravens in arousing game of football.  Some of my British friends asked me what I was talking about in my previous post so here is my pathetic attempt at an explaination.  As I'm sure you know, our version of football and your version of football vary slightly.  This weekend there were only four teams left.  The winners of those two games move on to the SUPERBOWL...which is the biggest game of all!

In the area of Pennsylvania where I grew up, the only team worth cheering for was the Steelers.  I yell at the TV when they are playing like a crazied woman, often to my children's amusement.  Now I live closer to Baltimore and in this area there are quite a few Baltimore Ravens fans.  The torture of losing to them would have been....well let's not think about it because....