Halloween album

Halloween 2007

Well, I found out that the night before Halloween is called Goose Night around here. There was lots of toilet papering going on and I saw shaving cream squirted on objects here and there around town. In Michigan (specifically the Detroit area), it is called Devil's Night and is much more violent...most of the activity dominated by setting fires all around town. Goose Night, in contrast, is much more benign. The toilet paper is a nuisance but at least doesn't permanently destroy property or put lives in jeopardy! Sam had a blast at his school party and came home all sugared up. It was a really fun, safe experience for him and I'm so glad he got to go this year.
The kids got up ON TIME today, for once, and were ready for school like an hour early...if only we could have Halloween everyday...
Peter got to wear his costume to school the whole time and Sam and Caleb got to change into theirs after lunch. They all had a costume parade after lunch. Since Peter was all ready for Halloween to start at 7:15AM, it was a long day for him. He kept asking me when we would go trick-or-treating. (Did he actually think we were going before school)? When I would tell him we would go when Dad got home from work, he'd say "How many minutes is that?" I'd tell him it's **hours away. He'd then ask, "How many seconds is that?" At one point, I actually had to get a calculator out and show him that we would go trick-or-treating in 14,400 seconds. He informed me he could only count to 106 seconds. You might say it was a long day for me, too.
As usual, they enjoyed handing out candy to trick-or-treaters just as much, or more, than going themselves. Caleb, especially, said something about how fun it was to stay home awhile and hand out candy to cute kids. Peter generously donated almost all his candy when ours started running low. He went through each piece deciding on which to keep and which to donate and ended up keeping only a handful. We ended up not needing to use his but I'm hoping Dave or I can take it to work and leave it or something! We certainly don't need it in the house! (See previous post about Steph's party pooping).
Hope everyone had a great Halloween!!!!
p.s. Dave says (in response to the previous pumpkin post) that he remembers things differently. He has done his fair share of pumpkin scraping, innard removing, and cleaning up. I'm sure he's right...if only I'd been blogging all those other years...we could look back and find out for sure! ;-)

It's the Great Pumpkin...

This past weekend, we held our annual pumpkin carving night. What this usually means is I get to cut open the pumpkins, scrape out and remove all the innards by myself, Dave carves a nice pumpkin face for the kids and I then clean everything up. It's not really an activity I look forward to each year. This year was a little better...Sam and Caleb did a lot of scraping and innard removing and actually carved a pumpkin each all by themselves. Peter didn't want to get his hands slimy so pretty much just watched me work. (I remember Sam and Caleb used to refuse to put their hands into the slimy pumpkins, too). Dave was busy making us a yummy dinner so we let him off the hook. Hey, anything as long as I don't have to cook!
This is the first year we used actual "pumpkin carving tools" which made the whole thing SO much better...as opposed to just using sharp kitchen knives that the kids aren't allowed to use anyway! Here's a picture of the finished pumpkins. They are already starting to shrivel up. I carved the two on the right; Sam did the one on the bottom left and Caleb did the one on the top left.

Sam is going to a Halloween party at the school tonight for all the 4th and 5th graders. Apparently this is an annual thing and should be lots of fun. After the party, they are given rolls of toilet paper and they actually get to run around the outside of the school, papering whatever they want to! (Their school is an "open air" campus with small, individual buildings connected by outdoor walkways). There are lots of big trees too! I couldn't believe it when I heard that, but, each kid had to sign a slip promising to arrive half an hour early for school the next morning to help cleanup. I'll be interested to see how it looks!?!

One more note about Halloween: Steph told me that on the TODAY show this week they were talking about all the candy that kids bring home from trick-or-treating. They said the average kid brings home 14,000 calories in their bag!!! That's fourteen THOUSAND, people! I couldn't believe my ears. But wait, there's more! They took a poll and the average mom (myself included) sneaks approximately ten pieces of candy per day from their kid's loot and is consuming an EXTRA 1,000 calories/day! Lucky for you guys I can do the math, and from that I can tell you that we will gain 2 pounds a week at that rate!!!! Yikes! Steph is such a party pooper.

This weekend I was on a cleaning frenzy and actually found lots of leftover Easter candy! I threw it out, of course, (after Dave ate a stale peanut butter cup) but thought it would be kinda funny to hand it out to the trick-or-treaters. Can you imagine your kid coming home with an old chocolate bunny in their bag? Or some marshmallow peeps?

What's on YOUR mousepad?

Every now and then I get one of those e-mail questionnaires that you're supposed to fill in the blanks or finish the sentence so that all your friends can learn a little more about you. I love reading them and seeing what my friends answered about themselves, but I'll admit, I've NEVER done it myself. I think I'm just too lazy to delete their answers and put in my own! Anyway, one question they often ask is: What's on your mousepad? Not a very exciting question, really...but I have to confess that I love my mousepad! Dave bought it for me a few years ago when I became enamored with the artwork of Gustav Klimt. His work is quite unique, in my opinion. Most of his paintings are on square-shaped canvas, although nowadays when they are reproduced, the distributors often crop them to make them rectangular (so they'll fit in ready-made frames). ANYWAY, my favorite is "The Kiss" which is the mousepad Dave bought me. We just can't afford the original...although Christmas IS coming, hint, hint!

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck...

The other day I made a quick run through a Burger King drive-thru. As I sat there in line contemplating the spicy chicken sandwich I would be ordering from the dollar menu, I remembered that I used to get chocolate shakes at Burger King all the time. So I thought I'd strike out on a wild hair and order a chocolate shake to accompany my chicken sandwich. When they handed me my shake, I thought it didn't look quite right. Even though the lid isn't see-through, I could tell that the shake inside was white, not brown. I asked the cashier if this was a chocolate shake. She looked at my receipt and said, yes, it was a chocolate shake. I opened the lid and looked at the white shake. I showed it to her and said, "Are you sure? It looks like vanilla."
She said, "No, it's chocolate."
I took a sip through the straw and said, "Tastes like vanilla."
She assured me once again, "No, no, it is chocolate."
Okay....???
So I drove away thinking maybe I could be wrong. Maybe just because it looks like vanilla and tastes like vanilla, it could be chocolate? Well, two minutes later as I was a fourth of the way through it, I kicked myself over and over for actually letting her almost convince me it was chocolate! It was definitely vanilla. Not that I hate vanilla shakes...but as you can see in my list: '10 things I love'...vanilla shakes are definitely not listed! I KNOW chocolate, lady!

Saturday in the City

Last Saturday, my childhood friend from Texas came to NYC for the weekend. Nichole now lives in Virginia and she's the one I mentioned before whom we visited in August during our D.C. trip. Anyhoo, she and her sister-in-law, and two other gals took the train up from VA to spend the weekend in NYC. They arrived on a Friday and met Dave at work where he gave them a tour of the Patek Philippe service center. The next day, I took the bus in and got the spend the WHOLE day bumming around the city with them!
First, we met up at the farmer's market in Union Square. It was fun to see a place like this in the city, with New Yorkers pulling their little luggage carts around, full of fresh produce, flowers, goat cheese, and so on. Then we went to a lovely seafood restaurant in Union Square. Seafood, you ask? Shelley went to a seafood restaurant? As most of you know, I don't DO seafood. But this trip wasn't about ME so I happily ordered a nice salad while the other ladies enjoyed their seafood. (Although, I admit Nichole got me to try her crab cake and it was a bit tasty). The only thing I can figure is that one day I must've had some BAD seafood and have been turned off by it ever since. That, and the fact that many sea creatures look like giant bugs. Think about it: lobster, crabs, shrimp? They're huge water roaches! AND, they swim in their own excrement! But, I digress...
We then wandered through the trendy Greenwich Village on our way to the Jacques Torres chocolate store. This is Nichole's favorite chocolate so she needed to stock up and I was more than happy to make a few purchases of my own! Afterwards, we wandered around Soho; window shopping and checking out all the cool street vendors. These are not the vendors selling I love NY shirts or Statue of Liberty trinkets. They sell really cool, very eclectic stuff. Everything from handmade jewelry and t-shirts to finger puppets for kids.
I LOVED Soho! It was very crowded and I noticed that you could probably wear anything in Soho and not even get a second glance. I bought a gorgeous crocheted winter hat, a beautifully soft blanket, and then a pink belly-dancing scarf with all the jingle jangles on it. I actually thought about wearing the noisy scarf over my jeans because then I would've fit right in. I'm telling you, nobody would've even given me a second glance if I was wearing a belly-dance skirt and jeans together in Soho! I don't think you could get away with that in Midtown (the area where Dave works).
Then we ventured a little closer to Chinatown so two of the girls could buy knock-off Coach handbags. To get the really good imitations, you have to be willing to go on a bit of an adventure but we were able to find some without having to climb into the back of someone's van, luckily.
It was a really fun day...especially for me since I had never had the opportunity arise to wander around the Village or shop in Soho before. I'm usually with my family when I'm in the city and Dave's never said before, "Hey, I have a great idea! Let's take the kids and go shopping in Soho today!" Just doesn't work...

The Naked Cowboy, part 2

OK, just in case you missed my previous post about the Naked Cowboy, you can catch up on it here.
I forgot to mention in my previous post that after the class with Beto, I caught a glimpse of the Naked Cowboy in Times Square. This was a first for me and I say a "glimpse" because I was literally running so as not to miss my bus.
Later that night, I mentioned to Dave that I saw the Naked Cowboy for the first time today. Our conversation went as follows:
Dave: You saw him, huh? I think he must wear a liner or something, don't you think?
Me: A liner?
Dave: Yeah, you know, some kind of special gear to cover his 'package'.
Me: His package?
Dave: Yeah, you know, his package looks way too smooth. He must wear a liner or something underneath his tighty whities to smooth it out.
Me: You were looking at his package?
Dave: Oh come on, and you didn't?
Me: NO, I didn't. I didn't allow my eyes to go South and I'm really wondering why you did!?!

Here's a picture in case any of you want to zoom in and check it out. I especially like the tattoo of Jesus on his left shoulder. Very classy...

Me on the TODAY show!

Last week I got up at 5:30am to go to the TODAY show. They were going to include a Zumba segment that morning so I HAD to be there with my "I love Zumba" sign and stand outside waving at the camera with all the other crazy TODAY show tourists. I stood outside in the COLD for almost 3 hrs. total and it was so fun! Alberto Perez (a.k.a. Beto), the creator of Zumba was there with his posse to perform a short segment outside on the plaza. Once I got there, I figured out where on the plaza they would be performing and gradually elbowed and nudged my way to the front for "front row" seats. I was on the air twice: once around 8:30am as they were coming back from a commercial and later at 9:50am as they were going to a commercial. When the Zumba crew came outside to do their thing, I discovered that having front row seats was not the best idea. Suddenly there were a zillion cameramen and such in between me and Ann Curry and Beto. That's OK because I got to watch it later...you can view the Zumba segment here. It's so funny to me to watch Beto's interview with Ann Curry because 1. He doesn't speak much English so I'm sure he had memorized things to say and 2. In every interview I've seen him in, he always always always mentions that Gina is the mother of 4 kids. I think that is his fall-back when he doesn't know what else to say. Luckily, Gina was with him! (She, by the way, is not the mother of HIS kids).
The best part, for me, was meeting Beto afterwards. He was so nice and friendly and sincerely appreciative of all of us who had come to the show to support them. At one point as we were standing out there, for some reason it was just Beto and myself standing off to the side of everyone else. It was a little awkward so I felt the need to make small talk with him...and I was kinda nervous so I was talking really fast, probably. Anyway, I was telling him about how my husband works right in this building next door and he's a watchmaker, and I'm the mother of THREE kids, etc. Then as I was blabbing on, I noticed the look on his face and suddenly realized: he has NO idea what I'm saying. No speaka de English? So I said, "My, it's cold today" to which he replied, "Si, Si, I'm from Miami so is much cold for me". And thus ended my conversation with Beto.
Soon after, Dave arrived for work (several hours late due to an overturned Mac truck at the entrance to the Lincoln tunnel). I went up to work with him and hung out in the conference room with my Harry Potter book. Some other employees came in, eventually, with stacks of beautiful watches that they were sorting for some reason or another. One gal was trying to decide which watch(es) to send to a magazine who was shooting pictures of a model and wanted their model to be wearing a Patek Philippe. (This happens all the time, apparently). Patek Philippe doesn't use celebrities to advertise their watches but often a magazine will do a photo shoot of a celebrity and they want them to be wearing a Patek watch. Anyway, not that I was eavesdropping or anything, but I did overhear that this particular shoot was for Charlize Theron. No big deal; all in a day's work for these people.
Dave and I ate lunch together in the City; a first for us (without kids)! We ate from a luncheonette called Mangia. It has amazing food and is not ridiculously expensive. It was fun to be together and also spend a little bit of time at his work.
Afterwards, I went to the Sports Club/L.A. in Rockefeller Center to attend a 'master class' with Beto. When I found out he was coming to the TODAY show I e-mailed Zumba headquarters to find out if he would be doing any classes or performances that we could attend. They said he wasn't but that he would be happy to prepare a "special choreography update class" for the area Zumba instructors if I wanted to organize it. At first, I was like: No way, I can't do that...I have NO contacts in NYC and only 3 days to throw something together, etc. BUT, I decided to give it a try anyway, got the ball rolling and luckily Zumba headquarters took it over from there! I wasn't sure if we could get enough instructors together on a weekday after lunch; especially since most of us were coming from NJ and CT, have kids at home, and so on. BUT, it was a packed house and it was so much fun! Man those instructors are lucky to have me! ;-)
Anyway, here's some pictures of me and Beto. One after the TODAY show, and one after the class. Also, below is my half second of fame from the TODAY show: special thanks to Steph and Geoff for transferring the video to the internet for me! It's a little grainy but you can see me with my purple jacket and gray scarf:

Miscellaneous happenings

The other night when Peter was supposed to be in bed, I walked in and found him NOT in bed. I was, however, kinda impressed with how he was spending his free time. It's not rocket science or anything, but I thought it was pretty neat for a 5 yr. old. You can watch the video if you want to see it, too.
Also, the other day, Peter asked me if I was lonely all day while they were at school and Dave was at work and I had no one to snuggle with. I told him that actually while they were at school, I was at work and then I went to the grocery store and then I picked him up at school so I didn't even have time to get lonely. He then said he felt sorry for our house being here all alone with no one in it while we were away. I asked him if he thought the house was alive and he said oh yes, definitely, and when we walk around in it, it tickles the house all the time.
One more thing about Peter: even though he's almost 6, he still has a lot of trouble with the whole linear time frame thing. Like when he says "yesterday" he could actually be talking about something that happened 3 years ago. Now that I think about it, when he says "tomorrow" he could actually be talking about something that happened 3 years ago. Sometimes there's even new words like "tomorrowday", but this week, he really made some progress as he was talking about the day before yesterday and said, "yesterday's yesterday". It took me a moment, but I understood what he meant!

Caleb got his first orthodontic appliance installation this week. I'm SOOOOO happy that it is cemented into his mouth and can't be removed/lost in the lunchroom at school! I experienced many years of orthodontia myself and am proud to say I never lost a retainer so I know it is possible to NOT lose one, I just don't count it as very likely. Anyway, he has tolerated it very well and speaks with a slight lisp now. It's very cute.
Sam is on his way to making a best friend. His name is Bernard and they were in the same class last year and sit by each other in the same class this year. He is a very nice, polite boy and he and Sam are also starting the gifted and talented program together tomorrow at school. We have had him over to play twice now and they get along very well. Most of their play consists of Pokemon on the GameBoy/Nintendo DS. Sam has the GameBoy and Bernard has the newer Nintendo DS. Sam really wants to get a DS now! Luckily he is not obsessed with it, though.
Yesterday, we invited Bernard and his little brother (who is 7) over to play. We had some water balloons already filled and ready to throw. (It was like 85 degrees; crazy hot for New Jersey in October, I'm told). Anyway, I thought it would be a really fun outdoor activity for the kids...unfortunately, these were deadly water balloons! Most of them wouldn't burst! The kids would throw them REALLY hard at each other and it would just smack them really hard as it bounced off their skin and then bounced along the ground! They were covered in red pelt marks and it turned into a screaming cry-fest in my backyard. Caleb was screaming at ME because the water balloons hurt so bad, as if I had manufactured them myself. Peter was crying because he wanted to throw water balloons at people but no one, apparently, was allowed to throw one at him. And Bernard's little brother was doubled over after taking a water balloon in the gut which knocked the wind out of him. Sam and Bernard seemed to be the only ones taking it in stride. It would've been funny except for the fact that they really did hurt, and not to mention I was a little worried about what Bernard's parents would think when they picked up their kids covered in mysterious bruises. These water balloons, by the way were filled and ready because we were going to use them during Caleb's birthday party weeks ago and never did. (We ran out of time). They've been sitting in our backyard ever since. Now I'm really glad we didn't use them during the party!!!