In Which I Earn the Bad Mom Award

E had basketball games at her school last night. It was also our night for our "compulsory volunteerism" in which we had to supervise at the games for 2 hrs (make sure there are no problems with fans or students from our school or the other team's and help as needed).

E's team lost, and when her game was done, I handed over the blaze orange supervisor's vest to Josh to wear while I went and finished proofing and printing the bulletins for Sunday since they weren't ready for me yet while I was working there earlier.

After putting the kids to bed, Josh and I watched The Soloist. I wouldn't recommend it. It wasn't horrible or anything, but it was R.E.A.L.L.Y. slow. I think it could have been a good movie, but it just seemed so drawn out when it didn't need to be. I watched the whole thing, but Josh fell asleep during it.

J had a basketball game this morning at P, H. Josh took J and S to the game while I took E, G, and F grocery shopping with me. E and G wanted to come with me and pick out presents for their friends whose birthday parties they will be attending soon, and F wanted to spend the remainder of her $10 money from Christmas. E was scheduled to have a 3 hr cheerleading practice this afternoon (or so I thought), so we had to get the errands run in the morning which meant we couldn't all go to J's game.

J's team won his game.

After lunch I took E to school for her practice. We were about 5 minutes early. Pastor's car was the only one there, but that didn't really faze me since the other cheerleaders usually get dropped off, and the coach gets there right when practice is supposed to start. I watched E open the door and go into the building.

On the way home, I had to stop at Piggly Wiggly to pick up a couple of things that they had really good deals on.

When I pulled into the garage, Josh came out with the phone in his hand and said that E was waiting at school and didn't have practice. Oh, no!

I drove back and picked her up, but I went into the office and checked on my computer there. Practice was scheduled for 1:00-4:00 NEXT Saturday afternoon!

I felt so incredibly horrible! Bad mom award for the day? Yep, that would be mine. :(

At home once again I spent over 2 hrs cleaning the house and folding laundry. Not fun, but productive, and now the house looks much better.

With our permission, J has started reading the Harry Potter books. Someone at school is reading the first one. Because it wasn't in the school library, J started with book 2. When we were at the community library this morning, I checked for book 1, but all the copies there were checked out there, too. Guess I'll have to put it on hold for him.

J just started reading the Harry Potter book this past Wednesday and is already almost done. Pretty good for a boy who mainly enjoys non-fiction!

Low-Key Week

This week has been wonderful! I had to work concession on Tuesday night, but I didn't have to work any other evening this week, and I don't have to work tomorrow either. E didn't have any musical practices this week because this week's practices are only for the leads, and Josh had no meetings in the evening either. Wow! How did we manage a week like this?! :)

Josh's brother C from TX had some meetings up here, so last night he came over and spent the night with us. He didn't get here til almost 9:00 pm, but E, J, and G were still awake, so they came down to say a quick hi before going back to bed. C had to leave this morning before 7:00, but all the kids got to see him before he left.

Josh had a meeting during the day for a couple hours down in the big city.

Josh's mom called today to say that Josh's grandpa is in the hospital with bronchitis and possibly the flu.

Josh and I finished watching the first season of Legend of the Seeker online, a tv series based on Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth book series which I'm currently reading.

Happy birthday, JP!

What I'm Currently Reading and a Movie Announcement

I'm currently reading Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML by Elisabeth and Eric Freeman. This is definitely NOT the kind of book I usually read, but I'm enjoying it! Josh suggested it to me. It's not written like your typical textbook and is very easy to read, even if you don't know much about html. So far, I've known about half the information in the book. Most of the html I already knew I learned through looking at codes here and there on the web when I wanted a specific thing, but I've learned that I wasn't doing a couple of the things exactly the correct way, and I've picked up some new tricks as well. If you want to learn a bit more about html, I'd recommend this book!

At the same time, I've started reading a new-to-me set of books called the Mithgar series by Dennis L. McKiernan. There are quite a number of books in the series. Right now I'm about halfway through the first book, The Dark Tide. It's pretty good so far, very high fantasy and Lord of the Rings-ish in style.

I didn't start reading books in the fantasy genre til Josh suggested I read J. R. R. Tolkein's The Hobbit* and LOTR triology back when he learned Peter Jackson was making the LOTR movies. I really enjoyed the books but still didn't read any more fantasy til I picked up the Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini this past summer. To my surprise, I'm discovering I really like the high fantasy genre, although maybe I shouldn't be so surprised since I also like reading historical fiction set in the Middle Ages, and high fantasy shares a similar setting.

*I just discovered that the same team that wrote the screen play for the LOTR movies has written one for The Hobbit and production is set to start in 2010 with the movie to be released in 2012!