Memorial Day!

This is going to be a great weekend for a lot of reasons - best of all, it is a long-anticipated breath of relief from the hectic daily schedule we've been keeping as the school year races to an end. We're all so excited to kick back and enjoy 3 lazy days in a row! Of course, Memorial Day also marks the beginning of summer around here ... as of this weekend, my little seaside town is running on all cylinders: the harbor is filled with boats, the ice cream trucks and tour buses start to make the rounds, the beach activity is bustling, the smell of hamburgers on the grill wafts thru the neighborhood every night, and the sun shines for over 15 hours a day. Yup, summer is the time for our little town to shine!

(image courtesy of j&j graphics llc)

In just 2 weeks our school days will turn to camp days - and around here, summer camp looks just like this ...

... that's my 8-year-old in the center, kicking back in her own tiny boat, not much bigger than a bathtub. So when summer looks like this every day around here, you can see why Memorial Day is the weekend I live for all winter long ... bring. it. on!!

volcanoes and lava and tourists - oh my!

So today was a big due date in the 3rd grade. Their first-ever long-term project has come due after two months of research and staggered due dates ... their projects on America's National Parks Service! Over the late winter, each child gets assigned to a particular National Park and the research begins right away ... they write letters to their particular Park Service for info, they research facts in books and online, and from there they create a display with an information poster, a diorama, and a Park Service pamphlet of their very own. It's a big event with all of the parents coming through to see the displays throughout the first a hour of the morning, followed by the entire school cycling through during the school day. The kids have to be ready to talk about their display and answer any questions about their particular Park. So what did my 3rd grade get for her Park?

Yup, that's Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park right there ... my daughter was thrilled to be assigned to this attention grabbing Park - the drama, the volatility, she wanted it all! However, when she realized in the homestretch of the project that she could not, in fact, have an explosion mechanism firing off throughout the day in her diorama, her disappointment was deep. Ever the tough cookie, my 3rd grader rolled with it and forged ahead with the cutest diorama you ever saw:

Notice the sweet old grampy with his crooked walking stick pointing at the wonder of the flowing lava ...

And the young man taking a photo (that's a flash going off at the top of the camera) while his wife reads from the fold-out pamphlet ...

And even though she wasn't able have the display actively firing off lava explosions, she was determined to have it erupting somehow ...

Yikes, I'm sure glad I'm not those poor tourists just beyond the fence!!

i'll never be LOST again ...

My name is Sloan and I'm not just a LOSTie, I'm a LOST-a-holic. It was my brother who first tempted me back in the Fall of 2004 - he had been recommending the show for weeks when we finally caved. My husband and I had to watch the first 6 episodes on the internet to catch up - I'll never forget that cold and rainy November Sunday when we snuggled in with the laptop and watched them all in a row. That day was pure bliss. Mesmerized and completely addicted right from the first scene of the first show, I loved everything about it: the drama of the plane crash, the complex characters, the mystery of the island, the flashback (and later flash-forward and flash-sideways) storytelling, and of course, the shock value of the cliffhanger presented in the last 5 minutes of every episode. Well, tonight is the night I've been waiting for ever since that snuggly November Sunday, the night when all of those puzzling questions are supposed to be answered, the night of the series finale.



So please, LOST, please I beg of you - 121 hours of episodes is a huuuuuge time investment. Please reward me with a convincing and fulfilling conclusion tonight. Unlike my husband and even my brother who hooked me, I have loved you and been faithful to you for the duration, even through the '07 writers strike and that horrible season on Hydra Island. So whad'ya say, LOST? Pretty please?

5th grade regatta ...

The end of the school year is quickly approaching, and my big girl, my first born, my beautiful oldest daughter is about to finish the 5th grade. Today was the day of the 5th grade regatta - it's as big a rite of passage at her school as the May Day event is for the 3rd graders. The kids spend a little over 4 months in a woodworking class making their boats from scratch - they plane the wood, they hollow it out, they dig space to secure a mast, they reinforce the keel, they paint the hull, they cut the sails, they do it all! A project that begins as 36 plain blocks of wood ends up as 36 uniquely gorgeous model sailboats:

As a bonus, today was the most beautiful sunny day you could imagine - a perfect day for a regatta on a sleepy local town pond. All of the 5th graders assembled at the far end of the pond:

And off they go ...

So congratulations to my amazing 5th grader - another big accomplishment is under your belt, sweet girl! Now it's time to sail into Middle School and enter the next phase of your young life ... may the winds always fill your beautiful sails just as they did on this special day:

the BFF ...

Do you have a best friend? I do. Her name is Lauren (she also goes by the nickname LT) and I've been lucky enough to call her my BFF for about 20 years now. She's amazing - thoughtful and articulate, hilarious and intelligent, and so much personal style packed into that tiny lil' size zero body of hers! In short, she's what I like to call 'LT-fabulous'! Since she's all of 5'2" next to my 5'9" frame, I often feel like a giant next to all of her adorableness. Here we are together, like fric and frac. Of course, I'm the tall one on the left:

With no sisters of our own, Lauren and I are the next best thing - we stood next to one another at our weddings, we're godmothers to one another's children, we sometimes chat several times a day, you get the idea. But with Lauren raising her family in North Carolina and me doing the same in Massachusetts, it's not often that we get to see one another in person anymore, usually just twice a year - such injustice! I miss having a daily dose of LT-fabulosity ... her funny sense of humor, her honesty, her incredible ability to break any situation down and tackle it, and her outstanding advice on everything from paint color to motherhood. I'm so grateful that we've been able to remain close despite the distance in miles. She's just a genuinely wonderful person right to the core and I feel lucky as a ladybug to call her my friend. So I'll ask again - do you have a best friend? I hope so ...

oh my goodness ...

For the second time in just a few days, there's been another viral video circulating that I can't get out of my mind, although this one isn't exactly sticking with me in the same warm and fuzzy way as sweet Greyson Chance's piano performance (see 5/14). This video also features incredibly talented kids, but it definitely has a different kind of wow factor for me ... kinda like "wow, what the ...?!" I'm curious to see what you think ...

These girls are 8-9 years old, and as the mother of a little girl exactly the age as the girls in the above video (the one who just last week (see 5/7) skipped around a maypole with a wreath of flowers in her hair!), I have to say I'm a little stunned by the skimpy costumes and gyrating hips - wowza, they seem ready to dance around an entirely different kind of pole! Clearly this is a world apart from a May Day setting, it's a national level urban dance competition - and good lord do these girls ever have impressive skills and talent, I'll give them that, and they surely put an incredible amount of work into this routine. And listening to the crowd, their routine hit a home run with the audience. But even if my 8-year-old had this level of talent, I'm just not sure I could stand by and watch this if it were her! Please, be honest with me, is there something that I'm just not understanding here?!

Update ... looks like YouTube has made it more difficult for this video to be shared. Click here to see the video.

more fun with sky high wifi ...

I don't know what it is about me and the return end of airline travel, but it just doesn't seem to work out well for me. On the bright side, I tend to have smooth outbound flights that are filled with good karma (note 5/11 entry) ... no traffic, no lines, decent seat, on-time arrival, first bag off the baggage carousel, you get the idea - it's usually something akin to those old British Airways ads: "this lane for Sloan".

But the return leg of the journey? Not so much. Like today for example. "This lane so not for Sloan". Today I think I may have encountered every possible reason for travel delay - all in one simple non-stop flight. Mechanical problem? check. Plane needs new part? check. Part needs to be flown in from another state? check. Special mechanics need to come in from an hour away? check. Original flight crew had to time out due to the extended mechanical delay? check. New flight crew delayed in arriving? check. En route thunderstorms forced a detoured flight plan? check. Circled my hometown airport for an hour while said weather moves out? check. You get the idea. It's been a comedy of errors but without the comedy. And I'm writing about it all while I circle round and round and round in my airplane high in the sky. 7 hours late ...

The toughest part is that I'll miss that exuberant airport greeting from my two sweet girls who I've missed so much over the last 3 days, for they have long ago gone to sleep ... I will arrive to an empty, sleepy airport in the middle of the night with no one waiting for me. So depressing. It's not easy for a complainer like me, but I really must force myself to see the bright side: we'll land in the clear weather behind the storm line, I'll be in my own bed shortly after midnight, I'll collect my hugs and kisses in the morning ... and, oh yeah, that mechanical problem was discovered while the plane was on the ground and not 36,000 feet up. I guess life isn't so bad after all ...