Allison and I just got woke up at 1pm. We were up all night at a girl scout event at our local mall. These are some photos of my girls busy at work at 1am Sunday morning. This is our 5th year participating in the Columbia Mall Sleep IN where no one actually sleeps. My girls have put on badges and craft tables for approx 1000 4th and 5th grade junior scouts for the past 5 years. The event runs from 10pm on Saturday night to 6am Sunday morning. Last year we put on a Sports Sampler badge which was alot of work. This year the girls opted to run a lanyard keychain craft table. Some of the girls were not as comfortable with the task(not enough girl scout camp experience). I did have the girls over to the house twice before the event to practice. They spent most of their time chatting. I sure wasn't good at it, so I did not really help them last night. I was there to supervise and help clean up our area. The only real downfall was that we were next to the karoake machine last night-I think if we have to hear one more Justin Bieber "BAby, Baby, Baby" song we are going to scream! And my co leader was busy with a nurse's strike at her hospital last night so she did not attend the event. Her hospital wants to pay the weekend and night shift nurses the same pay as the day shift nurses. So they are striking.

I also had the girls over on Friday night to finish up some last preparations for a Junior Fun, Food and Fitness badge that were are putting on as a fund raiser next Saturday. Fortunately I have 5 girls and two adults helping. WE have 50 girls registered for the event! I spent part of Friday out shopping for supplies and ordering the badges.

I decided to work a half day on Friday and take a half day paid time off to make up for the day I missed last week. Plus they can still use the extra help at work since our OT with the stress fracture in her foot is still not supposed to walk and is stuck at home. And our OT assistant's mom had a heart attack last week and was in the hospital so she took off to be with her. We had a student helping out but she just finished her internship on Friday. I am just as busy in our out patient clinic. And my knee still hurts and is swollen making it difficult to run around the campus. I think I need to go see the doctor. I probably need PT for my knee, but who has time! I can't even find time to put heat or ice on my knee while I am at work surrounded by PT's! I really miss working out at the gym.

At least I have been able to go out for walks with Cookie. I even picked up a missed bag of food for the Scout's Harvest for Hungry food bank collection on Saturday. Last weekend Scott and I put out bags for food collection for the cub scouts in the neighborhood, and then went and asked for collections at the grocery store. Tom finally got to a scout meeting last week and then took Scott out to put up reminder signs in the neighborhood after school. We opted out of the cub scout pick up and another weekend of soliciting donations with the boy scouts. We figured we put in our time. And we had a food collection at our girl scout event last night so I dropped off the missed bag of donations for their collection. My troop is also collecting food next weekend as part of our Jr badge event. I am sure a trip to the local food bank will be planned.

While I was busy with the girls at our house on Friday night, Scott was invited to a night out with our neighbor Phil and his two kids at the skating rink where Allison will be working and dinner at Cheeburger Cheeburger. Scott had a great time-I couldn't convince Tom to join them. He chose to stay home and shoot zombies.

Tom also spent some time last week at SCott's school helping out with a question/answer session for the upcoming science fair. The boys decided to run an experiment to see if playing video games can improve your memory using the Simon game and the Xbox. I think it is a little lame-too many interfering factors, but oh well, it is their experiment.

And Allison had another wonderful week. She was approved to complete an internship at Scott's school next year as part of her class work. Now we will just have to figure out how to balance it with her field hockey season. If she makes Varsity, they practice right after school so it may be a little tough to run back and forth. Makes you almost wish she was already driving! She will be soon though as she can get her permit this April and is taking Drivers Ed in June when school lets out. Fortunately part of the program begins with several weeks in the classroom so she should be able to get through most of the season(if she makes the team). I am thinking they can always use goalies.

She and Tom are off to her last indoor field hockey game of the season. Tom has been a wonderful coach and we are grateful for our neighbor Phil for stepping in and covering for him last week.

Allison also started her evening art class. She has been wanting to take an art class for several years now and we just couldn't find one that fit her age group, that ran at the right time or fit our budget. I would have liked to have had her take an art class at school but her schedule has just been too full. So I finally found an intro to the arts class through our parks and rec dept and gave the class to her as a Christmas present. She started out with sketching last week. She had to draw an object from different angles to learn about perspective. She opted to draw a bottle. Next week they will try drawing with charcoal. She is already enjoying herself(and she wants to see her movie I am Number 4 again).

Scott and Tom took time out this weekend to catch the new cartoon movie about a lizard cowboy (JohnnyDepp), Rango. They enjoyed it. Tom had wanted to see the new Nicholas CAge movie with me on Friday but I was busy working and shopping before the girls came over for our meeting. On Saturday I was busy trying to get some sleep and squeezing in some housework. At least I get to stay home on Monday with SCott since he is off having just finished his last semester. Looks like he did pretty well with his grades. I spent most of SAturday night catching up with the other school moms on how frustrated we all are with the school's methods of testing and teaching. At least SCott is pulling As and Bs, unlike some of his fellow classmates. We went through alot of the same thing with Allison.

She just finished midterms and had to write a paper last week on Animal Farm and the use of satire. She was busy this weekend with research for her next big paper on satire but she had to choose the book. We all thought Mark Twain was a good choice as most all of his writings were very satirical, as well as funny and enjoyable. I had Allison reading the reader's digest version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Apparently Mark Twain had a lot to say about our American society during the time of slavery. Now she wants to read Tom Sawyer. Glad I bought the sequel way back when.

I was busy with my own homework assignment writing a newspaper article for OT month this coming April for the Community paper at work. I will also probably put on an Open House and I am thinking of setting up a guest speaker from the Arthritis Foundation to talk about exercise.

Allison finally got her work permit from school, so we had to run it over to the skating rink. If you are under 16, you have to have a work permit. The rink hopes to have her paperwork done and have her employed by the middle of this month! We took some time out on Saturday afternoon to buy some black pants for her uniform. She is going to be wearing a referee shirt and she has a Columbia Association polo shirt. She was too busy to get to an orientation class this past week while she was writing her paper and studying for tests, but there are more classes coming up at the end of the month she can go to --and she gets paid for them too!

So spring is finally here(early I think). We have had lots of rain and the peeper frogs started making noise in the backyard. They are the tree frogs that start singing in the spring. Also my house has been over run by ants, moths and stink bugs! The ants come up from under the house and get into everything, the moths are left over from a bad bag of dog food I got at the pet store last year, and the stink bugs are a gift shipped in from China. I guess the east coast has it the worst and is loaded with stink bugs. They are actually looking into releasing a tiny wasp that lays its eggs on the stink bug's eggs and the wasp larva eat the stink bug eggs and larva when they hatch. This wasp has to be imported from Asia as the US does not have a natural predator for stink bugs, so they are looking carefully into any possible glitches that might occur if they bring in another non native creature. The stink bugs aren't harmful to people(just very stinky), but mainly they eat up all the fruit crops. And they really don't want them spreading all across the country. Winter doesn't seem to bother them either as they just hibernate in your house. And pesticides don't seem to do very much to them either. Another great thing we can thank China for!

So that's it for now. I started putting out my EAster and St Patty's day decorations this week. I had to have Scott climb up and down the attic steps for me and put away the snowy decorations. Hopefully we won't see much of that again since my daffodils are already poking their heads above ground. But that also probably means our ski season is over. Oh poop.

Anyhow, Have a great week and Happy FAt Tuesday(AKA Shrove Tuesday) and Ash WEds early! Happy Paczki Day too! WE are sure missing those great fat polish doughnuts from Hamtramck!

Kathleen