Titles

This morning Drew told me that most of the professors at his college want to be called by their first names.  I expressed a little bit of shock at that, which led him to ask, "Wasn't it that way at your college?"  Uhhh...no!  LOL  That conversation made me remember a few things, which I shared with him...

1.  There was only one teacher in my whole college who wanted to be called by his first name, and that was only because he was also the Dean of Students.  (I guess he wanted to be approachable.)  He asked us to call him John.  It took me at least half of my freshman year before I could bring myself to do that.

2.  Right after I graduated I got married and started working as the secretary in the admissions office of the college.  One day one of the professors, Dr. Dewitt, stopped me in the hall and said, and I quote, "Now that we're colleagues, you can call me Dale."

Colleagues???  It was very kind of him to say so, but there was no way we were colleagues.  I responded with something like, "Oh!........Okay!" and then never called him anything again for the rest of my life.

3.  A few years ago I became friends with another one of my professors from back then, Mr. MacDonald.  He told me that I should call him Craig now that so many years had gone by and I wasn't in school anymore, and, of course, that made sense, but do you think I could do it?  Nope.  It took me awhile...I'm talking a couple years...to really feel comfortable with it.  (Actually, I'm not fully there yet.)

After I shared all those little memories with Drew and we got a laugh out of them, he let me know that he wouldn't have had any trouble switching to first names in those cases.  "I bet you would've," I said back to him.  "If you've been using a term of respect for a long time, it's hard to go backwards.  It would be like if I suddenly asked you to call me Sue instead of Mom."

Can you guess what he said?  "I could do that!"  Punk.

PS:  When Zach was really little, like around 18 months, he called me "Mom" and he called Mike by his name, "Mike."  For real.  We were Mom and Mike.  And he wasn't trying to be disrespectful.  He really thought that was right, and no amount of telling him otherwise made any difference.  It took months before he self-corrected.

Tuesday

One of the things that's really hard for me as a mom...and this is a recent struggle, like within the last 5 years...is knowing when not to mom.  Does that make sense?  It seems like I'm always getting myself into little disagreements with the kids, and it's because I'm momming when they want to take care of something themselves.  On the one hand, I 100% want my kids to be fully-functioning adults who can and do make their own decisions.  I mean, of course I want that.  On the other hand, it's REALLY hard to not give my opinion or help.  (What makes it even harder is that they often want to tell me all about whatever it is they're working through, but they just want me to listen.  They still want to deal with it alone.)  Sometimes I think I'm not cut out for this gig.

Sunday

For the past few days I've been going through Michel Thomas' Total French program again.  In fact, I've been listening to it as I clean the house, so it's like killing two birds with one stone.  The reason I'm doing it is to get ready for my Milestone 1 prize, but I'll talk about that when I reach it.  To get to the point, though, today Michel said something that made me smile.  He's has such a great way of making you remember things.  He was talking about how in French you can never have a noun without some sort of article in front of it.  He said, with his thick German accent, "In French you cannot use a noun by itself, just...uh...disrobed...just nude and naked.  Yes?  No, you have to dress it up!"

The other day when we were at Patty's I told her a story about some weird friends that my parents used to have, but then when I thought about it later I realized I told her the story a little bit wrong.  Here's the real one.  It's a correction for Patty and a first-time memory for the rest of you.

Back in the 1980's my parents were friends with a married couple in their 30's that they knew from church.  Their names were Jim and Cindy.  Now Jim was a totally normal guy, and...here's the important thing...there was nothing wrong with Cindy, either.  She was pretty, well-dressed, and she wasn't missing any teeth.  And yet she often started her stories with, "I says to Jim, I says, 'Jim,' I says..."  Only that's punctuated a lot more than how it actually came out of her mouth.  How it really sounded was, "IsaystoJimIsaysJimIsays..."  (Too bad I can't show you this in person.  I can do a really good impression.)  Then she'd go on to say whatever it was that she said to Jim.  That's the end of the story, but it's enough, right?  I mean, it's just kooky.

Saturday

Today I had one of those awkward moments in the grocery store when you see someone you sort of know, and they see you at the same time, so you're both forced by politeness to stop and make small talk for awhile, but you hardly know what to talk about, because you barely qualify as acquaintances.  And you notice he's got a cane propped up in his cart, and so you're like, "So...how's it going with the walking?" and then inwardly you're like, "Oh my gosh, I'm an idiot."  And then you keep passing each other in the store as you do your shopping, and you have to keep giving that "We meet again!" smile.  Sigh.

Or is that just me?

Friday

Okay!  Today is day 1 of my diet.  I told you that I'm using the Happy Scale app, which splits your overall goal into 10 mini-goals, or milestones.  I resolve to reach milestone 1 by December 16 (which is three weeks away), but the truth is I'll probably reach it within a week.  I always lose weight quickly right at first.  Anyway, I'll report back when I get there!  (And I'll also tell you the prize I chose for myself.)

In other news, today I decorated the house for Christmas.  Honestly, it wasn't very fun.  And by that I mean it wasn't the least bit fun at all.  Ugh.  It's one of those jobs, though, that you have to do, and then you can enjoy the results for a month.

Hardly anybody is home.  Mike's over at his dad Danny's house, watching football.  It's their day-after-Thanksgiving tradition.  Zach's at work.  Baylee is spending the day with Jack and his family.  Drew is home, but he's busy doing his own thing.  So that just leaves me, decorating while listening to some rousing Christmas music French lessons with headphones.  lol

Thanksgiving, Continued

We had such a nice time at Patty's!  The food was delicious and the family time was a lot of fun.  Here are some pics.

Waiting for the last of the food to finish cooking.

 Drew decided to use that time to see how many black olives in a row he could throw into the air and catch in his mouth.  Turns out the answer is four.  I think this was throw number three...

Almost time to eat!

It was a great meal.

Later on in the evening we played a game called Aggravation and had dessert.

Baylee snuck this picture using my phone.  I found it when we got home.

Finally, at some point Patty's cat, Stewie, decided to come out of hiding.  Mike and Zach gave him some love.

Happy Thanksgiving

Yesterday, for maybe the first time ever, I didn't wait until evening to get all of my cooking and baking done, and, what do you know, it made for a much nicer experience!  (Duh.)  I made rolls in the morning.  Here's the bread dough ready to pop into the oven.

Then I made pumpkin bars with cream cheese swirls in the afternoon.  I tried one and they're delicious.  They taste like a pumpkin roll.  (Looking at this picture makes me realize that presentation isn't one of my strong suites.  LOL  Oh well.  They still taste good.)

Then I started making sweet potato casserole in the evening, but I asked Mike if he'd finish it for me, because I was sick of cooking by that time.  He did.  *smile*  There's no picture of this one, though.

We'll be packing up the food and ourselves and going to Patty's a little later to enjoy the day together as a family.

Also yesterday I got Le Petit Prince in the mail!  I want to show you guys this neat book.  It's exactly half French, half English.  That is, on every page, one column is in French and the other is in English, and they match up.

It's such a neat set-up.  It's got an introduction that suggests how to use the book, and it says to read it as much in the foreign language as you can (whether you're an English-speaking person learning French or vice versa), and glance over at the other side only when you absolutely have to.  It said that the sense of the story is more important than understanding every grammatical detail.  So that's what I'm doing, and so far I've read one chapter.  It's a lovely story!

Also, it comes with an audio CD, so you can listen while you follow along in the book, or you can download it into your phone and listen without the book.  There's a CD in French and one in English.  Here's a little example of the French one.  I really like it, because she doesn't talk too fast.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Goals

I'm done I'm done I'm done I'm done!!!!  Oh my goodness, that felt like an eternity.  I'm talking about finishing my French-related New Year's resolution, of course.  Here's what I had resolved to accomplish:

• Complete Learnables 3
• Do all of Learnables Advanced French

And here's what I actually accomplished:

• I completed Learnables 3
• I did all of Learnables Advanced French (Just finished that sucker tonight!)
• I did Duolingo both forwards and backwards.  That is, I did it like an English-speaking person learning French and like a French-speaking person learning English.
• I did Assimil French (except the writing exercises)
• I read a beginner French book called Voyage en France.

And the year's not over yet, so I'll probably have at least one more thing to add to the list before December 31.  It'll probably be that I read Le Petit Prince, because Mike bought it for me.  I'm excitedly waiting for it to arrive in the mail.

Unfortunately, that's the only New Year's resolution that I'll end up accomplishing.  I didn't take the weight-loss one seriously enough at all.  I'd get somewhere with it, then I'd backslide, then I'd get somewhere, then I'd backslide, etc.  Basically, I messed around pretty much non-stop.  And the resolution about starting up bike riding again ended up being impossible, because I waited too long.  I looked at my bike recently and realized that it needs a serious tune-up.  For one thing, somebody, either Mike or Zach, totally pillaged plundered borrowed (without asking) the inner tubes of both my tires.  Besides that, though, the whole bike needs work, and it's a bad time of the year to try to budget that. 

Here's the thing:  I think after homeschooling, cleaning the house, making supper, and running errands every day, I have enough self-discipline left over for one thing.  This year it was French.  It might've seemed like I had a great time learning that language...and I did, in a way...but it still took a lot of time and effort.  My point is that I need to make weight-loss my one and only extra thing in order to make it happen, so that's what I'm going to do.  I'll still do some French, but it'll be for fun.

Here's my new plan:

• Do one interesting French-related thing every day.  That might be reading, it might be listening to a podcast, it might be watching a video on YouTube, it might be doing a little studying.  Whatever.  Just something every day, as much or as little as I want.
• Truly aim all of my will-power at getting to my goal weight.  I'm starting the day after Thanksgiving (I mean, I can't very well start the day before Thanksgiving, can I??) and I'm going to follow the Slimfast 3-2-1 program, which I like a lot.  I'll plug my goal into the Happy Scale app, which will split it up into 10 do-able pieces for me.  (That's why it's called the Happy Scale, I think.  It makes things feel manageable.)  I'll come up with a prize for myself for every one of the 10 pieces I complete.  Also, I'll tell you guys as I complete them.  Each of the ten little goals should take no more than 3 weeks to accomplish, so if that much time goes by and you haven't heard from me, go ahead and ask about it.
• I'd like to say that I'm still going to start biking, but I'm not going to make that an official goal.  Maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't.  I can't worry about it right now.

Sunday

I'm going through Learnables Advanced French now, and it's not too hard.  In fact, I should be finished within the next couple days.  It's made up of 100 paragraphs, each having to do with a different topic.  Yesterday I read one that was talking about what English people eat for breakfast.  It said that sometimes they eat lard.  Then it went on to describe what it meant by that.  It said:

"Le lard est une partie du porc, coupée en fines lamelles et grillée jusqu'à ce que la viande soit croustillante."

That is, "Lard is a part of pork, cut into fine slats and grilled until the meat is crispy."

I was like, "You mean bacon??"  Yep.  Turns out they call it lard.

They had another paragraph talking about how French people never eat heavy breakfasts like the English.  They never have things like eggs, potatoes, and meat, for instance.  (Oh, and they don't have boxed cereal, either.)  Instead, "On mange une tartine de beurre ou un croissant avec de la confiture et on boit du café-au-lait."  That means, "One eats a piece of buttered bread or a croissant with jam and one drinks coffee with milk."  They also often have chocolat-au-lait for breakfast, which is homemade hot chocolate.

Last night Mike and I went to an event at a place in Seattle called the Sea Monster.  It was a benefit concert to raise money for Northwest Harvest, and the SoR house band was a part of it.  They did a great job!  This was their first gig as the new fall group (as compared to the summer group).  Anyway, Baylee killed it on her songs!  Here's part of one of them.

Music Stuff

A couple days ago Drew told me a little school story.  He said that all hell broke loose recently, because some student set a glazed doughnut on a grand piano in one of the classrooms.  Everything turned out fine, but apparently that's rule #1 in the music building:  No food or drink on the instruments.

Baylee is working on a new song for the Led Zeppelin show, and she said it's making her very thankful to her drum teacher for drilling limb independence into her.  (That means being able to do different things with different limbs at the same time.)  Here she is practicing it.

This is something kind of neat.  Awhile back Drew bought himself a looping pedal.  You know what that is, right?  You play a little piece of something, and the pedal records it and keeps playing it over and over.  Then on top of that you can play another little piece of something, and it'll record it and play it...etc.  It's like layering music.  Anyway, Drew was messing around with his last night, making up a song.

The loop was late but I like it that way

A video posted by Drew (@theseattle_seahawks) on Nov 18, 2016 at 9:45pm PST

A Grammar Lesson

Yesterday I mentioned that I found myself in a grammar-related altercation (if only I had that on my bucket list) on a homeschool mom forum.  I was told that my friendly explanation of objective complements was "argumentative" and "silly."  lol  So since I couldn't seem to have a conversation with that woman, I'll have one with you guys!  Hopefully within the next couple minutes you'll understand what an objective complement is and how to find one in a sentence.  Ready?

An objective complement is a word that renames a direct object.  That sounds tricky, right?  It's not bad, though, if you take things step by step.  Let's use this sentence:

Thousands acknowledged Christ savior of their sinful, needy souls.

Step 1:  The first thing you want to do, every time, is get rid of prepositional phrases.  They clutter the sentence and make it harder to find things. In this sentence we have "of their sinful, needy souls." Pretend like that's gone. In fact, it can be helpful to literally cross the prepositional phrases out. 

Step 2:  Find your subject. In this sentence it's "Thousands."

Step 3:  Find your verb. Here it's "acknowledged."

Step 4:  Now you want to find the direct object.  To do that just say the subject and verb that you just found (maybe even out loud to yourself), and then say "what/who?"  So in this case say to yourself, "Thousands acknowledged what/who?" The answer to that will be your direct object.  Thousands acknowledged Christ. So "Christ" is our direct object.

Step 5:  Finally we're up to finding an objective complement. It's easy! Is there a word after the direct object that gives it a new name? Yes, there is. Savior renames Christ, so "savior" is our objective complement. 

Get it?  Okay, good.  I think we all feel better now.

Blah

I'm officially having an I-hate-everybody day.  I've already cried once, and I've been on the verge of it a couple more times.  The problem is that I keep having conversations that somehow go to hell in a hand basket.  Very early this morning...like 5am...I had one with Mike.  (We fixed it.  We don't like it when things aren't right.) Then this afternoon I had one with Baylee and one with Zach, who happens to be home today.  Heck, I probably would've had one with Drew, too, but he was at school all day.  I also had a completely crazy one in the online homeschool group I'm a member of.  It had to do with grammar (objective complements to be exact).  In my defense on that one, I thought we were having an intellectual discussion and had no idea the lady was getting upset.  Anyway, I know what you're thinking.  You're thinking I'm the common factor in all of those interactions, so they must be my fault.  I'm telling you, though, I'm innocent.  It's everyone else who's wrong...especially that homeschool mom.

Sigh.

French News

I'm probably getting really annoying by talking about this so often, but I think I've reached a new, exciting (to me) stage with French!  I'll tell you how it went for me:

• In the beginning learning French was new and fun.
• Then there came a point when I realized I had a long, long way to go, and I felt like I'd never truly get anywhere.
• Now I've turned a corner.  I'm not saying I'm fluent, far from it, but I'm finally able to actually use the language in a real way.  I can read books with it!  That feels like a huge breakthrough.

You know what it's kind of like?  It's like when you're first pregnant and you're all excited, then reality sets in.  You're exhausted and throwing up multiple times a day, and you feel like that's just your new life now.  Then one day you wake up and realize you're doing significantly better.  You're in the second trimester.  You still have a long way to go, but things are looking up.

All that to say:  I've finished my first real book!  Granted, it's a "beginner" French book...but still!  I'm happy.  (Besides, I wouldn't say it was all that beginner-ish.  I guess you could try to read it as a beginner, but it would probably be pretty painstaking.  I think it's more for an intermediate level, because that's what I am, and I was able to read it quickly and with enjoyment.

Here's the book, which I read on Kindle, btw.

It's about an English man and his wife (Louis and Melba) who decide to take a vacation to France, because Louis wants to track down an old friend of his.   Here's one of the pages:

As you can see, it gives you definitions for words you might not know.  (I knew those three.)

Anyway, now my plan is to read the other couple books this author has written, which are a lot like this one, and then I think I'm going to try to read Le Petit Prince.  (Plus I still have to finish Learnables Advanced French.)

Bible Class

I mentioned quite awhile back that we're using something new this year for Baylee's Old Testament class.  It's this...

Its description on Amazon says:

Written in a conversational tone, A Journey Through the Old Testament is designed to be used independently by teens. Moving chronologically through the Old Testament, students look up references, memorize verses, and answer comprehension and reflection questions based upon a variety of texts about the most well-known incidents and people. Chapters focus on the Genesis Creation account, the Pentateuch, poetry and wisdom book, and both the major and minor prophets. 120 non-reproducible pages, softcover, with answer key.

I like it because it's thorough, and yet Baylee can do it independently.  All I have to do is administer tests here and there.

That's not what I want to talk about, though.  I want to tell you a great, in my opinion, idea I had to supplement this Bible course.  (PS:  Professor MacDonald,  you're probably not going to like this.)  See, I was thinking about how someone can have a really good grasp of the Old Testament...knowing the stories, knowing the timeline, etc...and I remembered my first roommate at Bible college.  I was a freshman, but she was a junior, which meant that when she started at the school she had had to take a Bible entrance exam.  (The school had done that for years and years, but right before I got there they did away with it.  They still made you take the exam, which was very detailed and difficult, but they had you wait until you'd been at the college for awhile.)  Apparently most incoming freshman failed the exam, but my roommate, Darcy, passed with flying colors, and the reason she was able to do that is kind of surprising.  She did well because she had read tons of Bible fiction novels as a teen.  You know the kind I mean?  They take the life of a Bible character, follow the outline of their true story from the Bible, and add in fictional details to flesh it out.  Darcy could remember so many things, because for her they had been played out in living color in her mind's eye.  Anyway, to get to the point, I decided I'd have Baylee read a few of those sorts of books this year as part of her Bible course.  I didn't even have to buy any, as we happen to have four of them right on our own bookcases here at home.  She already read one of them last year (Twice Freed, the story of Philemon's slave Onesimus), so this year I'll have her read one on David, one on Daniel, and one on Esther.

Random Stuff

Today I read something in French that I could really relate to...

— Je suis en train de lire un bouquin passionnant!  Il y a un tel suspense!  On ne sait pas si ça va finir bien ou en catastrophe!
— J'espère que tu me le prêteras quand tu l'auras fini.  Je suppose que c'est un roman policier?
— Pas du tout.  C'est un livre de cuisine!

It means...

"I'm in the middle of reading a passionate [which means something like "fascinating"] book!  There is so much suspense!  One doesn't know if it is going to finish well or in catastrophe!"

"I hope that you will lend it to me when you're finished.  I suppose that it's a police novel?"

"Not at all.  It's a cookbook!"

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This past weekend Baylee tripped in the bathroom while she was getting ready, and she caught herself on the curling iron that was on the counter.  Now she has a giant blister that she keeps making everyone feel.

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I'm proud of Baylee for how well she's doing in Physical Science this year.  It involves a lot of math, and she's being a careful, accurate student.

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Last night I was driving through an intersection, and some animal crossed the road right in front of me.  At first I thought it was a cute little chipmunk, then as it got closer I realized it was too big to be a chipmunk, plus it had a hairless tail.  It was a rat!  Yay, Seattle.

Sunday

A few nights ago I was driving down a fairly busy road here in Seattle called Greenwood, only it was late enough in the evening that it wasn't too congested.  In fact, there was really only one car in front of me, but the problem was that it was going almost twenty miles an hour under the speed limit.  (See, because it was going 20 mph, and the speed limit on Greenwood is 35, which, of course, means 40.  Duh.)  Anyway, I was stuck behind that doofus for ages, and it made me remember something that I haven't thought of in years.

When I was in high school...I think my junior year...I was nominated to interview for something called Girls' State.  Here's what Girls' State is according to the internet:

American Legion Auxiliary Girls State is a nonpartisan program that teaches young women responsible citizenship and love for God and Country. Since the inception of the Girls State program in 1937, nearly one million young people have had the opportunity to learn first-hand how their state and local government works.  

In my little town of Spring Lake it was a pretty big honor to be sent to Girls' State, which was a week of...well...it's hard to describe.  It was like an all-girl summer camp having to do with the government.  The campers were girls from all over the state who were chosen to be there.  (There were probably 300 of us.)  Once all the girls arrived they were put into "towns" and told to run for stuff.  You could run for office within your town or you could think big and run for state elections, and the other girls would vote for you.  Then once everyone was elected to different positions, they got to act out their parts, making laws and whatnot.  It sounds kinda lame, I know, but it was fun!  I had a really great roommate from the Upper Peninsula that I totally hit it off with, and I remember laughing a ton with her and the other girls in my town.  Oh, and I ran for and got the position of mayor.  

To back up, though, in order to even get there we first had to interview at the American Legion building in Grand Haven.  There were about 20 girls from my school who got to that stage, and then out of them 6 were chosen to go.  I still remember that interview.  I went into a room and sat in a chair in front of a panel of about 5 old ladies.  Their only question to me was, "Tell me about yourself."

Here's why I remembered all that:  On the day we left we all got into a little school bus that was driven by one of those old American Legion ladies.  She drove SO SLOWLY that it felt like we were never going to get there.  Finally I said something that was so stupid that I feel cringy about it to this day.  I said, loud enough for her to hear, "Hey, why don't you let me out, and I'll run ahead and tell them we're coming?"

Sigh.  Which leads me to another point:  For as much as I complained about my teens yesterday, I was once one, and I was obviously just as bad!  

Saturday

Here's the plan that Baylee cooked up for herself, then came to me and asked permission for:

• Go to a murder mystery dinner last night.  We said "yes" to this one, btw, and it lasted from 6pm to 11pm.
• Go out with friends this evening, and from there spend the night at Abby's.  Then from Abby's...
• Go to rehearsal at the SoR tomorrow afternoon.  Then from rehearsal...
• Go to Jack's to have dinner with his family.

In other words, she wanted to know if she could be gone almost all weekend.  I mean!  I said "no" and now she's mad at me.  lol  It's interesting (and when I say "interesting" I mean "Help me, Lord") how each of our kids has been challenging in their own way as a teen.  Zach wasn't all that social.  He had a few good friends that he got together with here and there.  He was responsible and trustworthy.  The way he about killed me was in homeschooling him.  He never enjoyed school, and that made it hard for both of us.  Drew...well...Drew was this likeable, funny, nice kid who, behind the scenes, did every single thing in his power to run his own show.  We had to stay on top of him 24-7, and I'm positive we still missed a bunch of stuff.  He took a decade off my life at least.  And now Baylee is a teen, and she's so many seemingly opposite things at the same time.  She's kind and sometimes moody, funny and sometimes too serious, sometimes an over-sharer and sometimes she won't tell you enough, and she's smart and social.  Lord, give me strength.  For real.  Parenting older kids is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.  (When I see parents on Facebook talking about how hard it is with their baby or young child, and how tired they are, I want to shake them.  They have no idea that those are fun years!)

Anyway, I actually didn't mean to go into all that.  And I don't want to give the idea that I'm in misery, because I'm not...usually.  Yes, the teen years are hard, but they're also filled with laughter and love and good conversation.  All I really wanted to do was show you this picture of Baylee from last night.  Like I said, she went to a murder mystery dinner, and she played the role of the butler.  She said it was a ton of fun.

And I wanted to show you this little video.  Yesterday Drew was writing a song on the piano, and it was neat to listen to.  Here's a little piece of it.

Woo Hoo!

I'm so happy!  I finally finished Assimil French!!!  At the end of the book it says:

Il y a des points de grammaire, des expressions et du vocabulaire que nous n'avons pas encore vus.  Donc, n'arretêz pas maintenant.  Prenez un journal, lisez un roman, écoutez la radio ou parlez avec un ami francophone, mais sutout, continuez à apprendre et à pratiquer cette belle langue française que vous avez apprise "sans peine".  

And I read that easily!   It means, "There are points of grammar, expressions, and vocabulary that you have not seen yet.  So don't stop now.  Take a newspaper, read a novel, listen to the radio, or speak with a French-speaking friend, but above all continue to learn and practice this beautiful French language that you have learned 'without pain.'"

I wouldn't say it was totally without pain.  I think if I hadn't already known so much of it, it would've been pretty dang painful indeed.  lol  It advances quickly.  Anyway, I'm proud of the accomplishment.  Now onward to Learnables Advanced French, and then I'll need to make a final decision on whether or not I want to keep subjecting myself to this.

PS:  One neat thing that Assimil ended up teaching me is to stop reading for a word-for-word translation.  In fact, toward the end of the course it makes a special point to tell you that you're expected, from that point on, to read for overall French meaning instead of an exact English translation.  And then, to make sure you follow that new rule, it start throwing in several French idioms.  (That is, sayings that don't necessarily make sense unless you consider them in context.)  It was hard at first and I didn't like it.  But now, after lots of practice, I'm finding that I can look at paragraphs of French and...not exactly fly through them...but read them fairly quickly.  For instance, I have a French book on Kindle that I downloaded awhile back, and even just a couple months ago I could only read it haltingly.  Last night I picked it up, though, and I read an entire chapter with very little problem.  It's exciting!

Saturday

Last night Zach got home from work, roared into the driveway on his motorcycle, turned it off, and then put the kickstand down.  He swung his leg over, and that's when he realized the kickstand hadn't actually locked into position.  The bike fell onto its side, and now it's got some dents and the turn signal is messed up.  Zach is really bummed, and I'm sad for him.  When he told me the story he said, "My biggest regret is that now I can't say it's never had any body damage when I sell it."  He's taking it into the shop today.

Something that nobody ever tells you when you become a parent is how different raising girls is from raising boys when it comes to their friends.  Zach and Drew have always had friends, and between them and their friends there's never been any real drama or upset.  Boys appreciate each other in a very straight-forward way.  They take each other at face value.  With girls, though, it's different.  Starting at about age 10 and lasting until college, it's rare for a girl to find a true friend who accepts her and loves her and isn't in some sort of private competition with her.  Baylee has had a lot of "friends" over the years...nice girls that she has a great time with...but she's only had a few real, true friends.  (Let me just take this moment to say thank God for Rachel.  I love her.)  I'm talking about friends who build up instead of tear down, and who like you for who you are.

All that to say, about six months ago Baylee made a new friend named Abby, and she's one of those "worth their weight in gold" kinds of people.  She's self-confident and so is Baylee, and, you know, I think that's the secret ingredient.  It's when girls are insecure that almost all the trouble starts.  Anyway, I'm so thankful for her friendship with my daughter.

(Taken from Baylee's Instagram page.)

 

A Second Post for Today

I'm not going to name names, but this just happened:

A Stranded Someone [calling out from the bathroom]:  There's no toilet paper in here!  Could someone please get some toilet paper from the other bathroom and put it outside the door?  Hello???  Is anyone out there???

Me:  Okay, hold on! [I look in the other bathroom, then come back.]  Umm...there's no toilet paper in the other bathroom, either.

Stranded:  Well, what about napkins?

Me:  Uhh...we're out of napkins.

Stranded:  Kleenex???

Me:  And Kleenex.  And paper towel.

Stranded:  What am I supposed to do?!

Another Family Member Who Happened To Be Standing Nearby:  Use the cardboard tube!

Stranded:  What?!?!

Me:  No, just sit tight and make yourself comfortable for a minute.  I'll run to the store and be right back.

And that's what happened.  In my defense as the buyer of groceries, I've been really ill.

Friday

Baylee's got a friend named Max who goes to the high school across the street.  He has auto shop right before lunch, and he often sneaks out of it early and takes an extended lunch break. (He told Baylee that the teacher is a nearly blind old man who never knows the difference.)  Sometimes when he does that he'll call up Baylee, and the two of them will walk to the grocery store together to get something to eat.  Max is also a bass player in the SoR house band.  Here's a picture of him.  You can't tell, but he has really red hair.

He's a nice kid.  (Other than the taking-advantage-of-a-blind-old-guy thing.)

Anyway!  I told you all that, just to share this little conversation that Max and Baylee had yesterday...

Baylee:  I'm in a bad mood, Max, and I don't know why.

Max:  Yeah, it's weird.

Baylee:  Isn't it???

Max:  It really is.  It seems to happen for a few days out of every month.

Baylee:  ...

Max:  It's almost cyclical!

LOL  Someday Max is either going to make someone a really good husband...or a really bad one. 

Thursday

This morning I found out something crazy:  "Amongst" is considered British and isn't commonly used here in America.  Instead, we only say "among."  I mean, I knew about "among," but I also thought "amongst" was totally normal.  Am I wrong?  Like, "There she is amongst the flowers."  There's nothing weird about that, is there?  It's not like "whilst,"  which is very British.  What do you guys think?

Last night Drew told me that there's a private joke amongst the students in the music building at college.  For the most part they don't know what's going on in the sports world, so whenever they find themselves in a group of people on campus who are talking about baseball or football or whatever, they say, "How 'bout that local sportsball team?!  The local sportsball team is doing great!"

Whenever I get a new phone it takes me a few weeks to figure out how it works, mostly because I'm a "need to know" learner.  I don't worry about it until I have a reason to need it.  That said, I got an iPhone 7 a few weeks ago, and last night I figured out that I can send the videos I take with it right to YouTube to be uploaded, and it takes seconds.  That's probably the oldest news in the world to most people, but for me it was amazing.  Because of figuring that out, I now have some videos to show here on my blog.

These two are from Zombie Prom.  In this first one Baylee is killing it on the drums.

And this is one is just silly and fun.  (And Baylee's on the drums again.)

Finally, I took this video yesterday afternoon.  Drew was messing around with his acoustic, making up a little song that sounded like something you could square dance to.  It reminded me a little of those finger-picked bluegrass songs that David, his first guitar teacher, would make him learn.  Anyway, I liked it so much that I asked him to let me video.

Wednesday

I love Baylee's Latin 1 class, because I don't have to do one dang thing...well...except grade stuff.  She watches the teacher on DVD, then does the assignments.  Easy!...for me!  Today Baylee listened to the teacher read a paragraph all in Latin, then she was given that same paragraph in writing and told to translate it.  She did a good job.  The only thing she did wrong was her overly direct translation in the very first sentence.  She's supposed to make things sound good in English.

Yesterday Morrow had an interesting experience.  They were supposed to play in a show at a place called The Kraken.

Except when they got there they found out that a couple members of their band weren't allowed to be in the establishment, which serves alcohol, because they're under 18.  (My understanding is that you can be in a place like that if you're 18-20, as long as you're performing.  After the show you have to leave immediately.)  Anyway, so everything they had planned had to be scrapped.  Instead of just leaving with the under 18's, though, Drew, the drummer, and the bass player stayed and played improv jazz.  Is that weird or what???  And the thing is, they did a good job!