*big exhale*

14 children (half of them, possibly, with ADHD) just exited my house. One of them—we are not sure which one yet—apparently walked home without shoes. (If you are reading this and your child is missing a pair of dark blue, size one “crocs”… call me.)

Several hours ago we kicked off a Super Mario Brothers themed party for Jachin. My husband was the creative mastermind behind the whole Super Mario thing.

 Being one of only a handful of non-Amish children growing up without a Nintendo system, I know absolutely nothing of it—other than Mario wears red and his skinny friend Luigi wears green. But apparently there is a whole thriving civilization of little squid looking guys, and little mad mushroom looking guys, and little turtle guys (whom I kind of remember), and other various cute but sometimes menacing characters. So when my husband told me that I needed to come up with a piñata resembling a “chain chomper”, I gave him a blank stare. But he got me a picture of one and then I went out and bought a regular old yellow smiley face piñata and painted all over it to make it resemble what I now know to be a chain chomper. The whole time I was painting, I was thinking No one is going to know what this is… this is a whole ‘lotta work for nothing. My cynical feelings lifted when the cute little neighbor boy, Mikey, walked in and took a look at the piñata, looked back at me like I was a rock star and said, “Woah! You got a chain chomper piñata?!? Cooooool!”

 My husband made two cakes this year. Many people will remember that my husband is somewhat of an amateur cake decorator. Self taught. (Previous years’ cakes have included a Chewbacca cake with brown coconut hair, a Deathstar cake with green spaghetti “lasers”, and a very cute Hello Kitty cake, just to name a few.) This year the cakes were the brown mushroom-looking guy with the big angry eyebrows, Goomba, and the white squid-looking guy whose name I can’t remember and probably can’t spell anyway. The piñata treat boxes were decorated to look like the question mark coin boxes. The kids played pin the star on the star, and then there was a pulse quickening contest to see who could finish world 1.1 the fastest. (The neighbor kid, Trevor, took that title at 38.4 seconds. Brothers Jamus and Jaron rounded out the top 3.) Anytime the kids started looking bored, we would throw candy at them, and that usually livened things up. When in doubt, throw chocolate.

The party went off without a hitch. Kids would come up to me and enthusiastically tell me about Mario games and I would nod and smile real big and act like I understood their excitement. But it was a very successful party, despite the fact that I don’t know much about Super Mario Brothers.

Bowzer, Master Big Hand, and Chain Chomper what? …they,  huh?… yeah, awesome, buddy… here, have some chocolate.

A little background: I’m in the Primary Presidency at church, meaning that I’m over the children and their Sunday school classes. Another part of that job is overseeing Cub Scouts. I really don’t know where to even start with this, because when I say “don’t know much about scouts”, I’m being absolutely serious. I’m not sure that I know enough about scouts to write a blog post about it. So instead, the focus of my blog post will be on my ineptitude in a scout leadership role.

First, let’s address my lack of knowledge as to which of the 46 monthly meetings I am actually supposed to attend. Den meetings, Pack meetings, Pack planning meetings, Roundtable meetings, Scout leadership meetings, new scout orientation meetings… I’m sure that if I actually attended these meetings with the frequency that I should, I would (eventually) start to acquire some scout knowledge. I’m just having a hard time getting psyched about investing the time, which is both selfish and irresponsible. But I like to honest here on my blog. If I can’t be honest here, well, you know.

At the end of the month, Jachin turns 8. At that time he will enter cubs and I will be thrust into scouts from a different angle, the parental angle. I’m hoping that wanting to see Jachin be a successful scout (Jon’s an Eagle Scout and he turned out pretty great) will be the motivation I need to really just throw myself in there with complete abandon… and let them chew me up and spit me out.

As Princess Leia might have said when her little Jedi started into cub scouts: “Help me, Jachin Alexander, you’re my only hope”.

Anyone out there have any scouting advice?

Jon and his dad spent several weekends building some really nice storage shelves in the cold storage room a few months back. I mean, nice ones. Adjustable and everything. The only “food storage” we had was a few boxes of macaroni and cheese, a couple boxes of Goldfish crackers, and 4 packages of Chips Ahoy cookies that I got on sale at Albertson’s. Not exactly a year’s supply of anything. So Jon set up a dry-pack cannery assignment for me at church a couple weeks ago. The cannery is where a lot of the humanitarian and welfare aid for our church is done. Volunteers go in and do the actual packaging of the food into #10 cans, and in return the volunteers have the opportunity to purchase X amount of cans of whatever. So this was our chance to get some actual food storage.  

So I went in this morning, having absolutely no idea what I was doing. I just knew that I was there to help with whatever they wanted and I knew that I wanted to leave with some cans of food. I had “n00b” written all over me. I actually couldn’t even find the physical entrance to the building for several minutes. (Yes, it was painful to admit that in writing.) But I got in there, and they were very nice and I filled out my sheet with what I wanted to purchase, and then I followed a guy around with a cart filling up boxes with my food cans. It was pretty painless. So $130 later, my trunk was filled (by me) with real food storage. I felt like a grown-up.

Then came the actual volunteering part. This made me very nervous. Surely they have people in there everyday with the best of intentions to help, but who aren’t all that bright. How bad could I screw up putting Hot Cocoa powder into cans? So there are all of these ladies there who, clearly, have done this a few times. They pick what I later learn are the easy spots on the assembly line. I am left to lift 40 lb bags of hot cocoa mix. I have to balance the bag on my hip, pour it carefully—without spilling any—into cans, trying to approximate how much is 4.8 lbs of cocoa mix. There is another lady who is “shaking” the cans, to get the powder to settle, another lady who puts the can on a scale to make sure it’s actually 4.8 lbs., another lady puts one of those gel packs in it to keep in the freshness, and yet another lady seals a lid on. (Yeah… who had the crappiest job?) I pretty much did this for 2 hours. We did switch to powdered milk later, at which time I stole the “shaking” position on the assembly line.

So I got through the two hours, made a few jokes (that I’m pretty sure no one got but me), hopefully did some good, and came home with a trunk full of real food storage. Yeah! And I could tell that by the time I left, there were some ladies in there looking at me with a little bit of respect. I kept up with the hectic dry-pack environment, and I earned some definite cannery-cred. I’m no longer afraid of the cannery.

To sod or not to sod, that is the question. Well, one of the questions. Some of the other questions are: what about fruit trees? Bark or gravel? What kinds of shrubs? What about sprinklers?

The biggest question is: what can we afford? And the answer, as it turns out, is: Not much!