Instagram August

~The tomatoes are in!  Unfortunately, they started off with bottom rot due to the drought conditions we had in July, and although that seems to have gone away, I now have leaf rot (or whatever it’s called) so my plants are soon to be doomed.  In the meantime, we’ve been enjoying and savoring every tomato.  Lately, I’ve been making eggs scrambled with tomatoes and feta, this dish, and don’t forget this recipe from Clover Lane.  My friend Sue makes it for lunch and eats it with light Wasa crackers (only 20 calories for a large graham cracker sized cracker!)

One of our tomatoes grew wedged in between a rock and a hard place, so to speak.  After some wiggling, I got it out and it’s (kinda) heart shaped!

~Maddie and her friends decided to hold a bake sale benefitting Paws for a Cause at the very beginning of August, so in between packing and organizing for our beach trip, another mom and I helped the girls bake and then set up the bake sale stand.  They made muffins, cupcakes, and many kinds of cookies and earned over $100, all of which will be donated to Paws for a Cause/Relay for Life for cancer research.  Way to go girls!

~Next up was our beach trip, and you’ve already suffered through seen all of those pictures.  Or have you?

Maddie found these books at one of the little gift shops and wanted them so badly that although I didn’t buy them, I’m going to put them on her Christmas list.  Click here to see some google images of the inside of these books.  We laughed until we almost peed our pants (well, I almost peed my pants…things are worn out down there after three children, people), and I know you will too!

~Before our beach trip, I took the boys shopping at WalMart for some last minute things.  My list was long and I stuck to it, much to their disappointment. That is until they asked for individual bottles of SunnyD to take onto the beach.  I actually said yes to those and you would have thought I told them they could have dessert for supper forever!

                                                     That is pure, unadulterated joy, people.

~So I’ve found a new addicting game for my phone. Have you heard of Draw Something?  It’s basically pictionary with another person (and I draw from my Facebook friend list so I’m playing with all people I know), however there’s no winning or losing, you just guess your friend’s picture and then they guess yours (drawing prompts are given by the game, you don’t just draw whatever you want).  I have found I’m a really bad artist.  Quite possibly, I am artistically disabled and should be riding a special bus everywhere I go.  Check out the pictures I drew of Shrek and Godzilla and bubbles:

As you can see, Shrek looks like a green Fozzie Bear, Godzilla has major tooth decay, and I had so much trouble drawing the eye on the person in the bubbles picture, that I wrote a little note to the eyeball telling it how I felt about it.  In my defense, I am drawing on a tiny phone surface with my huge, sausage of a finger, but still.

~After an extremely dry July, August has been bursting at the seams with rain showers!  Check out this awesome radar screen I snapped!

It totally looks like a seahorse/mermaid!  I think I even heard it whinny as it galloped over us!

~The woolly caterpillars are back.  Bug Boy is having a ball with them, and through some very thorough loving/isolation techniques, he has already inadvertently caused the deaths of 8-10 of the fuzzy little guys.  Also, Jack has decided to grow a mustache:

~We went Back-to-School shopping for the things on the list sent by the schools.

All told, I spent close to $90 on supplies (most of which were not for my own children, but for their classrooms).  It made me think fondly back to the pre-Tom Corbett days when the school supplied the basics and kept the class sizes optimal and cared about more than their PSSA scores.   But don’t get me started.  (By the way…the teachers still care about more than those scores, I’m not faulting them in anyway).

~The day before school started, we thought we’d take the kids to see Diary of a Wimpy Kid:  Dog Days, but it was completely out of theatres already!  Did anyone see it?  Was it that bad that they pulled it after only a few weeks?  So instead we went mini-golfing, which is not my favorite, but since I’m all about sacrificing for my children, I gritted my teeth, gripped my golf racquet, and hit the greens.  I told the kids if anyone got a hole in one they would earn a dollar, and can you believe that Jack, whose score was generally in the 7-10 range for each hole, actually got a hole in one!  Maddie and Ben were just a tad grumpy about this.

~And then, oh joy! It was time to go back to school!  Maddie and Jack were the most excited, but even Ben, who professes to hate school, came bouncing down the stairs to tell us “My deodorant’s on, my body spray is sprayed, and my hair is spiked!  I am ready!” 

There were 2-1/2 thumbs up when they got home.  Maddie absolutely loved school, Ben said 5th grade is the best and Mr. B. is the best teacher ever, but Jack seemed down.  He couldn’t really put his finger on what was bothering him, but I think he missed 1st grade and Mrs. F. and even though he liked his new teacher, he didn’t have that secure, happy, comfy feeling that he had in 1st grade.  I think (hope?) he’ll come around.

~Finally, for a new feature on my Monthly Instagram, I am going to share a celebrity Instagram!  This month features a picture of Melissa Gilbert’s junk drawer. 

After a month of posting photos from Paris and the road trip she and her boyfriend shared around California and (I think) Nevada, she decided to show us her junk drawer.  That’s a heckuva lot of batteries, Half Pint, and thanks for pointing out the flower food, I might have missed it!

Have a happy Labor Day weekend, all!