Fun at the pumpkin patch

Jack and his cousin, Kate.



Patrick and Jack discuss their pumpkin picking strategy. Or the upcoming election.



No, Jack. That's taking the easy way out!



PJ being PJ.



Jack gets the lay of the land and considers all his options.



Yes! This is the one!



A good time was had by all!

(Whoa! Is Mommy falling over?)

Office gossip

Ok, so it's not the kind where you talk about how you can't believe that so-and-so actually wore that particular wardrobe combo today.

But I need to talk about The Office.

The show.

Specifically, I want to know whether you think The Office has jumped the shark.

I'm feeling like perhaps it has.

The first episode of The Office that I saw was the Season 2 Christmas special. You know, the Secret Santa episode where Michael buys the iPod?

It's arguably the funniest sitcom Christmas episode ever, and I don't want to suggest that the series has gone downhill from there, because there have been several gems since then.

But since the writer's strike, I don't know. It just seems...different.

I mean, I love that Jim and Pam are engaged, but didn't the shenanigans surrounding their awkward and seemingly unrequited affections for each other keep us wondering whether it would ever happen? Now that it has, does it somehow change the anticipation of how their relationship will play itself out in each episode?

I still can't decide.

Vote in the poll to the right whether you think the shark has been jumped or not.

And maybe leave a comment with your thoughts.

Let's "tawk."

A busy fall...

This season has certainly brought with it a lot of activity!

Last weekend, we went to pick pumpkins at Milky Way Farm for my niece's birthday. My camera battery was dead, so I took some pictures with my sister-in-law's camera, which I'll post when she sends them to me. It was a gorgeous day, and we had lots of fun - hayrides, baby animals to pet, and, of course, time in the pumpkin patch picking out the perfect jack-o-lantern-to-be.


This past week, I had a book show for some grandmothers who wanted to do some holiday shopping for their grandchildren. It was a blast! If you have children on your holiday shopping list, consider checking out my Mystery Hostess show. You can get some great gifts and have a chance to win some free books for your family too! The hostess of my show on Wednesday received...are you ready?...$150 in free books! As you can imagine, she was thrilled!


On Saturday, we took Jack and PJ to the Strasburg Railroad again, only this time, we actually took a ride on the train. Jack was in heaven! We had such a fun time watching him. He'd been anticipating it for months now, since the last time we went, we told him that one day we'd take him for a ride on the "big black choo-choo."

First and foremost, we had to get a big bag of kettle corn for the trip. Sooo yummy - a little sweet, a little salty. (Oh yeah, the diet. Corn is a vegetable, right?)

The trains are just so well-maintained and beautiful. Here's the conductor waving as the train pulls into the station.



Waiting for our ride to start.



Jack was so stinking cute.



Checking out the beautiful farmland.



We all wore our Sox hats, hoping they'd pull through and make it to the series again.

(Missed it by that much!)

Anyway, PJ turned his head into Patrick's chest, and when he turned back, his hat looked like this.



How cute is this kid? He smiles about 99% of the day.

Even though he's teething something fierce.



Finally, yesterday, I tried my hand at Bakerella's cupcake pops for a birthday party last night.

If you want to try them yourself, you might be interested to know that I found the pops a lot easier to make than the bites (same thing without a stick), simply because I couldn't get the chocolate to dry smooth and flat enough on the bottom to get them to sit up and not topple over.

My biggest challenge was presentation, since they were just stuck into a white styrofoam rectangle and I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't really figure it out until we were en route to the party, but if I do them in the future (which I probably will), I'll put the styrofoam on a plate or in a basket, and put colorful curling ribbons - like the kind you buy to stick on top of a package - around the bottom to cover the styrofoam.

They were a little labor-intensive, but a lot of fun to make, and while I don't think mine came out quite as cute as hers did, they still looked good and tasted really yummy.





Not on the Raw Food diet, of course, but what I really liked about them was that one pop was two bites big, and totally enough.

Happy Monday!

Raw food - Day Five

The pounds are not falling off (I think I've lost one), but I feel really good on this diet so far.

Mostly, I'm enjoying the freedom from the guilt that comes after eating an entire row (or two) of double-stuf Oreos (seriously, why do they even bother making the regular-stuf kind?) in one sitting.

Do you know that guilt I'm talking about? I mean, not only do you feel lousy from eating all that sugar, but you also feel lousy for eating all that sugar.

Yet somehow, you feel compelled to do the same thing the next day with your kid's animal crackers. Or a half gallon of ice cream (actually, they're gypping us 1/4 of a quart these days, and selling ice cream by the 1.75 quart container, but I'm going to pretend not to be annoyed by this since I'm not a slave to sugar anymore...or at least not this week).

I still have until Wednesday to make it a full week.

And I think I'll tack on Thursday just because this past weekend was my niece's birthday and, well, I did have some ice cream.

In a waffle cone.

And a cupcake.

Is that wrong?

Actually, it's not. She talks about the fact that if you're eating mostly raw things, you'll have the enzymes you need to digest stuff like that once in a great while.

At least that's my interpretation of it.

So Thursday it is. I'll let you know the verdict.

I have to say, it's really curbed my appetite, and it's definitely easier to live with than I imagined it would be. The key is in the combinations of foods that make your body work most efficiently. More on that later.

I encourage you to get the book at the library and give it a glance. It's an easy read and really challenges everything you thought you knew about dieting.

Happy Monday, folks!

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The Story of Us - Part Three

I figure I'd better get this story moving along. November 5th is just around the corner.

The day I turned 30, I cried from the time I woke up to the time I fell asleep. This may be ok if you work in a cubicle, but it's not such a great thing when you're a teacher. I'd be able to pull myself together for most of the teaching time, but if the students were working on an activity, I was stifling sniffles and wiping away tears.

It wasn't really the turning 30 part, but rather, the idea that I'd hoped to be married by then. For whatever reason, I'd always had it in my head that 28 was the ideal marrying age. When 28 came and went, I thought, well maybe if I'm married by 30...(then what? My life would have purpose? I'd be validated as a person? Everything would be okay?) I never knew how that sentence was supposed to end, but here I was at 30, and I had hardly even dated, let alone had any serious relationships.

It was around this time that I'd decided to start giving Internet dating a try.

But Internet dating, I found, is a very bizarre way to date.

People can, and do, put up a good facade online.

Or they don't and you're left wondering why, if someone only has a little blurb in which to convince a member of the opposite sex that they're worth getting to know better, they didn't try a little harder.

Here are some actual samples from the profiles of people who contacted me.

Describing himself and who he'd like to meet, this one said:

A girl that likes go away at spermont on the weekends or go long rides or walks. Would like meet a women that likes joke. Likes scary movies and a women likes sex. A women that can open up to me.Im very normal guy wonts same as all other guys.I love to maintonbike and play sports.I dont like games of any cond.I like to cook.Looking into buy a house.I like play at the park play frezby or thorl ball around or rollerblade.

His headline said "Don't Pass Me Up!" Really? Watch me.

I mentioned that I taught biology, physics and French, and one guy emailed me with the subject line "Newton was right..." The message:

Hi, Well for every reaction there is definitly an equal and opposite reaction, nes pas?
I enjoyed your profile.....Tell me more?

Totally corny.

Another guy described himself in this way:

I am a responsible,down to earth guy....intelligent,honest,caring,loving,generous,goal oriented,adventurous, a Leo,romantic,fun, occasional drinker,healthy mentally,physically,and dentally! (LOL!),opinionated,an excellant lover,with a great sense of humor,and own my own vehicle.

To which I thought, Dude, you're 42. You have to say you have a car? (And you can't spell "excellent"?)

Perhaps I was a bit too critical, but there were many others like this, and it just made me wonder why, at a minimum, someone didn't just take the 30 extra seconds required to do a spell check.

There were others, of course, that were much more interesting. A few times, I'd exchange a lot of emails with people and maybe some (or several) phone calls before meeting them in person. This was usually a recipe for disaster, as we each tended to romanticize what the person was actually going to be like and inevitably, we'd fail to live up to each other's expectations.

Frustrated with the whole process, and feeling relatively stagnant in life in general, I decided it was time for a change. I needed to shake things up a little bit.

I decided to move to Boston.

Raw Food - Day One

Okay, so I'll admit it seems a little extreme. But remember my comment about the cake in the last post?

Yeah, well...that comment made me see it's time to take drastic measures.

My skin is a mess, my knees hurt, and by 3 p.m., I'm this shy of needing a set of defibrillator paddles to make it through the remainder of the day.

Clear!

I think losing weight is the only thing I've ever really set my mind to and not been able to do.

That's because I like Oreos too much.

And brownies, cake, ice cream, gummy worms, M&Ms, Milky Ways....need I continue?

I had candy corn for breakfast this past Saturday. And Sunday. Just candy corn and coffee.

(Actually, I wanted to put the candy corn in a bowl and pour milk on it, but I restrained myself just a little bit and only had a few handfuls.)

So today was day one, and honestly it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.

Even though they were giving out free samples of Jewish apple cake and crab cakes at the local grocery store today (not something they usually do, and just typing the words Jewish apple cake made my mouth water).

But I stayed strong!

I'm going to give it one week and see if I feel as good as the book promises I will.

I certainly wasn't a ball of energy today, but I'm still behind the eight ball in the sleep department.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Monster Pops

I have Bakerella's blog listed in my favorites way down there at the right, but I need to make sure you guys see her Trick or Treats post. These are the cutest little monster pops!

Click on the photo to see how she makes them.

If I'm feeling ambitious, I might try to make the pumpkin ones this weekend for my niece's birthday.

Might.

We'll see how it goes.

Free time and I haven't seen each other for a while.

Anyway, in addition to being adorable, they're not just lollipops...they're CUPCAKE pops, people! Oh yes. I like cake.

Did you notice the weight loss ticker is gone?

Coincidence? I think not.

What's in a diaper?

Wait, that doesn't work. Don't answer that.

How about, a diaper by any other size would smell as sweet?

Uh, no.

Note to self: Don't mix The Bard with diapers.

Especially after the introduction of solid foods.

So what's my point?

My point is this: I'm both delighted and horrified that Jack (almost 23 months) and PJ (almost 6 months) wear THE SAME SIZE DIAPER!!

Delighted because diaper bag packing just got a whole lot easier.

Horrified because why did his teeny tiny baby phase go by in the blink of an eye?

(And how big is this kid going to get?)

(And while I'm at it, if he's already in a size 4, will they make size 10 by the time he's Jack's age?)

I don't want to define him by his diaper size, because he's still my little cuddlebug. But let's just say my little cuddlebug is giving me huge biceps.

And occasional back pain.

The Story of Us (Part deux)

So I looked through all of the travel brochures for student travel and finally settled on one that met my criteria for price, length, and location. I was going to take 50 high school girls to Paris, Provence and Barcelona. YIKES!

As it turned out, the company that offered the package I liked was the one I'd gotten the phone call from.

You know, the phone call.

Determined not to make any more out of the feeling I'd had about that person on the other end, I decided to call and pretend I'd just perused their catalog and decided to plan one of the trips they offered, making no mention of the aforementioned phone call.

I got the receptionist and did just that. Didn't mention my name, didn't mention the call. She told me she'd connect me to a consultant and put me on hold.

Well, you can guess what happened, right?

It was him.

So weird.

There was nothing really significant about him other than the fact that he was really funny and over the course of the first few months we were working on the trip, we started talking and emailing more and more about ourselves.

He lived in Boston, and as it turned out, he'd written a bestselling novel.

Pretty cool.

We talked on a regular basis - usually not about the trip - and after a few months, when a coworker of mine in Pennsylvania asked if I'd like to go to Boston with her, I met him for lunch.

Nice guy. No sparks.

But, I loved Boston.

Loved it!

And I started getting one of those feelings again.