16 February 2010

The kids were excited about Valentine's Day, so we made valentines to send to special people, and made sure there was Valentine's chocolate on the table for them on Sunday morning.

Rose Pink and I went to the library to attend a Valentine's craft spectacular, where she made a Valentine's crown and scepter, and we both made Valentine cards. She carefully wrote "I LOVE YOU" in them and labeled each one "AB" before giving them to me. The next day, doing some workbook pages, when directed to draw a picture of herself participating in her community, she drew a picture of making valentines at the library. This is one of the things that I love about Davenport.

This morning as I was leaving, Nut Brown shouted, "See you later, Miss Alligator Mommy!"

paper dolls

Rose Pink and I made paper dolls, and she thought they would look great on our living room walls.

what we did with our new snow this week

12 February 2010

So we survived January. Barely. And I mean, barely. But things are looking up for the rest of February and March.

I know that everyone thinks that all that snow on the East Coast is a freak of nature, but it's actually proof that someone up above loves me very much. Let me explain.

I spent the entire sunless month of January working overtime on a huge sticky project at work. It's a stunningly large project to begin with, and was complicated by the fact that I have a hard-to-please boss, and also by the fact that the people at headquarters and higher headquarters kept issuing contradicting guidance.

Every other time this biannual project has been done, my command spends two days briefing the results to the Department of the Army, going over every single weapon system supported by the command, in detail. However, a new person was put in charge of this at DA right before the whole thing started. He didn't really have a clue what was going on or what was important, which resulted in the mixed messages about what they wanted from us. But he was really, really nice about it all. I like him.

He did know for sure, however, that he had no interest in sitting through two days of briefings about weapon systems from TACOM. He was very firm about that from the beginning. I liked him even more for that. Instead he asked for a briefing that reported on the five funding program.s which cover all the weapon systems.

He finally explained what he wanted one week before the briefing was supposed to happen, on January 29. So my team and I killed ourselves the next week trying to get the briefing together, and completely dreading the 10 am brief time on Friday morning.

Friday morning dawns, and the briefing is done but is an extremely poor representation of the genre. I am thoroughly ashamed of it, and ashamed to be the one giving it, but I am busy consoling myself with the fact that AT LEAST THIS WILL ALL BE OVER in another couple hours. Then we get an email from the DA guy saying that everyone in the Pentagon has been advised to go home, so our briefing is canceled.

So I have all of Friday to work on it! And then the government is closed on Monday! And then it snows some more on Tuesday! And on Thursday! It's now one week after I was supposed to give the dreaded briefing, and I have not heard a single thing from DA. Happiness. Bliss. Needless to say, I am much happier with what I have to present when I do hear from him.

I'm telling you, it may have seemed incredible, but really, somebody up above loves me.

I spent Wednesday and Thursday this week at home sick, which was nice. I was back at work today, and now I have Sat/Sun/Mon off, more joy. Four days of work next week, and then I'm off to Ft. Leavenworth for a class. Mr. Brown and our little monkeys are tagging along and planning to hang out in Kansas City while I'm in class. I'm very excited for the further break from work. I'll be in Kansas for two weeks, and then back at work for three weeks, and then I am traveling to Detroit for another class for a week. Mr. Brown is tagging along on this trip as well, mostly to scope out the area.

Your tax dollars at work. But I'm so looking forward to doing something besides work late every night.

8 February 2010

We have been singing "Tomorrow" from Annie at the top of our lungs for the past month. We went three weeks in January with no sunshine- it was a really, really hard month for us. But we discovered the optimism in "Tomorrow"- tomorrow is always a day away, so you can always hope for sunshine tomorrow. There was lots of singing at the top of our lungs to try and encourage ourselves. And now, when we get to the last line: "...it's only a daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay aaaaaaaaaaa-WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!" Rose Pink and Nut Brown shout it as loud as they can ("I was louder than you," said Rose Pink to Nut Brown this morning) and that cheers me up almost as much as the philosophy does.

Birthday Balloons

Rose Pink felt that she didn't have enough balloons for her birthday, so Mr. Brown bought several packages a couple days later. Balloons are even more fun in the winter because static electricity is even more readily available. And here's a shot of the birthday girl with her cake. We had pink ice cream to go with the pink cake.

An email from Mr. Brown this morning about Rose Pink: We worked with the Preprimer words and managed to get her to stop rolling her eyes by not expecting her to sound out and just to ask what the word is. Then we took the words she didn't know (only 10 out of the 40) and made sentences out of them to make a bit of a story.

Can you help me find my little blue kitten?

I do not know where she is

She ran away

She is playing a funny game

Here she is

Italics added to show HF words worked on.

It was satisfying.