Touching Base

Just so my faithful blog readers know....I am still alive and well but extremely busy and find little time to blog these days (or read, scrapbook, clean, relax, etc.). Tennis season ended for awhile last Sunday. The Saturday matches will start up again in June but will be on Fridays thru the summer and Team Tennis on Sundays is over until the fall!! This past Saturday, A played in her first two day ZATs tournament which is a big deal in the junior tennis world. These are the tournaments were you get points for your wins which in turn gets you ranked state-wide as a junior player. If you win these tournaments, you are "Champed up" which I'm sure I'll understand more if that ever happens. I think she did very well for her first big tournament but during her final match popped a few ribs out reaching for a short shot. The beautiful part of the story is that she got to the ball and made the return. The bad part is she lost the point anyway and we had to make a trip to see my friend, Dr. T, to pop those ribs back in place.

A has also kept me busy this week with school projects. It was Teacher Appreciation week and I decided to be "Super Mom" this week and make all her teacher gifts rather than buying stuff. So I choose the less expensive but much more time intensive method of kissing up to the teachers. Wednesday was the day for a sweet treat for the teacher so I bought some big candy bars and then made wrappers for them on the computer which read "Thank you, Ms. ___ for a great school year". This should have been an easy project but it turned into a major nightmare because all the templates I could find for the wrappers were on Microsoft Publisher and I don't have that. So I downloaded a free trial, downloaded a few wrappers and finally started to print about an hour after I intended to start only to have my printer act up. I wouldn't feed my matte finish photo paper. I decided this is the last year for candy wrappers!! Thursday the kids were supposed to bring flowers - easy, right? Well I decided that since real flowers die - homemade paper flowers were a much better idea. So I print some various sized flower template, we trace them onto different (but coordinating) scrapbook paper, punch a hole in the middle, crinkle the sides, ink the ends and insert a piece of green pipe cleaner for the stem. They were absolutely adorable but they also took much longer than I had anticipated so instead of doing one for every single teacher - we picked the three 5th grade teachers, the librarian and her old 1st grade teacher who is having her first child next month and we decided must have our cutest blue flower!! Since "create" is my word for '08, I am proud of myself for tackling these projects rather than just buying something but for a working mom w/ two jobs - this is more than I want to do again for a very long time!!

E is sick today which figures since we have VIP passes to the Long Drive competition at the Club tonight. My dad bought the whole family passes and this was going to be my chance to meet my brother's new girlfriend but it looks like I'll be the one staying home with my sick baby boy while the rest of them eat some fancy appetizers, drink booze and schmooze with the celebs (like Tony Romo) that are supposed to be there. Oh well, a mother's work is never done..........