Author: Doris

Rena & I just came back from our Taiwan, Kinmen & China trip. We stayed out-of-country for ~ 5 weeks. Had fun and also glad to be back.

In China, we had no access to our family blog. All blogs are filtered out by the Chinese government. Don’t know why? But, that is the way it is.

Our neighbors invited us over to their house for the traditional Memorial Day BBQ. There were 4 or 5 other families there and we didn’t know any of them and they all knew each other which sometimes can result in feeling left out, but that scenario didn’t happen and I really had a great, great time. Everyone was funny and gracious and tender to Edda (who got goodbye kisses on the top of her head) which, you know, always makes me happy.

It was hot. It was hot. It was hot.

Waiting for the parade to begin:

Our congressman who I’ve met before:

Our float!

Our scout!

Stopping by the cub scout fire hydrant.

Last weekend, before the Lego party, Vince put together a model of a caterpillar for school. I remember spending many enjoyable afternoons during my youth putting together these types of projects and I had to suppress my urge to help Vince too much to make the caterpillar perfect. I love having projects which can be made “perfect” unlike pretty much anything else in life where one has to acknowledge that perfection is never attainable. I did introduce Vince to the hot glue gun, which is the best invention ever!

Our own live caterpillar experiment has ended as well. The moth did end up breaking out of its cocoon. You can kind of see the exit hole:

But we didn’t let it go fast enough, I figure that the poor thing needs to find food soon after emerging as it has used up all its energy to do the transformation, so it died. I think we are having a little burial ceremony sometime this weekend. This is the moth (who is dead) that we perched on top of a slice of watermelon to try and “revive” it.

I’m spending some of this weekend quilting. I’ve joined the quilting group at church, full of lovely ladies who are a generation ahead of me in age. They are a lot of fun to talk to – they know all about the history of the church and they know a lot about quilting. We are doing a 20 square Baltimore album quilt and some of the squares that are done already are so incredibly beautiful, I don’t even want to touch them. I am contributing only one square – passable, not incredibly amazing, but pretty good for a first go round. Deadline for the square is June 1st and I just finished it today!

We are in the middle of the night time routine. Jeremy is reading aloud “The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle“. Edda is still awake at 9:30pm! I’m a little nervous about this long weekend, we don’t have very much planned and everyone else has plans – so maybe we’ll be a little stir-crazy. This morning, I had wanted to see SATC2, but it got such terrible reviews, maybe I won’t.

I am a week behind posting about our lives. Vince hosted his party last week. He was very excited.

The highlight of the party was the screening of Lego: The Adventures of Clutch Powers, a straight to DVD full length Lego movie.

Jeremy made the cake and pizza. Here he is manning the oven.

He got new glasses, I told him he looked like Steve Jobs (but I just looked up photos of Mr. Jobs and he doesn’t have black framed glasses). Anyhow, Jeremy said that he was chubbier, had more facial hair and more head hair than Mr. Jobs. So other than that, it’s they are EXACTLY the same. Two white guys in black turtlenecks. I don’t think Steve Jobs makes his own pizza (from scratch!).

There were a few kids who did not like pizza, so PB&Js and Ramen were made, but very little of it all was eaten. Although we did notice that Ruby managed to snitch half the sandwich when no one was around the table. I think Ruby is so good at stealing food from the table and we are so forgetful about what we leave on the table that Ruby probably gets another full meal from leftovers left on the table.

Lima bean got so big – had to go plant it in someone else’s garden. Our whole lawn is shaded, no sun for veggies. Vince did not want to let it go somewhere else, but it was tipping our little styrofoam cup over on its side. I asked if he was going to try some lima beans when they were ready. He was not sure at first, but finally relented. I told him they were almost like edamame.

Remember I mentioned that I was thisclose to getting pretty unlucky with the Times Square car bomber? I was in Times Square buying these awesome green PJs for Edda from the 4-story M&M World store. Who knew that M&Ms needed such a large store? The world is a funny place.

Last week, Vince had his final cub scout pack meeting of the year. He got promoted to Bear. We love our cub scout troop! Vince needed to pee in this photo. Can you tell?

After the awarding of all the promotions and badges earned, the kids had a chance to see lots of reptiles! The reptile guy was pretty funny.