Time sure does fly . . . am I having fun?

I just took a call from a co-worker. He called to congratulate me on my anniversary. I was confused for a sec since my wedding anniversary is less than a week away. I wondered to myself, "Gee, how nice of him to remember that."

And then it dawned on me! Yesterday was the official anniversary of my tenure at my company. Yup. I started working at Black & Veatch on October 29, 1990. 18 years ago.

EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO.

How can that be, you say? I must have been 12 when I started!

I hired in as a contract employee that summer of 1990 and never left. So, actually I've been here 18 years and four months. Whew. I never would have dreamed in a million years when I walked through those doors over 18 years ago that I would still be here today. Crazy.

And yes, my wedding anniversary and birthday are coming up in just a few days. I'm just hitting all the milestones this week.

Prepare youselves for a post on the crazy weekend I'm about to have. It's a doozy, I tell ya'!

(THANK YOU Janelle for the beautiful card!!!! Love you.)

The Song That Goes Like This . . .

Curt and I co-produced and co-hosted a fundraiser event for the Ann Arbor Civic Theater last week. We had a ton of fun putting it together and even more fun at the event itself. I was walking on a cloud for days afterwards.

The event was a singing competition between 10 men and 10 women called the Civic Open -- there were two top winners in each category -- so four winners in total. We had some fantastic judges (who became even more fantastic over their manhattens and martinis). Actually, the entire crowd was fired up all over the place. A bunch of us closed the club and continued the festivities at a friend's house.

SO much fun! Too bad it was a Wednesday night.

In addition to the competitors, Curt and I sang a duet - "The Song That Goes Like This" from Spamalot.

The girls watched us practice the number a few times (well, perhaps more than a few times) and somehow during our final dress (which literally took place in our dining room the night before the event) they decided to get into the act themselves.

Here are two versions of the song. The first one shows Audrey stepping in for my part of the duet. You'll see at the end of the video that Viv wants a turn. So she got one in the second video. Although Audrey couldn't stop correcting her in the background.

Too cute!

Audrey's video

Vivian's video

The family that sings together, stays together!

Fall Farm Trip

Last weekend a bunch of us nutty parents went to the Real Life Farm for a few hours. We had an absolutely gorgeous day for our trip -- which was a real bonus.

Here's a snippet of our afternoon (in the wrong order, of course. It's Friday afternoon and I'm lazy today.)

The kids clamoring around the bunny pen while we waited for the hay ride to start.

Vivian in line to ride the horses.

My littlest kid on the littlest horse!

Audrey rode the biggest horse -- "Tank"

My girly-girls posing for a picture.

Dueling cameras with January.

Listening to Farmer Tom (or Bob or whats-his-name) giving us the lay of the land.

Vivian, Daddy and a cow

Where's Owen going?

The kids loved feeding the goats!

Natalie in the goat pen!

Molly is pretty happy with that duck.

Anthony's NOT looking so happy.

Vivian's loving it, though.

Audrey and her boyfriend, Nicolas.

What's in a name?

Audrey told us that she "voted" for Barack Obama at school today because she likes his name. She thinks it's cool.

That's SO awesome!!!

Just because

I just ran across this photo comparison on my computer while I was looking for some other file. That's me on the left in (gulp) 1966 and Vivian on the right taken a few months ago.

Cups of Poopy

Curt and I went with some friends to see the University of Michigan's musical theater production of RENT last night. (Thanks to Rachel for hooking us up!)

I was impressed with the show. The two men playing Collins and Angel were crazy good. It was fun to relive my past a bit since I hadn't seen the show or even played the CD in years.

And then completely out of the blue this morning, Vivian started singing Seasons of Love while eating her pancakes. I looked at Audrey with bewilderment. "What made her start singing this?" Now you might recall that Seasons of Love was one of the songs from Audrey's show over the summer. Vivian learned all of the songs since she was also around during the rehearsal process. She sings a lot of the songs from the show -- her favorite being Hit the Road Jack. But why that song this morning?

Kids are funny creatures.

And lest you think my child is some sort of genius or something (which she is, of course) here's Vivian's version of the lyrics:

Five hunded tenty-five thousan six hunded minutes

Five hunded tenty-five thousan moments so dear

Five hunded tenty-five thousan six hunded minutes

How do you measure, measure a yea

In daylits, in sunsits

in midnits, in cups of poopy

in inches, in mals in la-la an sha

Five hunded tenty-five thousan six hunded minutes

How do you measure, a year in la laf

Super Trouper

Oh . . . the appeal of ABBA.

Our little songfest over dinner the other day had quite the impact. Audrey is now a huge ABBA fan.

At this very moment, I'm typing this at my dining room table while Audrey is performing a dance concert to ABBA Gold in the living room. Her favorite songs are "Money, Money" and "Super Trouper." (Both of which I've now heard ad nauseum)

Hmmmm . . . I guess I really didn't need to pick her up early from school today because her stomach hurt, eh?

Random musings and the weather . . .

We have had unseasonably warm weather over the past couple of days. Last weekend was down-right gorgeous and sunny. It was nice to squeeze in some outdoor time doing yard-work in-between being stuck in a dark theater for a good portion of my weekend.

Sunday afternoon was particularly painful to head to the theater. It was SO beautiful outside. Curt had dreams of playing disc golf but that couldn't happen.

The show is going quite well, though. I've enjoyed hanging out with my "other" family but I'm also ready to get my life back. We close this weekend and I'm sure I will miss it. What I won't miss is trying to catch up on my life during those precious moments when I'm not at work or at the theater.

I managed to get some productive things done around the house on Saturday - which included cleaning Audrey's room (also called "throwing a bunch of minutia away while she's not looking") and switching our bed over to its "winter" coverings.

And then I roasted while sleeping on Saturday night. Woke up in a full-out sweat. Leave it to me to fix up our cozy, winter bed when it's 80 degrees outside.

I hear normal fall weather is coming back later this week. Me and my down comforter will be happy to see it.

It seems much scarier than it is . . .

I have a feeling that Halloween is going to be a tough-one this year. Not only are we squeezing it in between a million other events in our lives (performances, a fund-raiser, my birthday and our wedding anniversary to name a few -- thank GOODNESS my two business trips this month were postponed!!) but I'm getting the sneaking suspician from Vivian that she's not going to enjoy this holiday very much.

Vivian told her daycare teachers that she wanted to be Cinderella. I don't think she actually knows what that means, though. She loves Cinderella so somehow she latched onto that thought one afternoon. But when I showed her a couple of Cinderella costumes on-line, she just said, "no." I tried Teletubbies too, since she's currently a huge fan. How funny is this??? But she said, "no."

Because of my nutty schedule lately, my Halloween decorations are still sitting in boxes on my living room floor (hey! At least I pulled them from storage!) so I don't know how Viv will react to those just yet. However, she's deathly afraid of the Bath and Body pumpkin soap dispenser we have in the bathroom. And the other day when I was purchasing mums and a cornstalk with the girls, she would . . . not . . . go . . . near . . . a giant blow-up of Frankenstein. He wasn't even a scary version of Frankenstein. But he was huge and depicted all-things-Halloween.

This is very odd behavior from a girl who normally appears to be fearless about everything.

I can't imagine what she's going to be like at her preschool Halloween party . . . let alone the crazy beggars night we have in our neighborhood . . . complete with flaming torches and a suit of armor with a pumpkin head in our front yard.

Needless to say, I will not be spending much money on Vivian's costume this year.

She DOES like candy corn, I've discovered.

All is not lost.

A night of relaxation after a weekend of drama

Not bad drama . . . I'm talking about real drama . . . as in theater.

I'm very happy to report that I had my first evening OFF since sometime in September (other than the "fake" night off I had last Monday) . . . . and I enjoyed myself!! I made dinner for my family (actually cut up things and seasoned them and cooked them and stuff!!) and we all hung around the dinner table for a very long time.

Curt had his laptop sitting on the dining table and we started performing computer karaoke during dinner. We're producing a karaoke contest/show in a couple of weeks (yes, that other one . . . more on that later) so we've been researching songs and getting organized. In any case, it was a lot of fun eating, drinking and singing ABBA songs at the dinner table (not that ABBA has anything to do with the show we're producing. Just humor me.)

The girls showed their enjoyment by dancing along to all the songs.

I don't think they ate very much.

[Perhaps THAT'S why Vivian gobbled up all of her breakfast this morning so quickly!]

My show officially opened this past weekend. We have been stressing about this beast of a script for weeks. One cast member even spoke of anxiety attacks during the day just thinking about it. We often joked to each other about "just WHY do we do this to ourselves????" Anyway, we finally opened and had FUN!! What a relief!! Our Friday night crowd was fantastic. All the stars aligned and everyone was on their game. We couldn't have asked for a better night to kick things off. The only thing that seemed to go awry was that I forgot a piece of my costume at home. I spend most of the first act in boxer shorts . . . which I discovered (too late) were at home in my laundry basket. Thankfully, Laurie wore capri-style sweats to the theater that night so I promptly asked her if I could borrow them for the show. Those same pants made another appearance later in the show when Dan realized that he didn't have his scrubs, either. Anyhoo . . .

We had a wonderful review that you can read about here.

Now I get to enjoy being a wife and mother again for a few days until we perform again this weekend.

I'm reveling in it!