I’ve had a migraine all day, that I’ve been keeping at bay with medicine, but, I still haven’t felt totally up to snuff. Blogging just wasn’t really in the cards today, although I do have some reviews that I wanted to get done. They will just have to wait.

It sort of turned out to be a good thing, though, because I worked on some of the design elements of my two new blogs. And I had a super-cool blogging buddy, Loretta, helping me! She totally rocks!

Aren’t they starting to look nice? Why, thank you, I think so, too!

Have a good evening – and I’ll blog at ya tomorrow!

Thank God in Heaven above that the boys don’t have access to this monster:

It’s a Mountain Dew Game Fuel soda machine! Oh my gawd!

My husband didn’t get home last night until 12:30 from the band competition he’d taken our other son to, and he said that when he went down to the ‘dungeon’ – those boys were wired FOR SOUND!

They had Halo 3 on the big screen, and DDR on the regular TV – and they were wound tighter than eight-day clocks!

I knew that one of the boys was being picked up early for church, so I went down there this morning as quietly as I could to wake him up, so I wouldn’t wake up all of the boys. When I opened the door, I was shocked to see all of them not only awake, but, already playing video games!

And the funny little monsters – you know what they said to me? With big smiles crossing all their sweet, sleepy faces, they said:

“We went to bed early, so that we could get up early and play video games, because we knew Daniel had to leave early.”

I thought to myself, “Well, that’s odd, I was sure they had stayed up late.”

So I asked them how ‘early’ they went to bed. By this point, they are all giggling:

“3am. It is early, you know!”

Monsters!

Tonight is Shawn’s slumber party – my thirteen year old. He has four boys over and they are all juiced up on sugar, caffeine, and video games! I threw some hot dogs in there for good measure. This definitely would be a good day for me to try a hoodia patch, with all this junk food around. They are all outside playing right now, which I imagine I’ll have to call a stop to soon, as they are not doing that ‘quiet thing’ very well. It is 9:30PM here and I don’t want to upset any of the neighbors. All in all, they are nice boys, so it’s a good party, but, whenever you mix an odd number of kids, candy, caffeine, and slumber parties, there are bound to be little issues here and there. They seem to be handling them nicely, though. Thank goodness, because, I am sitting here at my desk, trying very hard to keep myself awake. I am just no good in the evenings, anymore. Around 8pm, I start fighting off the ’sleepies’, so this is getting a bit too far past my bedtime. I am hoping my husband will be home soon to take over. He needs to probably blow up an air mattress for them, anyway. The floor in the basement doesn’t have any padding under the carpet, and there is only furniture enough for three boys to sleep on. (A couch, a big sidechair, and a loveseat.)

Last weekend Patrick had his birthday slumber party. He turned 14. He had two boys spend the night. It was definitely quieter, but, those boys were pretty darn sweet, too.

Uh oh, the boys are starting to yell a bit too much – I better go hush them up.

Yikes! Anyone wanna come over? My thirteen year old son is having his birthday slumber party and he and his brother received their copy of Halo 3 in the mail today. These boys were pumped just on that information alone. Then one of them brought over a twelve pack of soda. No, not just any soda. What he brought over to make the celebration complete – Mountain Dew Game Fuel Halo 3 – which has 73 milligrams of caffeine per 12 ounce can! According to this soft drink caffeine chart, that’s more than Jolt Cola!

They have divvied the box up, even giving me one (No, I haven’t drank it, yet) and they have decided that they want to each save one unopened one. Well, you know, they have to preserve this historic event. Which it seems to have really become. The boys’ cousin even missed their family birthday party because his copy came in the mail the day of the family party for three of the cousins. The strange thing was, I was upset he wasn’t there until I heard why he wasn’t there. And that is just one example of how big and some could say, out of control, this thing has gotten!

Ok, well, in case you’ve spent your life wondering what five boys and 365 milligrams of caffeine sound like, I recorded the event for you. You will only see my beautiful Christmas angel, because, I don’t have permission from their mothers to post their pics on the internet – and more importantly, because, I’m hoping she may deliver me from all of this.

(Sorry it’s so blurry, not one of my better camera-skills days! And I have no idea why the sound is fuzzy – that is the first time my new camera has done that!)

What, I mean, what, could I possibly even say to that? Oh, I don’t know, maybe I could tell you about something “nuke-you-ler”, or maybe I could tell you that I, too, “do the Google” – but, I don’t know.

I know I certainly don’t want to get on my No Child Left Behind soapbox, because, I’ve got work to do. No, I don’t have no time for them dang praisedents that cain’t even speak no Ainglish krect.

Those are the words of my sweet 10 year old daughter. She had to write a paragraph at school about a beautiful garden, and those words just really struck me. Are you just experiencing that waterfall with her upon hearing those words? I know that I am!

It’s funny, because, a group of friends and I have been having a lot of discussions lately about just this sort of thing. Taking your readers there with you, right into the scene, and letting them wholly experience it with you – like you’re looking at it on a big screen, HDTV – or even better, like you’re actually there! And here that concept is so beautifully demonstrated by a fifth grader! That’s just awesome!

I would love to share with you her whole paragraph, though, as I found it really sweet:

Daises, roses, and daffodils. Also I have fruits and vegatables.

I left her mistakes in place, because, they are cute, and I wanted to you read it as I see it on thepaper. (I’d scan it if it wasn’t in pencil and my scanner wasn’t fussy.) And the colorations were my doing, so I could emphasize that beautiful use of ‘taking your audience with you’. And also so that I could point out that, yes, that child’s father is a carpenter – how many fifth graders walk around talking about mahogany?