It's New Year's Eve and I am excited about my plans.... staying up (if I'm lucky) with the family. It has been a fabulous Christmas and I have confidence that the start of 2010 will be just as good.
Victoria is 7 and coincidentally, lost her 7th tooth. For her birthday, we had a house of girls for a "Rockin' Birthday Party: An All Night Jammie Session" (get it?). It was a blast.
You Gotta Be Kidding! gets kids and grown-ups thinking, laughing, reasoning, and having a blast making goofy decisions and completing the wild Would You Rather Challenges. Best of all, kids have fun speaking up for a change, instead of always saying "I don't know". Watch imagination rule and confidence build as kids get comfortable standing up for their choice while laughing the whole time. Would You Rather eat a bucket of apple stems or eat 20 banana peels' Gross, huh' But you cannot say "neither" when playing this game. Even though nobody would be dumb enough to eat that stuff, each player still has to choose. So make your best choice and then speak up and tell everyone why. To win, you must correctly guess what the others will say and successfully complete your even more outrageous challenges as you try to move forward to the Finish Line.
We LOVE it! It's fun to spend time as a family laughing and talking about the crazy choices in the game. Of course, we're hopeful that as the girls become better at reasoning and defending their choices in the game, we will be better at helping them become confident problem-solvers ready for life's unique challenges headed their way.
So, how pathetic is it that I check my OWN blog to see if anything has changed? I mean, obviously I know there is no new post; but I keep thinking maybe there might be a comment waiting to be discovered that I didn't see the first dozen or so times I logged on. Really, that's pathetic. This time I decided to actually post something for you to find.
I am one of those people. The Black Friday shoppers. I download the adscans weeks before they are officially released to plan my day long before the sale papers hit the news stands on Thanksgiving morning. This year, I even went to Target right before closing on Wednesday to scout out the locations of all the deals I knew were coming according to my web source. There were several things I wanted, but there was one REALLY good deal I was determined to get: a TomTom XL 340-S for $150.00 off the retail price. It wasn't the cheapest GPS, but it was the most marked down and I wanted that deal. In case you are wondering, here's how it went.
I literally ran through the front door of Target at 5:25 on Friday morning. Incidentally, that was exactly fiveminutes after waking up, 25 minutes after they opened, and 1 hour after I planned on arriving to wait in line with the other loons. Luckily I live one minute away and do not believe in wearing make-up before dawn just to shop. I sprinted to the electronic department with my shoes untied and my new Bon Jovi tee in my purse (there was no time for the top layer of clothing) I was certain the TomTom was gone. I was right. Sold out in 25 minutes.
All wasn't lost, though. I took time to tie my shoes and put on my t-shirt (thanks for the perfect b-day gift, Lynn), picked up everything else on my computer-generated shopping list, met up with my friends Holly and Bethany, and pushed a buggy around the store until I was quite satisfied I had reached a pausing point.
I checked out, earned $30.00 in gift cards, and headed to K Mart for the next-best deal on the TomTom. There were two left and I happily returned to Target to make one more round of shopping. Even two hours after opening, Target was packed. I saw people I knew everywhere. At one point, I was standing in the main aisle talking to a long-lost high school classmate about the deals she scored when Holly called for me from across the store to stop talking and "come here!" I admit I was slightly put out- it was a good story. In any case, I moseyed on over to find her and Bethany hovering over a buggy that had the TomTom in it. Can you believe it? The deal that got away at 5:30 was waiting in an abandoned cart for me at 7:00- right in the middle of the toy section. Now if you aren't a Black Friday shopper, you might not appreciate how HUGE that is. But trust me, that is the stuff of legends. I asked the people around the cart if it was theirs, looked both ways, grabbed the box and took off to the register! What a rush.
Retail Price: $249.00
Sale Price: $97.00
Gift Cards earned shopping at Target: $30.00
So, I haven't been good about posting. However, I have been GREAT at procrastinating. I think that I have actually mastered that. In middle school, I had a poster in my locker that said, "If it wasn't for the last minute, I would never get anything done!" So true.
I am in week 4 of my 1,000 week journey to getting my Master's degree. OK, I exaggerate. Barely. Well, it seems like it will take forever to get to the point where I am looking at this from the other side. I have been working hard to find time for my school work (which incidentally was about 12 hours worth last week) with my need for doing nothing. Nothing for me is really just staring at a computer. Clicking links. Hooked by AOL headlines. I can be lost in cyberspace for hours.
It's been hard. Besides the theory of leadership traits and the history of curriculum, here are a few of the more interesting things I have learned in week four:
If your loved one goes away for a long period of time, you can do this and end up looking like an idiot.
Patrick Swazey wrote "She's like the Wind" about his wife. (They were married for 34 years. Wow!)
There is gene therapy that has color-blind monkeys seeing color. (I spent some time imagining a researcher interpreting oooh-oooh-aaaah-aaaah to mean YELLOW.)
If you are a college student, a samurai sword is the weapon of choice for deterring (and killing) a burglar.
There's more, of course, but I need to stop procrastinating and work on the next thing to learn: how to work sleeping more than 6 hours into my schedule.
You Gotta Be Kidding! gets kids and grown-ups thinking, laughing, reasoning, and having a blast making goofy decisions and completing the wild Would You Rather Challenges. Best of all, kids have fun speaking up for a change, instead of always saying "I don't know". Watch imagination rule and confidence build as kids get comfortable standing up for their choice while laughing the whole time. Would You Rather eat a bucket of apple stems or eat 20 banana peels' Gross, huh' But you cannot say "neither" when playing this game. Even though nobody would be dumb enough to eat that stuff, each player still has to choose. So make your best choice and then speak up and tell everyone why. To win, you must correctly guess what the others will say and successfully complete your even more outrageous challenges as you try to move forward to the Finish Line.
