…OK I am new to the Girls Scouts.. so lots of this stuff is new to me.
No, I am not in Girl Scouts, silly person, Dylan is!
But every year those cute little Girl Scouts come to your door with smiles and batting their eyes in hopes of selling you some over priced Girl Scout cookies. They are a cultural icon I guess by now, right? When someone says the word ‘Thin Mint’ what do you think of?
Have you ever wondered what the Girl Scouts do with all that cookie plunder money?
Lets take a poll:
Without giving away the answer, here are a few pictures from last weekend at our local Girl Scout’s year-end party.
First off there was some food! A lot of it for a little Girl Scout troop…
There was this buffet table, complete with 30 Papa John’s pizzas at the end of it.
There was the colorful and inviting Cup Cake table
There was also an equally colorful Candy Table behind the buffet table filled with colorful gum balls, lollypops, Skittles, and Pixie sticks!
Are you kidding me?
Maybe that is not enough sugar for our little princesses, er, brownies you wonder!
How about a Sno-Cone table?
Now with all this sugar in their system these young ladies surely needed a way to burn it all off, right?
May I present Big Blue:
Now it wasn’t this Big Blue…..
..but is was more than enough to entertain Dylan for a while!
She seemed to enjoy it going down a few times…
In fact, she got real good at going down the slide, she went down so many times….
..in fact she spent most of the next 2 hours going down the slide…
Have another sno cone Dylan!
But it wasn’t ALL fun and games!
There was some business at this cookie-funded year-end party sugar-bash!
…and Dylan got to ‘Bridge into Brownies’
Cool stuff!
She had a ‘Certified’ great time on my birthday weekend!
Sorry to have been such a stranger lately. We have a few irons in the fire right now, making for some fun plans this summer; lots of things going on. T-Ball has been a Sand Gnat bitten bad experience so far for the girls and their coach. So that’s why I haven’t bombarded you with shared some more pictures here.
Rookie Card
So this birthday weekend I choose just to flop in my hammock with my favorite Jimmy Buffet song(s) and contemplate the near future. Click on my horizontal triangle below and drift away with me this lazy spring day…..dreamin our life away.
I found out this song was about Jimmy’s father. It’s a great song to sway in the breeze to, my hat pulled over my eyes.
And so, as I lay here in my hammock, I ponder what would my legacy might be with my girls one day….
…I don’t want to jinks anything but we are hoping to have a pool built in our backyard this week, or at least begun. Not that we are that well-to-do or anything. It’s a smaller pool. We just wanted some place for our girls to hang close to us. Its fun planning the details here in the shade and the breeze.
…. I bought some snazzy new Bluetooth speakers for our pool deck a month ago when they were on sale with Verizon. Actually two of them so we can have Jimmy and his band with us by the pool. They get great reviews and have amazing sound supposedly.
But I am having trouble figuring out how to get them to work however. I guess I should get them out of the box and read the instructions….
….We are also putting the final touches on an escape to the Magical Kingdom.What fun that will be for me the kids. I haven’t been there since the 70’s! So I’m getting kinda excited too.
hmmm…. what else?
I may be getting published! I found our local PTA chair started an E-book publishing company and spoke to me about submitting some of my writings. Yea, they sell for about $2.00 and I could get about 70% of that. But then I can put that widget on my blog that says I was published! Anyone else want to do E-Books? Let me know. I will put you in touch. Heck, if I can anyone can!
Dylan has her end of year Girl Scouts party today at the local water park. So I am taking my Daddy’s girl there while Mom was going to distract Skylar and run her out to the beach at the same time..
…ahhh the beach
“Sailin’ on a Midnight boat,
there were no questions asked.
The water’s so green and the air is so clean,
They just stuck right to their task,
Hammock daydreamin….”
Just maybe by the time you read this I will have aged another year. I don’t like birthdays any more. I get the birthday bluesfrequently. I don’t want to get any older. Hell, I look in the mirror and see what I see and I look too old now. But as I wink at myself in my day dream, and raise my head up and take a sip of my adult beverage, I toast to how it beats the alternative…..
…..Have you noticed there are a lot of birthdays in May? A lot of hanky-panky on vacations in August I figure. I’ll toast to that!
…Hey, where’d my sun go? …Darn cloud.
Oh, and did I tell you after they put in our pool I may have to re-sod the entire back yard! I don’t mind, It’s worth it. I’ll get right on it….one day. (yawn)
…..I have a(nother) high school reunion coming up in the fall. Folks, I have moved around so much that my classmates don’t even try to find me anymore. Plus I live about a day’s car ride away. But with the help of a long-lost high school friend or two I may make this one, the good Lord willing.
….And as I lay here swaying in the warm Spring sun I wonder how I can bring my schoolmates to the beach next time for our reunion instead. We have a large banquet hall at my beach, resting on the shore of an exotic beach known as the Isle of Palms. What could be more inviting?
We could make a day of it this way! There’s the beach, cooking out under the pavilion, volleyball matches for those of us who can still jump, beach combing, free beach parking, catching up and fellowship with old friends; and their families, lost loves…..
When I left you last I tossed out a challenge to see if anyone had been to Disney World recently. Let’s face it, EVERYONE knew those bracelets came from Disney World or Disneyland, right?
Well I have not been there since, oh, the early 1970’s, when Rapunzel still had short hair. We wanted to finally take the girls there this summer and I was just amazed, if not intimidated, of what kind of place this is now. It’s huge! So many options! So many choices! Where to start? What to do?
Well as strange as this may seem, there is actually a blog out there that gives advice on how to tour Disney World!
I know, hard to believe, but its true.
The blog is huge and vast! But it was a big help! It includes a 6 Step Process to planning your Disney vacation. Check out WDW Prep School. If you want to plan a trip there Shannon has answers to almost every question and does everything but book it herself.
Which takes me to these gems above. They are Magic Bracelets! Of course everything begins with the word Magic at the Magic Kingdom. Congratulations to Ms. AuAu, an amazing artist and story teller and computer whiz who guessed correctly on my challenge. She knew how to answer the quiz question all right, Google it!
If you book a room at the Disney resort you are entitled to these little bracelets. These MagicBands use radio frequency (RF) technology and can be read by short and long-range readers located at the Walt Disney World Resort. They are basically your ID card, tickets, Kingdom pass and more all rolled into one. As Ms. AuAu discovered, these Disney accessories will:
Unlock the door of your Disney Resort hotel room. Enter theme and water parks ~ your tickets. Check in at FastPass+ entrances..to get you to the front of the lines. Connect Disney PhotoPass /Memory Maker images to your account. Charge food and merchandise purchases to your Disney Resort hotel room during your hotel stay.
Maybe I have just been living in a cave and these things are have been around for a while but I thought they were pretty cool to have all that technology wrapped around our wrists. It’s the Photo Pass perk that I found to be the best thing.
You see there are various Disney photographers all over the Magic Kingdom; at the theme parks, the restaurants, resorts, everywhere.
When someone has a PhotoPass linked to their bracelet the Magic paparazzi can take your pic and than forward it to your own Disney Experience web page for you. Not only that but it can add cartoons to your pics, add some animation, and with the help of your Magic Brands, know you are approaching on s few of the rides and take your pictures or video of the experience. Take a look:
I thought that pretty Incredible. Thanks to the Memory Maker thing I don’t have to carry my camera everywhere and might actually get to be in some family pictures myself this time.
So with our Magic Bracelets first you make your reservation , then claim your Magic Bands and customize them, starting with picking your favorite color to make your band unique. Then you assign a Disney character as your image for your customized band.
What Disney character do you think I chose?
After reviewing a list of about 30 Disney icons and characters, Dylan and I decided I should be Mr. Incredible!
Kinda fitting, huh?
I know what some of my loyal fans are thinking?
No, Flynn Rider was not an option to choose from for me.
I know. I was shocked and disappointed too.
…and the only other male characters to choose from were the Grumpy old Man from Up, the boy from Up, and Yoda
I will give you two guesses who my girls identified with for their Disney characters….
Mom wasn’t close by to choose her character so Dylan and I thought about her for a moment and decided she was pretty Incredible too! Mrs. Incredible!
How did you like that honey?
All in all I am getting excited for this vacation as it looks like we may have a pretty incredible time!
How fitting….
an Incredible time!
…we are all ready for one great adventure!
So after 2 months of weekends on the computer, researching and planning, reserving, and paying, and calling we are all going to Disney World for the first time. It should be a great time filled with plenty of magical memories to last a lifetime!
And everyone can thank me in the end….
Mister Incredible!
Have the best weekend knuckleheads!
I’ll try to do better next time…
” THAT’S INCREDIBLE” ADDENDUM:
After seeing this post, one of my first Likeswas from Jenny at Magic Mouse Vacations, a.k.a. a Disney blog! (Thanks Jenny!) Unfamiliar with this blogger I clicked on a link to her site offered in my notification and found she has a LIST of favorite Disney blogsof hers.
So there appears to be multiple blogs offering Disney World advice. If anyone reading this post would ever have any questions I am sure you can find any and all answers at one of these helpful and experienced blogs. My only unanswered question is ‘How can I get a job as a blogger for Disney’? Hmmmm?
And so it is on the way to school when I take Dylan and her best friend. (lol, I’m sorry that just sounds silly even to me after I reread those first two sentences)
Most every morning we are forced enjoying Kidzbopp on the way to school as the girls like to sing to the pop songs. It usually puts them in a good mood and so most mornings I kinda encourage it.
But when one song comes up I make sure they know…
“I’m The Man,
I’m the Man,
I’m the man..”
Well go ahead and play it while you read..It will reinforce my the story…
You see after dinner Dylan came walking in crying big crocodile tears. We sat her down on the sofa and asked what was wrong. She told us she lost one of her brand new flip flops she had just received from the great Aunt Sue down the storm drain in front of our house.
As flip flops go, these were nice for a kid. She had just received them as a birthday present a month earlier when Aunt Sue was down.
You could tell through her tears she was sad from losing them before ever having a chance to truly wear them for the summer. I know she was looking forward to that.
She was scared she would get in trouble. And she was afraid she would hurt her Aunt Sue’s feelings by not having them any more.
You really hated to see her crying and so sad about her new fashion flip flops.
So I said show me what happened.
the Drain Monster
What would you or your spouse do?
Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
Yes, I went in the garage and gathered a big screw driver and a hammer and I pried up that manhole cover to see what I could see. There it was.
No Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles down there!
So I went back into the house,
found a step ladder,
and took a deep breath….
What’s my name?
OK, well maybe not THE man. I’m just a regular schmoe.
But to my girls, Daddy still needs to be The Man for his Daddy’s girls.
And where was Skylar all this time?
Well she was inside finishing my daily helping of birthday cake!
Dylan can’t blame her this time!
Pop Quiz!
Does anyone know what these are?
If anyone can tell me what these are, I will sing a special version of “the Man” for them?
What a gift, huh?
I will give you a hint, that is my name on there….
There was also an equally colorful Candy Table behind the buffet table filled with colorful gum balls, lollypops, Skittles, and Pixie sticks!
In fact, she got real good at going down the slide, she went down so many times….
OUR LIFE IN 3D 