24 days and counting...

"Senior Sunday" at church was a couple of weeks ago....

Graduation announcements went out last week...

And it won't be long before Randy Lowry's famous words,

"And please.... come to Lipscomb"

will be ringing in our ears.  :-)   

I still can't believe that it's come so fast...

Alabama All-State Band

This past weekend, our family traveled down to Mobile to take Mackenzie to the Alabama All-State Band Festival.  A while back she had tried out for the band and placed first in our district on piccolo.  This gave her the opportunity to go down to Mobile and compete with piccolo players from all 8 districts in Alabama for 3 spots open to piccolo players in the All-State bands.  There are 3 bands -- The Red Band is the top band, White is second, and Blue is third.  Very patriotic. :-)    They take one piccolo for each band - SO, if you don't make one of the top 3 spots, then you try out on flute and play flute in one of the bands.  Well, Mackenzie is a die-hard piccolo lover...  she enjoys playing her flute, but piccolo is her passion.  So needless to say, she was very anxious to earn one of the piccolo spots in the bands.  We arrived in Mobile a little after lunch time last Thursday.  Mackenzie's try-out was later that afternoon.  She was the last piccolo of the 8 to try out.  After she was done and the judges had deliberated for a few minutes, they began calling the girls in to tell them where they had placed.  (This is where you have to insert some tense and dramatic music to set the scene! ha)  The first girl to come out had made the first spot - Red Band piccolo.  Now we realized they were being called in order...   and before we had time to register all of that, they came out and called Mackenzie's name!  yay!  So she made White Band piccolo - and she was SO happy....  :)   So that was a pretty cool moment.  She then spent all of Thursday night and most of the day on Friday in rehersals.  They had a quick warm-up and dress rehersal Saturday morning...  and then Saturday afternoon performed the most amazing concert for a group of young musicians who didn't know each other and had only been together learning their music for a day and a half.  It was hard to believe how good they sounded. :)  And yes, if you couldn't tell already, I'm one very proud momma...   ;-)

This is Mackenze, Maggie and Clay after the concert.  Clay and Maggie both play clarinet.  Maggie was 8th chair (out of 32!) in the Blue Band.  And Clay is the budding prodigy of the group - he's just a freshman and made 4th chair in the Red Band!  And I should give some credit to Bob Jones as well -- they were giving out solo awards at the beginning of the concert and I think more than half the kids they called up were from Bob Jones...  let's just say that North Alabama was well represented! :)

And while Mackenzie was off working, Jack, Anna and I got to play a little bit.  There wasn't enough time to make it to the beach, so we spent a few hours touring Bellingrath Gardens - it was beautiful!   Here's a few pictures below:

Upstairs, Downstairs

This is the state that I left my upstairs in to escape to the downstairs for just a little while and take a deep breath!   There's a BIG neighborhood garage sale going on this weekend and we're trying to clean out the attics around here...  mostly right now, we're just moving piles of stuff from one place to another and I'm trying hard not to get too overwhelmed! ha.   Oh where's my sister when I need her?!?  :)

Ahhh.... Downstairs.  :)  I had to clean up first down here before starting anything up there just to make sure I had a place to retreat to!

If you look back a few posts, you'll see this room when I was getting started on it.  It's the 'picture' room.  I'm not sure you can really call anything going on in here 'progress' except that I did manage to find enough pictures of Mackenzie over the years to send in for her Senior Band Awards Banquet... at least that's one mission accomplished - yay!!

ALL of those bags have stuffed animals in them.  I can't even begin to explain how we could have possibly accumulated all of those over the years.  And hey, does anyone need a model of the solar system for a school project?  I've got one of those too!

 And this is how I found Mandy when I came downstairs...  there is something terribly wrong with her work ethic!  sigh....

It's amazing all the STUFF you come across when you start cleaning out the attic.  Things that you forgot you had, things you thought you had surely thrown away long ago, things you SHOULD have thrown away long ago, things you didn't know you ever even owned...  wow.  Lot's of memories, too.   But I will glad when it's all done!!  Wish me luck - or better yet, pray for my sanity! :)

April Fools Update

OK...  so after I posted my little April Fools story this afternoon, I actually got pranked pretty good by my darling daughter tonight.  So I had a quick dinner out with Jack and Kenzie while Anna was at gymnastics...  we ate at Wings and when I got home from that, I wanted to wash my chicken-y fingers.  So I went straight to the kitchen sink when I walked in the door and turned on the water - and proceeded to get sprayed head-to-toe with water!  Anna had apparently taken advantage of the time I was in the shower earlier to wrap the kitchen sink sprayer with tape and point it out so that as soon as you turned on the water you'd get sprayed...  very devious and very clever!  And I was the total sucker in this joke -- it even took me a while to realize that it was a joke and that there wasn't actually something wrong with the faucet.  haha. 

So, of course the next step was to figure out how to get her back. :)   The 3 of us put our heads together and the final result was taking the shower head off in her bathroom and filling it up with Dawn dishwashing detergent.  She always takes a shower before bed, so we thought we'd surprise her with a bubble-shower. :)  It worked pretty good....  but not quite enough bubbles to have as much of a 'revenge' effect as I wanted...  oh well, at least maybe the shower will get clean now.  ;-)

April Fools

I haven't laughed like that in such a long time!

Last night the whole family was sitting around catching up on epidsodes of American Idol and looking at old family photos that I've found as I've been going thru boxes and boxes of pictures. We were also passing computers around looking at youtube videos when Anna suddenly remembered a video that we all just HAD to see. Well, it was something about hippos and dogs singing and it was very silly. In the light of day, I don't think I would have found it quite as funny, but last night it got me and the girls laughing. THEN, Anna went from that straight into a very comical impression of one of her teachers - but SHE was laughing so hard already that it was hard for her to compose herself to do it. I wish everyone could see Anna when she gets like this - she's SO funny! :) Well, I don't know what happened to me, but I laughed so hysterically that I was in tears - to the point they were streaming down my face and my stomach hurt so much from laughing that I thought I'd be sore from it today! :)

A little later on, after all the hysteria died down, we finally got everyone up and going to bed. Anna confided to me on the way to her room that she had grabbed a box of clingwrap from downstairs and was planning to wrap it over the toilet and pull the old "pee on the cling wrap" April Fool's prank on her sister. Mackenzie's morning routine lends itself perfectly to such an endeavor because she likes to get up at about 5:30 every morning, take a shower, and then crawl back in bed to sleep for another hour - thus, most of this is done in a state of very little consciousness. ;-) ...and therefore, if she did happen to use the bathroom before getting in the shower this would probably have worked!! BUT, I guess we'll never know because Anna fell asleep before Mackenzie and never got around to putting her plan into action - bummer. ;-)

Anyways, it got me thinking at some point that it felt really good to laugh like that - I need more of that in my life. And April Fools Day (and seeing the weather predictions for snow up in Boston) got me thinking back to when Anna was just a baby and we lived in Canton, MA and fell victim ourselves to 'Mother Nature's' April Fools snowstorm on us - almost a foot of snow if I remember correctly! crazy... Hmmm.... now if I could just think of someone to play a joke on that would appreciate it! ha...