Tales of a Shoebox Princess

Matt's robotics team went down to Peoria for a district competition, made it to finals, lost in finals, but received the Chairman's award for being a model robotics team. Some of the robotics team member families decided to welcome home our little robot people with signs and balloons to celebrate the award and the qualification for World's competition in St. Louis in late April. The gear leaning on the door is what their robot is designed to deal with: Pick up, load, and deliver. Jim holding my spur of the moment sign. I painted this one. Matt applauded my correct use of gears. Matt and teammate unloading Sir Bedivere the bot. Bagged, it is placed on the cart to take it back into the school. Matt pushes a box of tools and supplies back into the school 2169 returns victories with their Chairman's award banner It has taken me 4 years to understand how the competition system works (and there are parts I still don't understand), but M...

And the one where we finally return Mr. H's house key to him. We've had this house key for two plus years, ever since Hayley dog-sat for Mr. H. (Mr. H is one of the district band leaders and he's familiar with the 4 band kids we've had). Hayley used to babysit Mr. H's daughters too. We are down to 1 actual band concert and 1 possible marching band event ever as high school band parents. Katie picked up a flute after fourth grade and we've been band parents ever since. One of the songs the Wind Ensemble played was Xerxes and if I may direct your attention to this post  from six years ago, you will understand why I was so excited to hear it again. Also if you go back to that old post, you'll see Matt as a young trombonist. Too bad he wouldn't allow close up pics at this concert so you could gauge his growth. Re: Xerses, I talked briefly to Mr. K about it, expressing my delight that it was played, and he said Matt was one of several seniors who reques...

The title of a familiar song to Jim and me, which I did not use on Jim's birthday cake. I'm kinda done doing all out, fancy schmancy, detailed cakes anyway since I've done them for so long. I think the first one was a Batman cake for Paul when he was 3 or 4. And now he's in his 20s. But now that I think of it, I do have one more detailed cake to do: Matt's grad cake. Oh and Hayley's wedding cake(s). I went easy on myself for Jim's cake. Boxed mix, which I like better than homemade anyway, and Katie had given us some leftover buttercream frosting, enough to frost a cake and do minimal decorations on it. So when I sat down to decorate Jim's cake, I had to come up with an idea that was 1)easy, 2)special for Jim, 3)doable in one color because I wasn't going to mess around with multiple colors, and 4)no fondant. I toyed with the idea of writing the lyrics to The Beatles' You Say It's Your Birthday, but I ditched that in favor of writing random...