A Crazy, Busy, Project-Filled Week

Last week ushered in October ~ all things fall and Halloween. I'm so excited. Fall is my favorite time of year!

If you look above, you will see Miss B in the far right corner. This is the 2014 Dianjiang calendar (filled with beautiful faces from the Dianjiang orphanage). All proceeds go to "Gracie's Room." There will be a calendar again for next year. I submitted photo for the 2015 calendar, so I hope Bri will be in it again. :)

 Monday, I met my high school BFF for lunch. We can talk for hours and never get tired of catching up...

Tuesday, Briana went to school all smiles...

...because she knew I was going to pick her and her school BFF up from school that afternoon to work on a castle project for their school book fair.

The girls worked so hard...

And I did too trying to help them out. A couple of weeks ago, I helped the girl shape the castle. Then T and her mom took it home and painted the outside and wallpapered the inside. T's mom brought it back to me. I then helped the girls paint, glue and tape all the details of the castle.

The girls had a lot of ideas. Too many ideas. Too many ideas to implement for the amount of time we had to get the project finished. I needed to reel them in a bit. They sometimes focused on small details that were less important than getting the main part of the castle completed. We would get something accomplished and then they would come up with another idea.

It was exhausting.

Two very excited and hyper girls with lots of ideas and strong opinions equals one tired mama. Heh.

The castle turned out terrific though...

The winner in each grade gets a gift certificate to the book fair. I would love to see the girls win. I helped Bri bring the project into the library on Wednesday morning. I added the girls' castle to the castles already turned in. Oh my gosh. The castles were amazing.

I asked the media specialist how in the world she was going to pick winners. She said she was going to bring in outside judges to decide and that she was glad that she didn't have to choose herself! I seriously don't know how the judges are going to pick winners. The creativity of these kids is crazy.

Wednesday was early release at school. That gave Bri and I some extra time to work on the map project that her teacher assigned. It was due Friday. Sigh.

With a little teamwork on her and my part, we came up with this...

 And keeping things real ~ Briana came home on Tuesday with her very first failed (science) test. She got a 1 (tests are graded 1 through 4) Ugh. My heart sank. I am not used to her not doing well. She always gets really good grades. But, it was a chapter on heat and the test just really confused her. The good news ~ her teacher is letting her take it again. I'm thinking a lot of the kids may have messed up. Her teacher said it was a really hard chapter and hard test with lots of similar definitions. So Bri and I are going to study, study, study over the next few days and hope she does much better. Fingers and toes crossed.

Thursday was my day to get ready for the community garage sale that was happening on Friday and Saturday. And I also needed to get ready for Briana's friend to come over for a Saturday night sleepover.

Thursday afternoon, I picked Briana up from running club. Her coach came over to my car and told me how impressed she was with Briana. She said that B's a very smart runner. Bri knows how to pace herself and listens to everything the coach recommends. I have a runner on my hands - who would have thunk it? ;)

I worked all day Thursday and somehow made dinner that night. Including these delicious southern style collard greens...

My friend Ansu grew them and gave me a huge bunch last Saturday to take home. Goodness they were good!!!

Friday was the garage sale. It was raining cats and dogs that morning. The skies opened up right after Bri got into school (thank goodness). But, I was bummed that the day was so nasty.

I thought for sure that I wouldn't sell anything on Friday. But, people actually started showing up! In the rain! That is major dedication.

We did great - we sold all of our big ticket items. We didn't have a ton of people come through, but the people that did come through needed what we had to offer. It was great. We did so well Friday that it didn't make sense to sit outside with the little we had left on Saturday. We just donated what we didn't sell. I can now knock the garage sale off my bucket list!

And Doug was out of town Tuesday through Thursday.

I somehow got through most of the week without him. (Wipe sweat off brow).

Hopefully this week will be a bit quieter. At least I hope so!