Into Every Life, A Little Larceny Must Fall...

My purse was stolen last night.



My purse was stolen last night while I was at Family Home Evening.



My purse was stolen last night while I was at Family Home Evening in the Seminary building.



Really.



I left it alone for twenty minutes and that was all it took to get took. Cash, gone. Checkbook, gone. Debit card, gone. Credit card, gone. Apartment keys, gone. Car keys, gone. Mailbox key, gone. Two brand-spankin' new books of stamps, gone. And so on and so forth.

I went through all of the stages of grief in a relatively short period of time: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And then I channeled the cartoon spirit of Disney's Prince John and mumbled, "I've been robbed" over and over again while sucking my thumb. It was actually very therapeutic. And for the past 20 hours or so, I have been annoyed.

Very annoyed.

But all things considered, it could have been worse. It turns out that the best thing about having my purse stolen was that it was stolen at FHE, so I had complete and total access to my wonderful branch presidency who helped with everything from making the police report, to breaking into my house to get my extra keys, to loaning me a cell phone to take care of business last night, to giving me a new cell phone to use forever, to guarding my car, to changing my locks, to giving me blessings, to giving me hugs. I am going to be happily making them thank-you-treats till the end of time.

And I was also surrounded by friends who gave me comfort (thanks, Zealanda), and doughnuts (thanks, Krystal!) and use of a neurotic bat-eared rat dog who, as it turns out, makes one heck of a guard dog (Thanks Elizabeth and Ratha!)

And now, 24 hours later, I have new locks, new keys, new accounts, and a new license.

Oh....

And a new obsession with fanny packs.

Really.

I think that with my luck (remember last week when I lost part of my finger in a freak cupcake making accident?) strapping all of my valuables to my person at all times seems like the wisest thing to.

I could even get one of those cool leather fanny packs like Fiona on Burn Notice wears. Fiona doesn't look like a dork wearing her fanny pack... and in three seasons, nobody has ever tired to steal her purse.

Of course, that might have something to do with the big guns she carries around while wearing her fanny pack...
And I have to admit that I am no where near annoyed enough to acquire a gun to go with my fanny pack. I mean, if I can lose a giant piece of flesh making cupcakes, think of the damage I could do to myself with a shotgun.

Yikes.

Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to go count my blessings ... in alphabetical order from "Barlows" to "Zealanda".

And then I am going to shop for a fanny pack on-line.

Visual Aids

This week, I gave my 7th grade English kidlets an assignment to outline and write a speech.

They were cool with that... until I told them that they would also be delivering those speeches in front of their peers later in the week.



They retaliated by filling my classroom with their very much required, and thus very much resented visual aids. It was a nonviolent form of protest, but it still managed to make their displeasure with the situation come through loud and clear. Gandhi and Rosa Parks would be so proud.

The speeches were an extension of a short story that we read in class last week called, "Zebra," by Chaim Potok. In the story, the main character takes a summer school class that changes his life for the better. The kidlet's assignment was to think up a summer school class that they would want to take, and then write a speech that would convince the school board to allow the class while also convincing other junior high kids to register for it. Part of the assignment was to bring some sort of visual aid to illustrate their topic.
The first question the kidlets had when I mentioned the "visual aid" part of the assignment was if pets would be appropriate visual aids. Having given this and various other speaking assignments over the past few years, I was prepared for that particular question. After having students bring horses, ducks, birds, turtles, and ferrets to class during my first year of teaching, I had quickly created a rule to deal with living, breathing visual aid situations. If it can sit in a box in the corner and not make any noise, the creature can stay in my room all day; but if it is big, loud, distracting and there is any chance, however small, that it might poop on my floor, a parent has to bring the creature to school right before the speech and then take it home right after.
Over the last two days, I listened to presentations plugging several pet-care summer school classes, along with two "How to be a good babysitter" summer school class proposals. And in keeping with the big, loud, distracting, and potential pooping rule, small children were not allowed to hang out in the corner of my classroom with the other crawling critters, despite their older siblings many assurances that they would be wearing diapers the whole time.

The visual aids didn't have to be alive. They also didn't have to be expensive or fancy. Kids who gave speeches on soccer-themed summer school classes brought shoes and/or balls. Shoes were also the visual aid of choice for one creative kidlet who proposed offering a class on how to run through the halls of the school without getting hurt.

Over the course of the speech delivery days, my classroom played host to bikes, skateboards, musical instruments, games, and toys of every variety. I would try to guess which class each kidlet was going to be pushing by looking at the visual aids they hauled in with them. Sometimes I was right, and sometimes I was very, very wrong. When one little guy lugged in a giant remote control car, I never dreamed I would be listening to a speech supporting a "how to hot wire a car" class. Even more surprising, in his two minute speech that covered the reasons for the class and the proposed curriculum, not once did he ever mention the stealing of cars. Not once in two minutes.
Because this is a red state, we had plenty of speeches on hunting classes, shooting classes, care of weapons classes, and the manufacture of small explosives classes. Of course, the kidlets couldn't bring those kinds of visual aids on the bus with them, so parents were once again recruited to bring all guns and swords into the school office before the speeches. Unfortunately, I forgot to let the office staff know that this was a speech week and therefore parents would be walking in with all manner of rifles, shotguns, and swords. Remind me to send some chocolates to the secretaries on Monday.

One kid was having a hard time coming up with a topic for his speech during our in-class work time. I told him that his speech would be easier for him to write if he chose a topic that he already knew something about. He said he didn't know about anything, so I asked him what he does after he gets home from school. "Eat sugar," was his reply. "So you could design a class about candy making or candy tasting or candy appreciation," I suggested. "I didn't mean I ate candy," the kidlet said,"I mean I eat sugar. Just plain sugar." After making a mental note to discuss that with his parents at conferences, I asked him more questions about his sugar consumption. He ended up giving designing a class that combined his love of sugar with dental hygiene. He got a 97%.

Some kids went with some "old school" visual aids. There were posters for sports-themed classes, drawings for art classes, and collages for classes about different celebrities.

One of my favorite hand-made visual aids was this duo of pictures drawn by one kidlet to illustrate the importance of his "snake handling" summer school class.

Some students chose to create their visual aids on the spot, utilizing my chalk board. They sketched and explained football plays, soccer defenses, and nuclear fuel cell reactor technology. One girl used the chalk to demonstrate why students needed to take her proposed cooking class. The stick figure on the right took her class, learned how to use the oven properly, and made a yummy treat. The stick figure on the left didn't take the class and accidentally lit their head on fire while trying to boil water.

We had two "extreme pogoing" summer school class presentations.

We also had a speech about a "sleeping" summer school class, wherein the student had arranged for one of his friends to act as a visual aid and demonstrate proper sleeping techniques. Genius.

Another of my favorite visual aids was a simple roll of toilet paper a student brought to illustrate his speech on offering a "toilet papering" summer school class. He did a great job making his case for offering such a class. He pointed out that the students would learn spacial reasoning skills, practice math skills in real world settings, and develop artistic abilities.

The speeches that were the most popular with the kids were those that involved edible visual aids. I was pretty found of the too beccause it meant that I didn't have to pack any grapes to school for two days, or break into my emergency stash of granola bars. As long as I reminded the kidlets to wash their hands between pet speeches and food speeches, I had plenty of cookies and brownies to sustain me.

I was in visual aid heaven...until one little girl broke out her visual aid: CUPCAKES.

I have been avoiding cupcakes all week, ever since making about twelve batches of cupcakes and eighteen batches of frosting for Elizabeth and Ratha's wedding last weekend.

Still sporting an open, oozing wound from my last interaction with cupcakes, I was somewhat reluctant to partake. My nearly-knuckle-less finger started to ache just looking at it.

I thought about ignoring it, but I couldn't have just left if sitting there untouched, right? I mean, what would it have done to that poor kid's self esteem to have her visual aid rejected by her teacher in front of her whole English class? That is the kind of trauma that a 'tween just doesn't come back from. But my love of visual aids (and chocolate) eventually overcame my newly developed fear of baked goods, and I scarfed the cupcake before settling in to listen to the next speech.

The things I do for the children.

I guess teaching really is a labor of love.

Wedding Cake Weekend

About a month and a half ago, my friend Elizabeth informed me that she would be getting hitched on September 19th. Then, while I was still in a state of shock from that little announcement, she asked if my mother and I would be in charge of the wedding cake. I said "yes" without either consulting my mother or firing up enough brain cells to realize that, while we both love to cook, neither of us had ever attempted anything as complicated or potentially life altering as a wedding cake.

Lucky for me and my hair-trigger "yes" reflex, my mother was overjoyed at the idea of providing the cake for Elizabeth's big day. You see, while most women dream of living a lifestyle where they can have the money and occasion to hire a caterer, my mother's life long dream is actually to be a caterer.

We quickly enlisted the help of my sister-in-law Becky, who has a culinary arts degree and a great deal of experience making wedding cakes. Armed with my mother's natural talents and overwhelming excitement, Becky's technical experience and artistic abilities, and my uncanny knack for volunteering them for huge responsibilities, we set out upon an adventure fit for an epic narrative poem... or at very least a cleverly written limerick.

We spent part of Labor Day weekend baking a variety of cupcakes for Elizabeth to taste test. The soon-to-be-bride sampled the different cakes and frostings and then very carefully and deliberately made her decisions.





Decisions that we honored right up until the day before the wedding when we decided it would be fun to use completely different recipes.





Thankfully, Elizabeth didn't mind the last minute switch. Of course, her zen attitude about the whole thing could have been due to the fact that we didn't tell her that we were changing recipes, but I would rather chalk it up to her kind and charitable nature.


Becky and my mom started working on the top tiers earlier in the week, then I drove over on Friday morning to help with the 200 or so cupcakes that would make up the bottom tiers. After a few hours of watching me spread flour, powdered sugar, and various other cake-related paraphernalia all over her kitchen, my mom thought it would be a good idea if we took a little break.

Lucky for us, our neighborhood high school was having their home coming parade. So we hijacked Becky, dressed her little girls up in I.F. Tiger related gear, and headed out to cheer for the band kids and the floats.

Kenna wore a what we told her was a tiger hat (it was really the hood for my brother's old yellow care bear costume, but she was kind enough to humor us) and both girls wore tiger noses that came as Happy Meal toys way back in 1988.

The hat and noses ended up scoring the girls a giant pile full of parade candy.

Kylie had a little bit of trouble eating the candy while wearing the nose, but was not willing to take off that magical thing that caused perfect strangers to throw candy at her from moving vehicles.

So she compromised.

I can not wait to see how she uses her unique problem solving abilities later in life. Mark my words, this little Monchichi is going to go far!

My biggest responsibility for this whole wedding project was ordering the brown cup cake papers... which I forgot to do until exactly a week before the big day.

I spent that week assuring everyone else involved that the papers would get here before the wedding, and they did.

The mail man dropped them off exactly two hours before the wedding started, and about 14 hours after we had baked the last cup cakes. Thank goodness my dad had time to help us hunt for a plan B after putting the finishing touches on his wedding ceremony routine.

Here is how the actual cake distribution of labor came out: Elizabeth's dad and brother-in-law built the rockin' cake stand, Elizabeth, her sisters, and her mother decoated it, Becky and my mom baked, assembled, and decorated the two-tier cake, my mom baked the vanilla cupcakes, I made the chocolate cupcakes and then made about a dozen batches of frosting for my mom to swirl on all 200 cupcakes.

I would have helped with the decorating, but my swirling abilities leave much to be desired. Can you spot the cup cake I swirled in the photo below?

We had all of the cup cakes finished and the cake mostly assembled about an hour before we were scheduled to drive across town to deliver the cake and the bishop to the wedding location.

Once we arrived, it was time for the final touch ups.

There were flowers to add and ribbons to smooth before the cake was moved to its place of honor in the beautifully decorated backyard. Becky and my sweet mother did most of that.

I had somehow managed to slice off the top of my knuckle a few minutes before we left my parents house, so my main job for the afternoon was not to bleed on anything important. I think I did a pretty darn good job accomplishing that goal...but it helped that red was one of the accent colors.

Soon the cake was hoisted into place, cup cakes and flowers were carefully arranged, and the string quartet began playing the music that signaled the start of the ceremony.

The wedding was beautiful and neither the bride nor her mother shed tears of broken-hearted disappointment when they saw the cake, so I think we can call this little adventure in cake baking a success.

The best part, besides the whole "Elizabeth marrying the man of her dreams" thing, was seeing our hard work enjoyed by our target audience.After all, when a flower girl's only pay comes in the form of cup cakes, they had better be pretty darn good. And when it comes to frosting, I know for a fact that nieces have the most discriminating of tastes.

So once again, congratulations to Elizabeth and "The Boy" (a.k.a. Ratha). Thanks letting us be a part of your most special day. And to anyone else out there who may want to enlist my family in baking a building a wedding cake: we will be more than happy to supply you with a list of very reputable professional bakers.

Elizabeth Takes A Walk

Elizabeth went for a walk today, but it was a bit different this time. There were other girls walking with her, but they had brushed their hair and didn't have morning breath.
She didn't have to carry around plastic bags to clean up after Chole the neurotic, bat-eared, rat-dog.

And this time she had a tall, distinguished gentleman as her walking partner.

Oh, and instead of having a violin student waiting at the end of her walk, there was a handsome boy and a Bishop named Homely.

This walk involved a whole heck of a lot more hand-holding than any of the other walks I have known her to take in the last few years.
There was also a lot more hugging.

Oh, and there was a little kissing involved too.

This particular walk also ended with the consumption of a some beautiful and delicious baked goods made by my mother and sister-in-law under my supervision (more on our epic cake adventure tomorrow!). I think that I would be much more willing to walk at 5 a.m. if I knew I had cake waiting at the end of the trail...not to mention a handsome boy.
Congratulations to Elizabeth and "The Boy" as they set out, hand in hand, on a long and happy walk together.

But Elizabeth, don't think you are off the hook for the early morning thing. We will see you bright and early Monday morning. And your husband can come too. We will even let you hold hands, as long as you keep the kissing to a minimum.