Well, it's been an interesting week. It started last Saturday, when DD went to her All-Region Choir Festival. She tried out and made it. So they met at a school in town, practiced from 8:30 AM until 4 PM, then put on a concert at 5 PM. The kids had to practice on their own and with their own choir directors, then come together to fine-tune it. We were so proud of her!

DS has been busy with Scouts. He is "crossing over" to Boy Scouts in February, and he's finishing up his requirements to receive the Arrow of Light badge. This is the only badge they can wear as a Boy Scout that they earned as a Cub Scout. DS is shaping up to be quite a leader, and younger Cub Scouts are looking to him to get questions answered. Amazingly (to me, anyway), he is quite patient with the younger scouts. He is up this morning as I type making us all breakfast by himself: bacon, scrambled eggs, and hand-shredded hash browns! I can tell he's nervous how it will all come out, because he usually has me or his dad in the kitchen with him, but he's not afraid of getting in there and doing it. We are so proud of him. And I'll be prouder when I get a plate of food... I'm starving!

The choirs at DS's school do a benefit concert each year for the local Animal Shelter. They have a bake sale each Friday leading up to the concert, sell T-shirts, and charge a "donation" admission. The kids really seem to get into doing something for homeless pets, and are proud they can help. So I signed up to bake yesterday, and help sell baked goods after school. So I show up with my PB&J Bars, all divied up into zipper bags, and find I am up against bake sale veterans. These moms must have slaved all day getting ready. One gal made those PNB cookies w/ a Hershey Kiss pressed into them... but then she wrapped them in aluminum foil and twisted the top to resemble a Hershey Kiss. She even had a tag of paper hanging out the top with "Hershey's" written on it in light blue ink. Then there were the Rice Krispy treats topped with multi-color sprinkles and perfectly cut and wrapped in parchment or glassine paper and tied with kitchen twine. These things look like they came off the pages of a Martha Stewart magazine. I guess it's natural to compare one's contributions with other ones. Thankfully, there were the zipper bags of 2 tiny, misshapen chocolate chip cookies that were burnt on the bottom. I set my PB&J Bars next to them, so they looked great by comparison. As it turns out, anything with chocolate sold first: brownies, chocolate cookies, chocolate cupcakes. Then cupcakes and anything with sprinkles. Finally, latecomers got to choose from chocolate chip cookies and lemon bars. (Note to self: don't make lemon bars for a bake sale aimed at children; no one buys them.) On the bright side, the adult helpers get to take the leftover lemon bars home.

One thing you need to know about my son is that he's coin-operated. That boy likes money. So put himself in charge of holding the bills, making sure all the presidents were looking the same way, and gave the adults a running total of how much we'd sold at any given point in time. Now, this bake sale lasted all of 20 minutes, so I consider it quite a feat that he could count it all more than once in that amount of time, all while sorting fives, tens and even a twenty. (What 5th or 6th grader kid brings a twenty-dollar bill to school for a bake sale?!) He had fun, and wants to help at the next bake sale. I'll be bringing chocolate cupcakes with chocolate icing and sprinkles, from a boxed mix, and icing from a can. Those kids don't care how much semi-sweet chocolate I melt into a pound of butter! Cake mixes are pretty cheap, and I'll take the easy way out to donate a respectable, fast-selling item without knocking myself out to top Martha Stewart.