Super Scooper

Fun with Friends Fridays have been a little more challenging to plan that I had anticipated.  So many kids are at camps!  Plus, I've never really done the playdate thing.  Sure, when I was home full-time with the kids we hosted and went to plenty of playdates through the MOMS Club or Mothers and More, but that was more other moms getting together and the kids kinda being shoved together by chance.  Now that the kids are in school during the day and I'm teaching part-time, I just never caught on to making playdates after school or on the weekends.  Therefore, now that I WANT to schedule them, I'm a little unsure how to make it work.

That being said, Saturday was a lot of fun.  We headed to the all-you-can-eat Super Scooper Ice Cream Festival at Penns Landing with all the kids plus my niece and nephew (who had slept over Friday night).  Five bucks per person (which goes for pediatric leukemia research) gets you a spoon and as many cups of ice cream or water ice as you can eat.

Do you see the HUGE stack of cups? 

I'd say we got our money's worth!

Little Bit of Catch Up

Things got a little crazy here at the end of last week. For those of you reading this who are not local, we had a huge storm blow through which kinda changed last week's plans.

We were all at my sister's pool. Well, it's not really HER pool but her community's pool. That's right, her community has a pool that everyone in that area can buy a membership to. So instead of paying the up to $1000 or so to join a pool in my area, she pays about $100 (yes, that's one less zero) for her family to enjoy the two large pools within walking distance from her house. We try to join up there every Thursday for "Cousins Club," so on Thursday, the kids were all splashing in the water as the grown ups watched the sky get progressively darker. Suddenly the lifeguards began running and shouting, "Get out of the pool!" I flashbacked to the movie Jaws for a moment to the scene where they realized the shark was close and everyone started screaming and pulling their children out of the ocean. Apparently lightening had just struck the field a short distance from the pools. I have never seen lifeguards move that fast.

We ended up driving home as the sky opened to release buckets and buckets of rain and hail and wind, causing trees to fall, causing roads to close and power lines to fall (and cause fires in the roads), causing detours to happen, causing our ride home to take three times longer than it normally does. Power was out all over by the time we got home. When the rain finally stopped, the power was still out - and it was HOT! We found a mall that had a working back-up generator and went there for some AC and dinner, but came back to a stifling house. Eventually everyone got to sleep, but it was really tough. Around 3:15 that morning the sweet sound of the fan and the feel of a cool breeze woke me as our power finally came back on. Lots of other people in the area were not so lucky; my parents' power was off until late Sunday night! As you drive down the streets you can see trees STILL down, waiting to be cut up and carted away. We got really lucky.