Auction is over!

I took Stella to swimming Saturday morning, and while she was in the water, I opened my cell phone and saw that it said "Saturday, April 19, 2008" and I smiled because I have been looking forward to the day after the auction! It was a beautiful sight.

It's always hard to know before the auction how it's going to turn out. Even though we sell tickets in advance, people are either no-shows or they show up at the door without a ticket. I think we had over 100 people there, and so many auction items that everyone could leave with something.

I gave a "Welcome and Acknowledgments" speech, so I dressed up. Here are John and I before the big event:



I felt so happy to have Joe and Kathy come to town and attend with us. Several folks on the Board wanted to meet them, because they have donated 2 weeks at their Gulf-view Florida condo for 3 years now. This year the condo went for $650-700 per week, so it's easily our most lucrative auction item. And people come back to the auction just for the purpose of bidding on the condo.

Since a member of our Board is a higher-up at Kellogg's, she gets so many cute items donated. My generous mother-in-law made sure Albert John and Stella got some cool stuff from the auction. A.J. got a Pooh chair and a Kellogg's NASCAR basket. Stella got some Kellogg's bobbleheads and a Fruit Loops T-shirt.

I knew A.J. would love this Pooh chair:



I always love when Joe & Kathy come to see us, and they hung around and played with the kids and helped us with the chores we never seem to get to. Now that it's Spring (finally!), Stella is having so much fun in her swing again and being in the backyard where she is most happy:





We even enjoyed a homemade pizza (which really isn't that homemade; I buy the dough frozen and use canned sauce). But it's good!



And I'm still so happy that the auction is over. I don't know how much we made. In the past, we've made $7,000 - $9,000, and it looked like we did pretty well this year too, but I won't know until the treasurer tallies it all up. This might be our last year for a silent auction, because it's not really a recession-friendly fundraiser. I hope the Board will be open to something a little different next year, but if this year was so successful, they might not!

AJ put some new shoes on!

Uncle Hribar will get this Paolo Nutini reference!

We finally got AJ into some real shoes so he can run around outside. He acts a little unsure of himself when they first go on his feet ... he hangs onto something for dear life. But then he remembers how to walk and is unstoppable once again!





Thank goodness for a great little store in Kalamazoo called "Little Chick." It's an actual children's shoe store where people measure their feet. They carry a lot of sizes and brands, too. AJ's new Stride Rite shoes are an extra wide! (He inherited my feet.)

A.J. passed on some really bad cooties to Stella. The doctor thought last week that he had the herpangina virus ... Hand/Foot/Mouth disease. He had a fever of 103°, but Stella is suffering today with a temperature of 104.6°. I really needed to get her back to school this week after a long week of Spring Break last week. I'm needing to work this week because our silent auction is this Friday. But this is just my luck.

Our winter, and now spring, has been so full of various sicknesses. I keep praying that any day now it will stop and the kiddos (and John and I) will have a long period of good health.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Stella's version of this will clear up quickly, like A.J.'s did, and she'll be able to return to school. She just seems so much sicker.

And just to make everyone feel better, here is the song "New Shoes."

Paolo Nutini - "New Shoes"

NCAA Champs again at last!!!!

Rock Chalk, Jayhawk, KU! So proud to be an alum!







National Champs for the first time since Danny Manning was a one-man show in 1988. Several final fours later, we finally get the trophy! This never happened while I was in school, but better late than never!

In the newspaper

My guest column was in the Battle Creek Enquirer today: Support Efforts to Prevent Child Abuse.

Stella's upcoming summer

It's been so long since my last blog. April is going to be a crazy month. We've got this big Silent Auction coming up for my job. Every year we raise a good portion of our money at it. But it requires a lot of volunteering from the Board of Directors, and I'm so worried they haven't been taking it seriously. I'm having nightmares that I'll show up to the event on April 18th, and no one will be there (because no one sold tickets) and no prizes (because no one collected donations). Ahhh.

And this week is Spring Break, so I'm pretty much homebound and unable to do much myself.

One of the moms in our ASD support group takes her son to a local horse farm for therapeutic riding lessons, so we've decided to give this a try with Stella. Last weekend, we went for a visit and got to meet the horses Gidget and Scarlett.



Stella wasn't too agreeable. She'd just had swimming lessons that morning, and her teacher took away a lot of her floatation so she had to work harder. She was pretty tired and didn't make a great impression on Kim, her instructor.



AJ hung out in the backpack just as content as he could be.



Stella will start her riding lessons late this month. It's really supposed to improve muscle tone and coordination. And I know she likes animals, so I think she will enjoy this once she gets used to it.

Despite my earlier blog entry about winter being gone, it came back full force Easter weekend, dumping a foot of snow on us. But the snow has finally melted again and the kids have returned to the backyard. Here they are having a McDonald's picnic on the back deck:



And AJ still continues his ornery antics. He was digging through my purse the other day and I pretended not to notice. I figured he couldn't do any harm. Well a few minutes later, I noticed he had found one of the DumDums that I keep for Stella, unwrapped it, and managed to get his face all blue. I don't intentionally give him candy this young, but he has a way of finding it!