July 2022 in review

July cool, my birthday.

Ha ha ha ha, I totally missed, that’s how I started this when I started writing this post on July 8…

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Week 1

This is all in a mess, no sort of time order.

Jeff and I started July going to a wedding for his co-worker (bottom left picture), and we got a chance to go dancing for a little bit, but it was the world’s fastest swing song, and we were insanely tired after it, and right after the DJ played another of my favorite songs, but it was even faster, and we were too tired to dance to it. Sadness.

We came back and went to a friend’s house for Independence Day, and the boys happily played Smash Up, and we got The Artist to play Throw Throw Burrito, outdoor edition (with giant inflatable burritos).

We spent this week making insanely large amounts of foods for our Cooking Around the World. We cooked bread from Antigua and Barbuda, made a lemon chicken from Guinea, and then had a beef stew from Kyrgzstan. I also attempted to make a coconut turnover from Barbados, but I was not having luck with that and I stupidly tried to make two bread recipes when I was quite short on time, and just gave up on that.

Not pictured, but hilarious story. I’m trying to figure out how to better include the fun moments that don’t have pictures because there’s no way to get a picture to encapsulate the picture.

They started a short term weekly Bible study, and after the first week they had too many bagels left over from the “Bagels and Bibles,” so my kids grabbed a bag to take home. They got home and started turning the bagels into lunch. I wandered over to grab my own bagel and spent several minutes looking for the cream cheese, at which point I turned to The Artist and said, “Where is the cream cheese The Artist?” But I sounded so much like my Mom when she said the now infamous in our household, “Why are you giving me trash Ticia?” from her birthday (explained in January 2022 memories, if not I need to add that story in). Then Batman chimes in with this creepy version of “Where is the cream cheese The Arist,” said in terrible voice.

The next day as I’m driving home from getting The Artist from babysitting. We started joking all about how I’m never going to live down that moment. I said, “It’s now part of the Messing Family canon, the whole mythos.”

“You see,” I said, “I have it all planned out. The opening sequence is rather like how Avatar starts with the whole Earth, Air, so on and so forth. Only it’ll be each person of our family, and they’ll do something iconic for who they are.”

“Oh!” The Artist joined in, “Batman and Superman can have a sword and Nerf gun. One will shoot the other, and he’ll move the dart out of the way with his sword. You can turn around suddenly with a cup of tea and a stack of books.”

“We’ll have you painting something, it’ll look really cool for the animation.”

“But you turning around with a cup of tea isn’t very cinematic.”

“I can pour it out on the boys. Daddy can be writing on a computer.”

“That’s not very interesting.”

“No, he’s writing a story and as he writes the story comes to life,” I said.

“But who will narrate all of this?” The Artist mused, and with a stroke of genius she said, “Mimi! Mimi will narrate it!”

And that is how we decided we needed to write an anime for our family.

July week 2

I didn’t think this week was busy until I looked at the pictures.

The week started off with the boys hosting a Nerf War, they have so many various Nerf weapons and melee weapons. It greatly amuses me to see them all laid out.

I’m trying to make sure the kids do some amount of stuff each day this summer that is not on the computer (and myself as well). The boys have found a war game called Kings of War, they really enjoy the different factions available in the game, and have created cardboard bases to move whole platoons. It amuses me to watch them playing the game, especially because I have no clue how they even discovered the game. They just showed up at my desk saying, “We want to buy this game and handing me money.”

We’ve found one game The Artist likes to play, Smash Up, in particular, she likes the expansion with Greeks (It’s Your Fault, the expansion names get ever more hilarious the more you get). She really loves the artwork on the cards, that’s what draws her in (pun not intended), but she also likes that it’s not super competitive somehow. We played with an unusual twist this time and had other people pick your second faction, so she got Rock Stars, with the featured Rick Roll card that had us all laughing.

Leezard tried to use her mind control to convince me to give her popcorn as we watched Lost City, Jeff bought it for me on the Prime Day sale. I love that movie, it’s so hilarious.

And almost done with this week, we studied California again, because somehow it wasn’t completed in our notebooks. This was especially shocking because as I went to update the California booklist, I discovered we had studied it back when the kids were in preschool and AGAIN in 5th grade. Sigh…

And the final picture, The Artist and I went to go see Seussical. We knew several people in the production, though none well, but the big reason we went to go see it is that I’ve wanted to see it for years, and this gave me a chance to actually see the musical I’ve been listening to for years. Well worth it in my opinion.

July Week 3

A good portion of this week I spent feeling miserable from food poisoning. That was fun.

Oh wait, no it was absolutely miserable.

We started off the week trying out an art tutorial to all paint the same painting. As you can see, that did not happen, but it was lots of fun, there was much laughter.

Oh wait, there’s a story with this one.

The girl on the front in the right, is new to our group, having just recently moved here, and while her family is staying at a home by my house, so we joked that we were going to kidnap her, and when she didn’t show up we texted her Dad to find out if she was home, and then kidnapped her with parental permission, and so she happily came over and painted with us. Lots of fun.

The Artist is volunteering at a therapy farm near our house, and the sign at the gate always makes me laugh, so I got a few pictures of it.

Tuesday night, my car battery died, and I was very glad we had the mini battery to jump my car. The next morning, we dropped my car off to check it out and Jeff and I went to one of his favorite breakfast places, and I ordered my usual crepes, and then proceeded to get the worst case of food poisoning ever.

But then, to make it even stupider, I didn’t realize it was food poisoning, so the next day I ate my leftovers and gave myself a second case of food poisoning.

Yep, that was fun.

I did however as a result of feeling absolutely terrible, read a whole bunch, one of which is a fun Jane Austen/fairy tale mash up series. That’s the first book in the series, Rose Petals and Snowflakes, wait no, I took the picture of the second book Crown and Cinder. I’m planning on getting the third book, which may or may not be released yet.

When I wasn’t sick, I was working on the Noah’s ark unit to get all the pictures and things. I created a fun aluminum foil ark to see if I could sink it with animals, and made the boat too well. I couldn’t sink it with the plastic animals. Oh well.

July week 4

Well most of it. I’m seeing Newsies tonight, and won’t be home until midnight, so that will be in August’s memories…

After serving in the parking team during first service we sit outside and talk, and I got this great shot of Batman and the Artist messing with each other, which is a common site.

We celebrated my birthday, I got a carpet cleaner, which I know is incredibly boring, but it’s also desperately needed in a house with 3 teens and a dog, and a me, I’m a mess. But we played an Agatha Christie card game, and tried a game Jeff and I had enjoyed back when we were first married, but it’s not exactly a great game, so I’m glad we’re giving it away. We finished the day by watching a movie, Marry Me, which I’d seen a trailer for and it was exactly what I expected, very cheesy but fun.

We studied Ghana and Gambia, and so tried out Ghanan steak and onions, which was rather generic. Then we had Gambian tilapia and banku. The Artist took one look at my recipe and said, “Mom the recipe literally has emojis on it, AND it’s from WattPad, that is fine for fan-fic, but not a recipe.” I have to admit I laughed so much about that.

Friday we finished up my birthday celebration by making my entire family go see League of Superpets, if you’re wondering it was exactly what the trailers said it would be, so I was incredibly happy to watch it.

Afterward Sean’s kids came over and made D&D characters for the one-shot we’re going to do while up in Galveston. I’m super-excited for this. It’ll be fun to see how they do with their very first campaign.

And that’s a wrap for 11th grade! I can’t believe the kids are about to be seniors! It’s really weird to think about.