Thing 1 turns 8... in a couple days

We have been planning for a couple weeks to have Thing 1's birthday party on the 12th of September. I mentioned it to my mother on Saturday, and she told me she was pretty sure that my brother and his family - whose daughters are some of my girls best friends, and whose presence is VITAL to any party at our house - will be out of town. OH NOOOO!!!
Looking at the calendar, since Hubby is traveling so much the next month (and we're going with him on one of those!) there are no good times in September, it would be halfway into October before we'd be able to get everyone together. So I frantically called everyone and we bumped the party to the next day - Sunday. Amazingly everyone was able to come.
Luckily Thing 1 wanted Pizza, which is the easiest birthday party to have, so the only hard part was making her the cake. Usually we order a cake from a lady we know, but 24 hour notice isn't enough time to do that. So Hubby decided to do it. He was going to make a Pikachu pokemon, it's kind of a little round ball with ears and a tail, it ought to be pretty easy to represent in cake and frosting. I think he was going to try and surprise her. But luckily, or unluckily, she saw what he was up to and it turns out she doesn't really LIKE Pikachus. She likes elaborate, involved looking pokemon. After quite a bit of back and forth, they came on one that she liked that he had a prayer of doing. I think he did a pretty good job. Though you kind of need the picture to see what it was supposed to be. Everyone thought it was a really angry elephant with it's trunk up in the air, until they see the picture.



So we celebrated Thing 1's family party last night, and her friend party will be this week.



Another weird thing - we solved a mystery. Thing 1 had homework on one of the first days of school. I know she had it, I remember pulling it out of her folder. But then it dissapeared. I couldn't find it anywhere. My house isn't completely tidy, but there aren't too many places it could have been. I looked in all of those places, but we couldn't find it. I had to send her to school with no homework, with a note from me saying it was my fault, we looked high and low but somehow lost it. Which is a real thorn in my side as I pride myself with them doing their homework quite regularly. Her teacher made her do it at recess.

Well, I found it.
Scooba ate it. We have one of those floor mopping robots, my husband knows that while I love having a clean house, I don't like cleaning it and since I'm a stay at home mom I can't justify hiring anyone, so he has given me my cleaning buddies, I have a Roomba upstairs, and a Scooba downstairs. Apparently I had the swamp cooler on (translate - GALE FORCE WINDS) while Scooba was running. Scooba requires some monitoring, as it wedges itself under my cabinets in a couple of places, but it calls me with a frantic beeping when it's stuck, so as long as I'm in ear shot, it merrily works away. And to clean it, you open it up and push buttons to release brushes, pull out filters, and clean them off. I don't remember the last time I turned it over.

Well, getting ready for this birthday party I turned on Scooba to clean the kitchen floor. It was almost immediately obvious it wasn't running right. Completely weird, it was leaving these strange little rolls of lint everywhere, and kept stopping. I pulled out several filters, tried several different things to clean it, but nothing worked. I was on hold with their customer service department when I finally just turned it over to find a wet wadded up ball of homework stuck in the outer brush. I was able to unwrap the paper wad enough to see yup, it's Thing 1's homework.



I'm not even going to try to explain that to the teacher.