I’m so excited to be attending Proverbs 31 Ministry’s She Speaks Conference this weekend in North Carolina!  There are sessions on blogging, and a bloggers’ reception tomorrow afternoon.  I should be meeting at least four of the ladies listed in my sidebar links, as well as several of my Barefoot Blogs customers.

I hope to eat lunch today with Robin (Pensieve) today if I can get out of my house by 7 a.m.  WOO HOO!

I’m really kind of psyched about the 8 - 9 hours of drive time I have ahead of me this weekend (except for the parts when I pay for the gasoline).  What a perfect excuse to drink lots of sweet tea and listen to my favorite CDs!

I garden in spurts. Perennials are great because they just keep giving, year after year; it feels like my money and effort are well-spent when I plant them. I’m a bit of a tomato snob and only like the fresh ones from the local farmers’ stands instead of the pitiful variety you find in the grocery store, so they’re in my garden, too.

This morning I found the first little cherry tomatoes on the vine!

It sounds like this is a good year to grow your own. We have four plants - two cherry tomatoes and two regular - but one plant died and needs replaced.

When we moved here nearly three years ago, I transplanted a hydrangea from our old house. The first year it was inadvertently sprayed with a heavy dose of weed killer and last year it was hit by a late frost. These are the first blooms we’ve seen in all that time.

Last year we planted a little gardenia. It’s so small that you have to squat way down on hands and knees to smell the blooms, but I look forward to the day when its perfume will fill the air. We had large gardenia bushes at our house when I was expecting our eight-year-old daughter and the smell was rather overpowering during the queasy stage of early pregnancy.

Lily was too busy to stop and smell the flowers.

I was teased at church yesterday for being so slow to post about the awesome day we had with some of our closest friends at Amicalola Falls last Wednesday. To overcompensate for my delay (and get out of the proverbial doghouse), I’m posting a ridiculous number of photos.

Becky and I have discussed going to Amicalola for some time, and we asked Michelle’s family to join us for an afternoon there last week. My family has been to the falls before, but this was the first time for the others.

Amicalola Falls is a 729 foot waterfall - “the tallest cascading waterfall east of the Mississippi River.” I kindly failed to inform Michelle of this (until yesterday, actually) so I wouldn’t discourage her, since she toted a 1-year-old in a sling for the entire hike. Thoughtful of me, wasn’t it?

We hiked up the mountain, which in addition to generally steep conditions contains two staircases totaling over 600 stairs. Here’s a view from the top looking back down the mountain. See that tiny glimpse of concrete at the top of the picture? That’s the parking lot where we started.

Halfway up the mountain there’s a bridge that crosses over the falls. This shot was taken while standing on that bridge:

Here we are (finally!) at the top:

We parked our van at the top of the falls with our coolers and lunch in it. Everyone had a great time playing there:

I love this shot! I call it “Insane Brother Jumps in Front of Posing Girls”:

My new photographic angle is kids looking up. See another shot on my photoblog.

We decided to hike back down the mountain instead of driving. Almost immediately, Lily decided she had had enough hiking for one afternoon, so I carried her most of the way. I honestly think it was more difficult than going up and my calves have hurt for days!

I’m so thankful for these two precious families. The women are among my closest friends and my children are blessed to grow up in a church with their best buddies. Thanks for a great afternoon!

Our homeschool group does a couple of really neat events each year: a father/daughter dance and a mother/son outing. Last Thursday was the mother/son outing and I had 3 handsome dates!

We split into two groups: kickball for boys nine-and-under, and flag football for boys ten-and-up. I had two boys in the older group and one in the younger, so I started with football. The moms received the first kickoff. The ball hit the ground and I sensed that this could be a moment where we moms might just politely stare at the ball (and then get trampled by a herd of our stampeding sons), so I grabbed it and ran!

Looking over my shoulder to see if my flag had been taken (it had, but didn’t feel it) I lost my balance and nearly careened head-first into the end zone. Fortunately, I regained my footing quickly enough that maybe I was the only one aware of my near wipe-out (otherwise my boys would have teased me to death by now). That was our first down, and I ended up scoring the mom’s only touchdown.

I ran track in jr. high and played softball from fifth grade until my senior year, plus I participated in high school and jr. high drill team and cheerleading. It really felt good to run again and give my latent inner jock a chance to come out and play. With eight kids, I’ve spent most of adult life on the sidelines cheering and taking pictures.

One of the moms switched with me so I could join my younger son at kickball. He told me, however, that “kickball is for losers (pronounced “loosers”)” and would I please just go to the creek so he could show me a snake he’d found and take pictures of him? We never found the snake, but that kid had a ball in the water (check the photoblog). When I asked him if he wanted to go to the football game, he told me that “football is for losers.” I quickly determined that anything that didn’t involve water, rocks, and mom taking pictures of him was for losers.

Here are some pictures of my guys in all their glory:

When my daughter spilled today’s mail across my bed this morning, the first thing that caught my eye was an envelope from Robin (Pensieve). I won one of her contests last week during the Bloggy Giveaways Carnival! Look at my awesome goodies: $10 Starbucks giftcard & Mary Engelbreit surcies.

I confess I spent quite some time rummaging through Robin’s archives searching for a definition of the word “surcee.” I found that there are several ways to spell it and that it’s a very Southern term, which obviously means I needed to learn it, now didn’t I?

If you haven’t visited Pensieve, Robin’s blog is a lot of fun and very interactive. We “met” when we discovered that we share George Clooney as our “celebrity soul mate” (some goofy quiz), but we keep finding additional things we have in common. I can almost guarantee we’ll meet IRL someday.

Next I saw that I had an envelope from Compassion International with “Message from Your Sponsored Child” printed on the outside! In February I told about Guadalupe, the little girl we’ve recently sponsored. Although I’ve written and sent a picture, this is the first contact we’ve had from her. The letter was actually written by Guadalupe’s (or Lupita, as her mother calls her) mother, since she is only 3-years-old.

I was reading aloud to the kids, but when I got to “For Lupita and for me it was a great joy to know she has a sponsor. It is an answer from God,” I got all choked up and couldn’t continue. How many opportunities do I have to make such an impact on another person’s life? I know that Guadalupe and her family benefit much more from our $32 a month than we would. I also discovered that Guadalupe has a twin brother. I wonder if he has a sponsor?

The most touching thing was the picture drawn on the back of the letter. What a treasure! I love how excited our whole family is about this little girl so many miles away from us.

To find our more about sponsoring a child through Compassion International, click the button in my right sidebar or follow this link.

This weekend two of my sons and I attended our first homeschool conference of the season. This was our second conference working with our state rep at the Math-U-See booth. A last-minute surprise was that Steve Demme, author of Math-U-See, was attending this conference with us. I have met Steve more than once, but this was the first time for my sons. Since we’ve used the program and watched the videos for years, he’s a household celebrity. After all, he’s on TV!

I was totally hoping to meet other bloggers at the conference. I wanted at least one person to say, “Hey! You blog don’t you?” and get to meet one of my online friends. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. I did see a couple of old friends who visit the blog though. My 17-year-old-son told me that his former co-op creative writing teacher said she had read something very positive that I’d said about him on my blog. I told him I’ve been blogging for 2 years (which reminds me that my bloggiversary is at the end of this month!), so I wasn’t sure exactly what post she had meant. That will keep him paranoid wondering what I’m saying about him on the internet.

We also got to meet Paul Suarez, Jr. (Paulie) who handles our web hosting for the Homeschool Blog Awards site. Paul’s family are the nice folks who bring us The Old Schoolhouse magazine. I met his daddy and a brother, too, but the conference was just so busy that I never made it to their booth at a time when I could meet the rest of the family.

It was fun staying in the hotel and attending the conference, but I was awfully happy see the rest of my family and sleep in my own bed last night. I’ve got to figure out how to handle my shopping now that we’re working at the conferences, because it’s just not happening at this point. Roaming the convention hall and checking out all those vendor booths is usually the highlight of my homeschooling year - the jump start to finish one year and get psyched about the next.

My 17-year-old had a date for prom and had to leave early, so we boxed the remainder of the books without our biggest muscle when the conference ended. As my 13-year-old and I drove through downtown Atlanta, we were drawn like a magnet to The Varsity, and had the satisfaction of coating our digestive tracts with the most greasily awesome chili dogs and onion rings around.

Tonight a new reality TV show premiers on Country Music Television after the CMT Awards. It’s by the folks who do American Idol and it’s called Can You Duet; the goal is to find a hot new country music duo.

My cousin is a makeup artist for the show. I am so proud of her! Because of her inside connection, our family drove to Nashville and attended one of the live shows with a table reserved in our name. We strolled past a sidewalk full of people lined up outside the venue - Nashville’s famous Wild Horse Saloon - and walked right in the door. VIPs for a day!

Rossi, the host, is my cousin’s cousin, but not my cousin (other side of the family). We really enjoyed getting to meet him. He was super sweet, especially to my kids, which is the nicest thing I can say about anyone. He entertained the crowd with a performance of “Great Balls of Fire” while the judges were voting. My kids thought his was the best performance of the evening!

I don’t know if this contestant will become famous, but my girls thought he was pretty great (see the dreamy look in 11-year-old daughter’s eyes - HA!).

Afterwards, our family went backstage and met Naomi Judd, who was one of the judges.

We’ll call this my “just to prove I was there” shot:

Outside after the show:

Can You Duet premiers tonight after the CMT Awards and then can be seen on Friday nights at 8/7 Central Time.