No soliciting means no soliciting.

I came into the kitchen to do some dishes and I saw a flock of people canvasing the neighborhood.

Can I tell you how much I hate that?  I hate it so much that I put a sign on my front door that says, "No solicitors, please."  Because the Jehovah's Witnesses didn't think that the front door sign applied to them, they decided then to start going to the side door.  I wanted to make certain that it was clear that they were included in the "No solicitors, please," that I posted one to the side door.

They are very unsuccessfully canvasing the area and I saw the one saw me in my kitchen window.  She made a beeline up the driveway.  I thought that certainly she saw both signs.  She did.  She saw the front door sign and went to the side door.

Knock-knock-knock.

Really?

She caught me in a bit of a mood.  I opened the door a few inches and said, "No solicitors," and proceeded to close the door.  I did see the look on her face.  She was in shock.  Well, I could see her face just on the other side of the No Solicitors, please sign.

She made her way down the driveway.  I'm thinking that she may not stop again.

The drop offs come through our neighborhood on a quarterly basis.  This past spring/summer, I was outside and again, there was a man knocking on doors.  He saw me, made a beeline down my driveway and I said nothing.  I walked to the backyard.  I closed the gate and latched it.  He picked up on the hint.

I was out gardening and on the phone.  Again, I had another woman not care to uphold my wishes.  She interrupted the phone conversation because she wanted to convert me to her religion.  I kept the person on the phone, spoke with her a moment and said I wasn't interested.  She was strong in trying to give a defense for her religion.  I'm not telling her what way to believe.  I wasn't attacking.  I just didn't want her on my property.  She finally left.

So for those who are solicitors coming to my door:

1.  Jesus is our man.  We have religion covered.
2.  We have the cookies.  We don't need more.  If we do, we have a dealer.
3.  We like our phone service.
4.  We don't need your cable.
5.  We don't want your chemicals on our yard, even if you insist that we're "the only ones in the neighborhood without" because, well, that's a flat lie. Organic is the new green, after all.
6.  Our child may not come to your house for Backyard Bible Club.  We don't know you.
7.  We have a child in school and have fundraisers.  I'm not being cheap, but understand that we have to buy from her first even if you don't agree.  (I had a child argue with me.)

Stop coming to my door.  If I know you, come on in.  If I don't, please stay on the sidewalk.

Tara and the amazing Deva Cut.

I have curly hair.  I have thick hair, meaning lots of it, but it is kind of on the fine end of actual individual hair thickness.

I had an appointment to see the Amazing Tara for a cut.  It is at this point that I admit that it's been probably 2 years.  I get into mama mode and frankly, I put my kid first.  Time or sometimes financial thoughts keep me away.

Back to the Deva Cut.  It's best explained here.

Deva cuts are for anyone with curly hair.  If you have curly hair, then you know that just because people know how to cut hair doesn't mean that everyone can cut curly hair.

Believe me, I've had my fair share of bad cuts.  Just yesterday, I was talking with my mom about Tara and her mad skills with some scissors.  "Well, Andrea could cut your hair!  She can do a great job because she does have curly hair."

"Mom, Andrea sucked."

"What do you mean?"

"I had to fire Andrea.  I gave her a good 4 tries.  Every time she cut my hair, she did a worse job.  Her hair is far curlier than mine, but the final straw was when she really didn't listen to me at all, decided to do what she wanted and gave me a lesbian haircut."  (No offense to my lesbian friends out there.)

"Oh."

"She was supposed to give me long bangs in the front and a wedge kind of thing up the back that would be funky and that I could spike up.  She got the back right, but the front was so short that M's hair was longer than mine and I couldn't even keep a bobby pin in it, because it was so short."

"Oh.  I understand."

So back to the Deva cut.  Y'all, I went in looking like the Lion King after a big fight in the most horrendous humidity known to man.  The hairs were all out.  They were all long.  They were-- unruly.  Oh, I apologized.  I said that I knew that I was coming to her and that I would just let her wrangle my hair into shape.  I had been losing bobbie pins in my hair, making my thin haired friend extremely jealous.  It was taking a few days to find them all.  My hair was getting sucked out of the car window.  My hair was catching on door handles getting into the house.  I was losing my iPod ear buds in there!

I sat in the chair, gave Tara an idea of what I was looking for.  Really, I wanted to keep my hair long, but I left it to her discretion on how much needed to come off.  She showed me, I told her to have at it and she did.  She cut it dry.  She washed it, she then went back in and trimmed up a little more.  She had a diffuser that looked like a bunch of green bananas in the shape of a hand.

I want one.

You can get to the roots, but not get to the hair a ton to make it all frizz out.

There is uber great shampoo and after much consideration, I decided that if M can buy Muscle Milk to work out, I should be able to buy some shampoo that isn't going to make me look like I haven't washed my hair in a month of Sundays.  Thanks to the wonders of Amazon Prime, it was $10 less for the combo pack I purchased and all hail the 2 day ship.  The shampoo will be here tomorrow.  I don't have to wash my hair every day and I don't.  It's still nice to have the proper stuff on hand to do it with.

So hooray!  When I leave my hair down, it doesn't look like it was cut that much.  When I pull it up in a pony tail, you can tell that she thinned the heck out of it.

Curly hair.  Someone who can cut it.  Tara walks on water.

Of course I don't have photos.  That would have taken forethought and obviously, all of the excessive hair got in the way.  Trust me.  It's all good.  :)

Juan Pablo and his European adventures.

The fairy that visited us was a lovely gentlefairy by the name of Juan Pablo.  I told K that we employ the Fairy Union that is an equal opportunity employer.  We have males.  We have females.  I explained to her that she is one of the few children that are given foreign coin.

Foreign coin?

Well, you see, our Tooth Fairy Union members travel internationally.  They've got a lot of ground to cover, so they must be of most excellent flying skills.

Juan Pablo had dropped 5 different Lira and a coin from Spain.  I explained to K that though Juan Pablo knew that the Lira no longer held a monetary value in Italy, that he thought that she could appreciate it and enjoy it as foreign coin.  JP bounced through Europe on this way through to K.  He wanted to leave her something special because he knew that she just had 6 teeth yanked all at once.

Can I tell you how much she enjoys getting the foreign coins from the fairies?

Her tooth fairy haul overall?  5 Lira, 1 Spanish coin and $6 American dollars.  (1 for each tooth.)

The tooth fairy will be dancing through tonight.

My kiddo hasn't lost teeth since she was at the end of 2nd grade.  I should add that she only started losing teeth a couple of months into 2nd grade.  I didn't realize it had been that long, but her x-rays agree with her.  She had a backlog of teeth causing a bit of a jam.  In fact, they were starting to impact.  :eek!:  The orthodontist said it was time.  It was time to shed those teeth with a bit of help from Dr. Rick.

We saw Dr. Rick last month.  He had the images in hand from the orthodontist.  He made a plan.  We'd do two teeth today.  We'd do the remaining 4 on March 26.

I picked K up from school, ran home and made a quick batch of homemade macaroni and cheese, threw some cooked sausages on top and sailed off to the dentist.  I gave her the option and she chose to go back on her own.  She knew that I was there if she needed me, but the orthodontist has the parents stay in the waiting room (you can go back if you want) and since they put her in charge of her care, she just pressed on and continued with the same.

Dr. Rick came out, said he had her numb and that she opted to roll with all 6 teeth to get them done and over with.

Alright then.

He pulled her teeth, came out and told me what an incredibly tough kid she is.  She took her iPod, so she listened to music while she had him working.

The roots.  I won't gross you out with photos, but hello long roots!  Everything was just dammed up by these long roots.  To take the pressure off of all of the teeth just being jammed in, he said that he expects new teeth to emerge within two weeks.  He did say one gave him a bit of a hard time.  "Let me guess, the bottom right."  He laughed and told that I was right. "I saw the x-rays.  I figured that would be the toughest one."

She is now home.  She is liquored up on Advil.  She has eaten macaroni and cheese, even though she originally thought she didn't want it.

Dr. Rick also prescribed ice cream.

Hubs is out now, getting ice cream, yogurt and a major tooth pulling prize.  The tooth fairy will be stopping by the house tonight, but she's going to leave a note that her teeth won't be left behind for him/her.  (We have many international tooth fairies fly by and we've never specified our gender preference, so we get both.)  They will still leave her international loot (because they are international travelers, of course) and a dollar per tooth.  (The first tooth was $5.)

Those fairies that give $20/tooth?  Geeze, Louise!  That'll break a tooth fairy's bank in a heartbeat!

Little bits of 5th grade.

This past Thursday was the school wide Literature and Arts Festival.  They have improved it quite a bit from when they first started it.  I believe that K was in the third grade and frankly, it was a bit of a snoozer.

This year it was Dr. Seuss themed.  It made for a bit of a tight night.  K had the Literature and Arts Festival where she was playing in a harp recital and in a shoe fashion show (more on that in a minute) then moving on to swimming lessons at the local university.

Harp recital:  6:45 PM
Shoe Fashion Show:  7:00 PM
Swimming Lessons:  7:45 AM (about a 10 minute drive, park and walk.  About a 20 minute total time investment.)

I painted K's face with a Lorax mustache with pink swirl cheeks and pink eyebrows.  I gave her three unevenly placed hair knobbins with bright pipe cleaners swirling around them.  Her principal was laughing and calling her Cindy Lou Who.  :)  You see, I talked with her art teacher and asked if there was any way we could bump K close to the front of the shoe show so that we could scoop and run if it ran too long.  Sure!

She put her up front.

My baby up front with her Lorax boots.  Those would be her boots on the screen.  I loved that her art teacher took photos of them and put them on the screen so that everyone could see.  

Blurry, but you could get a little idea of those knobbins that I'm talking about.  

You can also see the face paint.  

The kids are on two-handed play with the harp now.  What a wonderful opportunity for her to be able to learn harp this year.  

What was funny is that we raced to swimming with her still in costume.  The students at the university kind of dug it.  She wore her bathing suit underneath all of it, so we could have her ready with clothes, but that left me to pull pipe cleaners out and the more difficult task of removing the paint.  I had baby wipes and had to kind of scrub at the paint.  We got her all ready with 5 minutes to spare!  :)

It's been a rough year.  I credit harp for pulling K through.  What a wonderful blessing in the storm of 5th grade we've had this year.