A VERY busy weekend!!

Feb. 8-10
It was a busy weekend after an extremely long week during which it either rained or snowed all day every day.

Friday night, we went to an authentic Chinese New Year party thrown by the Chinese and Singaporian Sloan Fellows. This is the year of the Rat - which makes it Jamie's year. We ate moderately authentic Chinese food for dinner and had Singaporian snack foods. Rachel even participated in a Chinese dumpling-making contest. It was a nice evening.

Saturday was absolutely full! Jamie and Rachel both had Saturday music school in the morning. Then we had another Sloan Fellows function in the afternoon. We went to Jillian's next to Fenway Park (the closest I've been to Red Sox territory) - and it was "Truck Day" too. For those of you who are like me and don't have a clue what "Truck Day" is . . . it's the day that the truck departs from Fenway Park to take the equipment to Florida for spring training to begin. You know that you're in baseball crazy country when they even name the day the truck leaves for spring training!!! Anyway, this place is a very nice bowling alley/pool room. The kids all had fun bowling and playing with the pool tables. We had to leave the party early to get Rachel to the high school for the Spelling Bee. Her team-The Super Spellers- did a terrific job. But I must say that it was a little underwhelming. The whole thing only lasted about 15-20 minutes. Even Rachel said, "That's it????" So we let her choose where to go for dinner to celebrate her hard work preparing for the bee, and she chose Chuck E Cheese.

Sunday, we got up and went to church at Belmont First Methodist because it was Scout Sunday. Jamie dressed in uniform, sat with the boys, and recited the Boy Scout oath during the service. For afternoon entertainment, Jamie, Rachel, and I went to see the Arlington Children's Theatre's production of Little Shop of Horrors. It was actually pretty good. Jamie really likes the music from that show, plus there was the added bonus of knowing a girl who was in the girl's chorus. She was Jamie's buddy at VBS this summer and is a real cutie. When we got home, Tim wanted to go scout out Nashoba ski area. It's only about 20 miles from our house, so we drove out there. It's really just a big hill, but I think it will be a good place for us to start since none of us have any ski experience. We'll probably go next week while the kids are out of school for February break. We stopped to eat at McDonald's on the way home and experienced our most interesting snowfall of the season thus far. It has been snowing on and off for the whole weekend, but the pavement was all clear because the temperatures haven't been too low. When we went in McDonald's, the parking lot was clear of snow. While we were eating we had a round of heavy thundersnow - thunder, lightning, and heavy snow. There was about an inch of snow deposited in about 15 minutes. The snow was strange - it was little balls that reminded us of Dippin' Dots. Plus the temperature dropped dramatically during the time we were inside. The moisture on the roads flash froze. We saw lots of cars that had run off the road and many others that were slipping and sliding all over. We were ok because the van has front wheel drive, buit this was definitely our most frightening winter driving experinece! Tim expertly brought us all safely home. Jamie and Rachel were both sure that they would be out for a snow day on Monday, but no luck. The Belmont road crew got busy sometime after 10:00pm, and the roads were just fine.