First Girl Scout camping trip!

Aside from family members our daughter, who will be 7 next month, has never spent the night anywhere but with a couple different family members. This weekend her Daisy Scout troop was invited to their first Camporee. Not far from our home but still away all day and over night. So many questions came to mind like how many people will be there, who will be in the tent, how many chaperones, how old are all the kids, what are the activities planned, what will they feed her..and on and on.

As expected she had no questions! "Camping trip! Yippee!" and then she dances excitedly all around the house. She's into it and raring to go and has no idea if we're sending her for a week across the country or just a night across town. She's a little dare devil and always down for something adventurous. Go now and ask questions later, that's her philosophy.

Anyhow, the house feels quiet without her and I wonder what she's up to. Probably some arts and crafts, hiking around in the bushes and driving the adults crazy! Hey better them than me!

ETA: They called us at 10:15pm and she said she was homesick and wanted to come home so we went and picked her up!

Bittersweet

My husband and I were some of the lucky ones who purchased a house in 2001 when the market was normal, the prices would now have seemed dirt cheap and unbelievable. The problem is that even though we bought at the right time we knew we could never afford to buy a new home because the costs have quadrupled and even if we sold for a profit, we couldn't afford the mortgage on the cost of a new home at the recent prices.

Well recently foreclosure rates in our area have skyrocketed, prices have dropped, and interest rates are low. We saw this as a chance to jump on the opportunity to buy before prices went back up. The depressing thing is that virtually all homes in our area are being sold by banks who have foreclosed on local homeowners. House after house we toured looked abandoned and I could picture the families who had lived there no longer being able to afford their mortgages and 2nd mortgages, upside down in their payments, no longer seeing their home as an investment and deciding to give up. Here we were looking to purchase at a fraction of what they owed. Doesn't really seem fair but I guess it's the way the cookie crumbles.

The Library Lady is after me!

So, after the birth of my twin sons I felt I needed to get motivated, get over my fear of taking three kids out in public alone. I decided to go to the library, hadn't been in ages, in fact wasn't even sure I still had a card.




I arrived and it was awesome! The Childrens section was amazing and I felt so guilty for not having taken my daughter sooner. We played checkers and the librarian in that section explained a program where my daughter would get prizes for reading books, all we had to do was check out as many as we'd like, read them together, bring them back and she'd get to win prizes. So I was feeling all happy and proud that I'd taken the kids out and all, so we checked out at least a dozen books, they are FREE after all I thought to myself.




Weeks passed and we returned the books a few weeks late but my daughter was still able to choose some prizes. I paid no attention at all to the fact that I'd accumulated a late fee. I thought late fees were like .01 per day per book or something...




Well a couple months go by and I get a letter, from a collection agency, stating that I owed the #*!##!* library over $50.00 in late fees! I was speechless. I still am speechless. How can they charge me more per book then the books were worth? Shouldn't I have been told that the price would be the same at this point whether I returned the books or not? I mean, I could have kept them.




So I have been putting off the inevitable, a confrontation at the library. No doubt they'll treat me like a criminal for owing them money. I am just so ticked that I let this happen.