Freaking out little boys

It's funny that things never go exactly the way you would expect with kids.
We were throwing a Spooky Supper Halloween party for our grandsons who live in the area, sort of a turnaround because they weren't included in Grandma's Tea Party for the girls.
We decided to keep it simple and sort of silly rather than gross and scary because frankly, I don't do well with gross and scary.

Connor getting wrapped

Kyle the happy mummy

Besides the ages we were working with range from 6-12. We had a mummy wrap contest, a Horcrux Hunt with edible snakes and Ring-Pops and a spooky story with dried apricot ears and boiled cauliflower brains, nothing too horrid. We wrapped hot dogs in breakstick dough so we could have mummys for dinner.
Instead of a spook alley with chainsaws and dripping blood, we opted for a couple of jokes.
In our living room, we set up a tent and draped it in black cloth. Then we threw in a couple of red plastic bats we have hanging around and hung a warning sign "Danger, Rare Bats!!"
We put out a tunnel for the kids to crawl through and set up a blinking light inside.
Then we put a bunch of toy baby rattles inside a cauldron at the top of a tower built out of big, plastic barrels.
Again, we hung a warning sign that said "Careful, Keep Back, Baby Rattlers!"
We led the kids in one by one and let them tiptoe carefully to the edge of the barrels so they could peek inside. As soon as they lifted the lid, we rattled some pebbles in a can.
Every one of them jumped.
Every one took it seriously.
Some of the bigger ones wouldn't go down the tunnel to see the bats.
One child said he could hear the bats moving around in there and he wasn't taking any chances.

It's a wrap for Scott

He hung back until he could see that some of his cousins went in and came back safely.
It was interesting to me how wholly they believed what grandpa and I said.
If we told them there were live snakes in our barrel, they bought it.
If we said there were rare red bats in our tent, there absolutely were.
In a way, that's flattering and kind of sad that we used that blind trust to trick them, huh?

The magic in making kids laugh

Timothy Riggs is a gifted magician.
He can juggle fire.
He can eat fire and use invisible holes to slip metal rings onto unbroken ropes.
He can divide his assistant with swords and metal sheets and make her disappear only to reappear in entirely new outfits.
He's good with the sleight-of-hand, expert at amazement.
But he's at his best with children.
At the SCERA recently for the annual Trick-or-Treat show, he plucked a few out of the audience to help him on stage.
Ellie helped him gather coins in his bucket from her ears, her nose and all of the kids in the audience (who kept tossing in their imaginary coins despite Timothy's protests and to the delight of all).
He used Tucker as a front man who donned a huge tuxedo coat and tie and added an animated face to Timothy's magical hands as they performed scarf tricks galore.
He made 6-year-old Joseph laugh and laugh as he did rope tricks that he attributed to "dangerous" Joseph.
It was so much fun to watch the kids participate and be amazed.
Even a cynical 11-year-old had to admit it was pretty magical the way Timothy put solid metal hoops together only to "breathe" them apart.
Timothy starts out telling the kids he went to the library to learn magic and the books turned him into a magician.
He mixes enough simple tricks with the ones that can't be figured out that the show works for children and adults.
His Chinese yo-yo tricks are wondrous on their own.
His juggling is fantastic, especially as his assistant adds a stinky toilet bowl cleaner, a plunger and ultimately a heavy bowling ball to his flying props.
"I meant to do that," he declares when a pink ball goes bounding off stage and it's impossible to know whether he's telling the truth or not.
This is a show geared to entertain.
Bless Timothy for shaping his show to include youngsters and bless the SCERA for making it available for only $5 a ticket (that includes free candy at the end).
See more about Timothy Riggs at: http://utahmagician.com/

Magic and scary stuff

I'm realizing that the child's brain deals with the magical and the spooky stuff quite differently than we old fogies do.
I was trying out some Halloween on my 6-year-old granddaughter just to see how it played out.
I'm prepping for a Spooky Supper with a half-dozen grandsons on Saturday and I needed a kid's opinion on a couple of Spook Alley moments.
In one dark box I had a bunch of baby rattles and told her there were Baby Rattlers inside that she had to stay away from. I tried to help her understand what rattlesnakes are and how mean baby rattlers could be before she peeked over the top to see these creatures.
I rattled some buttons in a box just as she peeked in.
She was unimpressed.
"That's not scary, grandma!" she said accusingly even though I could tell she was also relieved that nothing jumped or hissed at her.
I told myself it was OK because I don't think she really knows what a rattlesnake is anyway.
I tried the next thing.
I had hidden a couple of baseball bats inside "The Rare Bat Cave" and told her she needed to be quiet so as not to scare the bats away. I had a fake black bat hanging over the doorway so she'd have a picture in her mind of what a real bat looks like.
She crawled inside the tunnel and looked around.
She came back out indignant once more.
"That's not scary, grandma!! she said again. "Do you know about scary?"
I guess not.
I'll have to get busy and try harder before my Halloween party.
Otherwise, the boys I've invited are going to laugh.
Wait, that's the point.

C3PO gets bumped

When Samuel Mirejovsky of Newport Beach, Calif., looked for Legos to use in his model of the Bountiful LDS temple, he had to be creative and imaginative.
He had to trade with collectors all over the world to get the pieces he needed for windows and spires and steps.
He paid a good price in some cases to get pieces that accurately replicate the stonework and design, spending more money than he wanted to admit to his wife and several months putting the model together for his ward's Primary — an impressive 4x4 foot building with more than 13,500 blocks.
For the Angel Moroni he came up with what his 4-year-old son thought was a neat solution.
He used a golden Star Wars robot — C3PO — holding an inverted wineglass for his trumpet.
Here he is:

Mirejovsky admits it may at first appear to be an irreverent solution but gold pieces are rare and C3PO actually makes quite a cute addition to the project.
When I first proposed the story on the Lego temple, I wasn't sure my editors would run with it because sometimes Mormon readers fail to utilize their sense of humor and no one wants to look like they are mocking something so sacred.
It was a nice surprise when they said OK.
I interviewed Mirejovsky on the phone and found him charming and completely loyal to the church and his beliefs.
I laughed when Mirejovsky told me about using C3PO and threw in a paragraph or two about him.
The editors cut out the part and in their defense, I don't really blame them.
C3PO was a good guy in the movies but really no angel.
He's a toy.
Here's the link to the whole story: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705392922/A-testimony-and-a-Mormon-temple-built-on-building-blocks.html

Three inches too few

In the paper today there's a piece about Delta Airlines adding three inches to their coach seating.
For a mere $99 upgrade fee, you can now have back the three inches they took away sometime last year.
Isn't that peachy?
It makes it so you can actually push past your fellow passengers on your way to the middle and/or window seat without doing permanent damage.
It puts the tall guys — like my husband — back in the game. It means when you drop something, you can actually bend down to get it without getting your head stuck.
It's just great and certainly big of them.
It's also a bit insulting to think the airlines believe we won't all remember a time when there was actual legroom AND little meals AND free luggage AND perks like blankets and tiny pillows and earphones that made traveling fun that came with the ticket price.
I'm not that old that I don't remember when airlines were vying for our business and working to get us to fly more often.
Now it's painful and uncomfortable.
Besides the security check-ins and privacy invasions on the way to the plane, today traveling by air means going hungry and getting fleeced all along the way.
I recognize the need for airlines to make money.
I know it has to be expensive to keep planes in the air and fueled and maintained.
I recognize the need to recoup the cost of high-priced jet fuel. It's got to be tough to pay pilots.
But it would help if there was some honesty in the hype.
Don't try to tell us they're "giving" us three inches when it was our three inches to lose.
Don't try to sell us on the value of being able to purchase a $7 sandwich that used to come with the flight.
And don't try to tell me they're are doing me a favor by letting me bring on a bag for $50.
The formerly  "friendly skies" are today's perilous horizons, give or take a few inches.

The end is near

We're almost done with our second round of the HCG diet, aren't you glad?
I'm sure everyone is pretty much fed up (pun is intended) with hearing about it.
And we're pretty much done with thinking about it: can't have this, can't have that, how many calories in this, why is there nothing but fish and chicken and lettuce to eat?
We're two days away from normalcy and the good news is, Marc lost his designated 25-30 lbs. and I hit my goal weight with two pounds to spare.

Our clothes fit better (actually some are a bit loose now) and we both like feeling a little lighter.
But it's been tough.
Not the 500 calories-a-day part so much as the three weeks of protein replenishment.
The theory is that after starving the body for 21 days, it's time to shovel in the protein.
You don't want the body to realize it's starving and start to hang onto any fat it can find.
So you go from 500 calories a day to a whopping 2,500 to 3,000 calories.
None of it can come from sugar or starch which means I can't go out and grab a Sweet Tooth Fairy cupcake or even one of those little tiny carrot cake desserts at P.F. Chang's.
We have to eat a LOT of meat and butter.
It really feels wrong.
Marc is happier with it than I am because he's always wanted to eat a lot of food. He likes a second and third helping.
I like less. In fact, the first time through this, I gained weight back because I didn't believe in the theory. I'm trying to have a little more faith this time around.
But, still, while he's having protein burgers at In-N-Out and double down sandwiches at KFC, I'm drinking lots of whole milk, putting butter on my vegetables, whipping cream on my raspberries.
He's loading up with a grin and I'm feeling like a kid again facing a big plate of food I don't want to work through.
I'm realizing nothing much has changed in my 60 years of experience. I still don't want to eat what's good for me. I don't want to be told what to eat and Mom was right. I don't like anything.
Anybody want to slip me a candy bar?

Spud-picking weather

I know in Utah the cooler, crisper weather signals the coming of the deer hunt followed shortly thereafter by Thanksgiving and Christmas.
But for us Idahoans — and there are more of us than you think — it's spud-picking weather.
While the rest of the world went crazily on during October, going hunting or on vacation, we country kids were hitching up our Levis and packing our lunches for two weeks of the endless picking of potatoes.
I thought everybody did it.
School let out and every teenager who was healthy asked the local potato farmers for "jobs."
These jobs paid well in our eyes and since everyone was in the fields, it was the socially cool thing to do.
You'd get up before the sun, dress in your oldest, warmest stuff, grab a pair of gloves and pile into someone's pickup.
Once at the field, you grabbed a wire basket and started in on some of the longest rows of vegetables you ever saw.
It wasn't particularly hard work but it was dirty and every once in a while, you knelt on a soft, rotten potato or flushed out a nest of naked baby mice. Ugh.
In between filling and dumping the baskets into gunnie sacks, you broke up the routine by figuring out how much money you were making. It was exciting.
It was up to the individual pickers to total up the bags. I think we got all of 25 or 30 cents per bag for a grand sum of maybe a $100 or so by the end of the two weeks.
I don't know why we did it, really. Looking back now, it looks like slave labor to me but it was the social thing to do and there were often cute guys coming around for the filled sacks.
It was good, honest work that required little or no experience. It was what everybody did at the time.
So even though I still have nights where I'm picking potatoes in my sleep, I don't regret it. I think it's almost a shame that few Utahns know the feeling.
In fact, when the temperature drops and everything around me shouts "Fall!," I still get a bit of a hankering for the good old potato-picking days.