Monday, August 10, 2009
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Was that the REAL play?
I was telling Judah this afternoon that I was really proud of him last night for doing such a great job delivering his lines in front of a live audience.
He said, "Was that the REAL play?"
"Yep," I said, "that was the real play."
"So I don't have to rehearsal anymore?"
Reminds me of a time when I was four. My mom had enrolled me in ballet lessons. After our big performance, I told her that I didn't want to go to practices anymore--I just wanted to be on stage. Sometimes I feel as though I'm raising myself.
He said, "Was that the REAL play?"
"Yep," I said, "that was the real play."
"So I don't have to rehearsal anymore?"
Reminds me of a time when I was four. My mom had enrolled me in ballet lessons. After our big performance, I told her that I didn't want to go to practices anymore--I just wanted to be on stage. Sometimes I feel as though I'm raising myself.
Monday, July 27, 2009
We made the news . . .
Did you happen to see our article in this Sunday's Tennessean? Click HERE to read it online!
I'm quoted on page 2, and the 5-year-old the author mentions is Judah!
The show opens this Friday, so I'm getting my hair dyed auburn on Wednesday, and I'll be trying on costumes tonight. So fun.
We spent the weekend building things (thank you, Dad and Uncle Charlie!!!), painting, and generally having fun sweating in the sun and heat with a bunch of hilarious theater people. It was fabulous!
Hope you can make it to one of the performances. Remember, you have six to choose from!
Friday, July 31
Saturday, August 1
Sunday, August 2
or
Friday, August 7
Saturday, August 8
Sunday, August 9
Shows start at 7:30 each night, tickets are $10, and seats can be reserved by calling (615) 364-5199 or e-mailing scott@oracleproductions.org.
Hope to see you there!
I'm quoted on page 2, and the 5-year-old the author mentions is Judah!
The show opens this Friday, so I'm getting my hair dyed auburn on Wednesday, and I'll be trying on costumes tonight. So fun.
We spent the weekend building things (thank you, Dad and Uncle Charlie!!!), painting, and generally having fun sweating in the sun and heat with a bunch of hilarious theater people. It was fabulous!
Hope you can make it to one of the performances. Remember, you have six to choose from!
Friday, July 31
Saturday, August 1
Sunday, August 2
or
Friday, August 7
Saturday, August 8
Sunday, August 9
Shows start at 7:30 each night, tickets are $10, and seats can be reserved by calling (615) 364-5199 or e-mailing scott@oracleproductions.org.
Hope to see you there!
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Judah and Lori take the stage--next weekend!
You know how Judah and I auditioned for a play a few months ago? Well, not only did we both land roles, but we're now getting ready to start the show! The play opens in a week and a half on July 31, which is a Friday night.
You'll have six performances to choose from:
Friday, July 31
Saturday, August 1
Sunday, Augsut 2
and
Friday, August 7
Saturday, August 8
Sunday, August 9
The show starts at 7:30 PM sharp, and tickets are $10 each. Group rates are available. To reserve seats, call Oracle Productions at (615) 364-5199 or e-mail scott@oracleproductions.org.
Come out and see Judah in his first stage production and Lori as Morgan Le Fay, the wicked Queen Morgana. This is our first play together, and it's going to be worth your time--we promise!
Where is it? Glad you asked. Lipscomb University's Shamblin Theatre, 3901 Granny White Pike, Nashville, TN (across the street and large parking lot from Pizza Perfect, Copper Kettle, laundromat, bookstore, and Mexican restaurant). Take I-65 to Wedgewood and head away from the fairgrounds, toward 8th Ave. Hang a left on 12th, which turns into Granny White. Immediately past the light at the little row of shops on your left, turn right into the parking lot and head into the University Center (first building on your right). The theater is tucked away in a corner, past all the places to eat, near the restrooms. If you get turned around, you can call or text my cell (615) 496-8079. Hopefully, I'll hear it!
See you next weekend or the second weekend in August!
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Judah and Miriam recite Judah's lines
Miriam has heard Judah practice his lines so many times that she can now deliver them with ease--usually while running--as demonstrated in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw8WtsIrUjw
If that doesn't entice you to come see us in Mirror, Mirror, then check out this little video from Judah. This is a little picture of what he says to nearly everyone he meets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_AyfTi0ark
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw8WtsIrUjw
If that doesn't entice you to come see us in Mirror, Mirror, then check out this little video from Judah. This is a little picture of what he says to nearly everyone he meets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_AyfTi0ark
Miriam Talks to Ms Ruthie about Baby Arianna's Visit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubXaUz4XSoE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xV9cQz-JUN8
Thursday, July 2, 2009
VOTE for Jonathan Frank!
We have a close friend (Jonathan Frank) who is auditioning for a year-long contract with a local television station in Virginia to be their new "Face of Fox 43." To vote for him, all you have to do is watch his funny two-minute video audition all the way to the end. I recommend watching it twice so you can read the captions the second time.
If you have the time and the desire, open up several tabs, play the video in each one (on mute, of course!), and then start the video all over again as many times as you're able. We'd love to see him win this contest!
http://www.fox43tv.com/generic/face_of_fox_43/frank_jonathan
First-round voting ends at midnight on Sunday, July 19, 2009.
Vote often!
Tell your friends!
Help Jonathan win!!!
Judah Quote of the Day
Overheard on the steps, spoken by Judah to Miriam: "I'm wounded, Miriam. Do you know what wounded is? It's a boy way of saying I have a boo-boo."
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Mira Quote of the Day
On Monday, I took the kids to the Bicentennial Mall fountains. As I was playing with Miriam's hair, trying to pull it up for her, she turns around and says to me with all sincerity, "Mommy, my hair is NOT a toy."
(The picture is of Miriam with baby Arianna, one of her favorite babies. The daughter of our new friends, John and Ruthie, she is an absolute angel!)
Friday, June 26, 2009
Food & Stuff Re-post from September 3, 2007
Original post written on September 3, 2007: http://herroyalexcitedness.blogspot.com/2007/09/food-and-stuff.html.
Food and Stuff
While I'm no expert, I am a reader, and that, at least, makes me informed. I also like to eat. Excellent food paired with good conversation (and, occasionally, no conversation at all) is one of our family's core values.
We like to eat out. We like to eat at friends' houses. We like to eat at home. We like to eat in the car. We like to eat outside. We just like to eat.
I forget that the way we eat has been completely revolutionized until I get around other people.
Recently, my husband went on a grocery run with one of his friends. His friend said, "Everything in your cart is perishable. It's all going to go bad." Well, sure, if we left it in our cabinet forever, but we usually eat what we buy that week. The fruit goes on the counter for Judah to help himself (he's becoming more and more self-sufficient) and it's what we eat instead of chips, cheetos, crackers, cookies. . . .
Most of our vegetables come from a local farmer's garden, and they're usually consumed by the next grocery run as well. Anything we're not too keen on, we give away. Okra went to Grandma a couple weeks ago. Extra watermelon went to our neighbor. Occasionally, we have fruit or vegetables that do go bad. We now add them to our composter so we'll have some decent soil and keep bags of trash out of landfills. (Between recycling and composting, we're down to one kitchen-sized bag of trash each week--mostly Miriam's diapers--but that's another entry entirely).
We try desperately to avoid partially hydrogenated oil, high fructose corn syrup, anything that says it has artificial flavors and/or colors, anything "white," which usually means it has been bleached or processed to death then "enriched"--white flour, white sugar, white rice, white bread--(you could eat cardboard and take a multi-vitamin for the same effect.)
Years ago, a friend said that the shorter the ingredient list, the better the food. Someone else said that if she can't pronounce the ingredients, she doesn't buy it. I recently read that someone eats only foods with one ingredient. Those would be "whole" foods.
Our bodies don't know what to do with fake stuff. We're not designed to ingest plastic in the name of food and become healthier and live longer as a result. Quite the opposite.
In The Oiling of America, Enig & Fallon write, "Trans fatty acids are sufficiently similar to natural fats that the body readily incorporates them into the cell membrane; once there their altered chemical structure creates havoc with thousands of necessary chemical reactions—everything from energy provision to prostaglandin production. . . . most of the trans isomers in modern hydrogenated fats are new to the human physiology and by the early 1970's a number of researchers had expressed concern about their presence in the American diet, noting that their increasing use had paralleled the increase in both heart disease and cancer. The unstated solution was one that could be easily presented to the public: Eat natural, traditional fats; avoid newfangled foods made from vegetable oils; use butter, not margarine." (emphasis mine)
James forwarded an article to me a few days ago (it took me three days to read it, but I finally read the whole thing) from The New York Times: Unhappy Meals by Michael Pollan, January 28, 2007. Excellent read.
What it boils down to is this: Real food has been largely replaced in America with processed, boxed, labeled, nutrionally-deficient "stuff." It's not real food. It tries to pretend to be food through "nutrionism." Nutritionism, according to Wikipedia, is an ideology that assumes that it is the scientifically identified nutrients in foods that determine their value in the diet. [1] Ever heard of lycopene? Ketchup sellers use it to get you to buy ketchup. They actually want you to think that the high fructose corn syrup-laden goop is somehow "good" for you. That it could help your body fight cancer. Give me a break.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Ah, synergy. Never thought I'd say that food is synergistic. But it is. It truly is.
Eat a tomato. Enjoy it fresh from the garden, warmed by the sun. A bottle of ketchup with a 2008 expiration date doesn't begin to compare to my garden-fresh, ripe, delivered the same day, grown an hour away, truly delicious tomatoes. Sliced with a smidgen of sea salt or sandwiched or diced and tossed into my husband's fresh gazpacho, mmmmmmm.
In case you were wondering, we didn't get here overnight, and we didn't grow up eating healthy food. Just a few years ago, I was pregnant in Africa and craving all kinds of cheesy, processed junk. It was somehow comforting to me to eat "cheese" crackers ("made with REAL cheese!"--what else have they been making it with? Think about it). It took a LONG time for me to reach for a piece of fruit instead of a bag of chips. For my son, however, the fruit is much more appealing. Praise God.
Speaking of fruit, Judah was upset tonight when I told him we didn't have any more plums. "May I have an apple, then?"
"You ate the last apple right before you took a nap on the couch."
"Then tell me what we do have."
"We don't have any more fruit. We'll have to buy some more."
"No more fruit? Why?"
"Because we ate it all."
I thought he was going to cry. Then he ate almost all of my zuchinni. Little stinker.
Oh, I could write about this all night. It's 10:00, though, and I need to join my husband upstairs and drift off to sleep. I have so much more to say, but I'll save it for another post. I'm re-reading Food Politics by Marion Nestle and I'm hoping to read Eating in the Dark by Kathleen Hart before I have to take both books back to the library. I may post a few quotes from both books and comment on them. Reminds me a little of school. Can you tell I miss researching and writing on a regular basis?
Now that James is back home, I should be on here more often. I hope so.
A quick addendum:
Now that we've discovered roasted okra, we never give it away anymore.
Food and Stuff
While I'm no expert, I am a reader, and that, at least, makes me informed. I also like to eat. Excellent food paired with good conversation (and, occasionally, no conversation at all) is one of our family's core values.
We like to eat out. We like to eat at friends' houses. We like to eat at home. We like to eat in the car. We like to eat outside. We just like to eat.
I forget that the way we eat has been completely revolutionized until I get around other people.
Recently, my husband went on a grocery run with one of his friends. His friend said, "Everything in your cart is perishable. It's all going to go bad." Well, sure, if we left it in our cabinet forever, but we usually eat what we buy that week. The fruit goes on the counter for Judah to help himself (he's becoming more and more self-sufficient) and it's what we eat instead of chips, cheetos, crackers, cookies. . . .
Most of our vegetables come from a local farmer's garden, and they're usually consumed by the next grocery run as well. Anything we're not too keen on, we give away. Okra went to Grandma a couple weeks ago. Extra watermelon went to our neighbor. Occasionally, we have fruit or vegetables that do go bad. We now add them to our composter so we'll have some decent soil and keep bags of trash out of landfills. (Between recycling and composting, we're down to one kitchen-sized bag of trash each week--mostly Miriam's diapers--but that's another entry entirely).
We try desperately to avoid partially hydrogenated oil, high fructose corn syrup, anything that says it has artificial flavors and/or colors, anything "white," which usually means it has been bleached or processed to death then "enriched"--white flour, white sugar, white rice, white bread--(you could eat cardboard and take a multi-vitamin for the same effect.)
Years ago, a friend said that the shorter the ingredient list, the better the food. Someone else said that if she can't pronounce the ingredients, she doesn't buy it. I recently read that someone eats only foods with one ingredient. Those would be "whole" foods.
Our bodies don't know what to do with fake stuff. We're not designed to ingest plastic in the name of food and become healthier and live longer as a result. Quite the opposite.
In The Oiling of America, Enig & Fallon write, "Trans fatty acids are sufficiently similar to natural fats that the body readily incorporates them into the cell membrane; once there their altered chemical structure creates havoc with thousands of necessary chemical reactions—everything from energy provision to prostaglandin production. . . . most of the trans isomers in modern hydrogenated fats are new to the human physiology and by the early 1970's a number of researchers had expressed concern about their presence in the American diet, noting that their increasing use had paralleled the increase in both heart disease and cancer. The unstated solution was one that could be easily presented to the public: Eat natural, traditional fats; avoid newfangled foods made from vegetable oils; use butter, not margarine." (emphasis mine)
James forwarded an article to me a few days ago (it took me three days to read it, but I finally read the whole thing) from The New York Times: Unhappy Meals by Michael Pollan, January 28, 2007. Excellent read.
What it boils down to is this: Real food has been largely replaced in America with processed, boxed, labeled, nutrionally-deficient "stuff." It's not real food. It tries to pretend to be food through "nutrionism." Nutritionism, according to Wikipedia, is an ideology that assumes that it is the scientifically identified nutrients in foods that determine their value in the diet. [1] Ever heard of lycopene? Ketchup sellers use it to get you to buy ketchup. They actually want you to think that the high fructose corn syrup-laden goop is somehow "good" for you. That it could help your body fight cancer. Give me a break.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Ah, synergy. Never thought I'd say that food is synergistic. But it is. It truly is.
Eat a tomato. Enjoy it fresh from the garden, warmed by the sun. A bottle of ketchup with a 2008 expiration date doesn't begin to compare to my garden-fresh, ripe, delivered the same day, grown an hour away, truly delicious tomatoes. Sliced with a smidgen of sea salt or sandwiched or diced and tossed into my husband's fresh gazpacho, mmmmmmm.
In case you were wondering, we didn't get here overnight, and we didn't grow up eating healthy food. Just a few years ago, I was pregnant in Africa and craving all kinds of cheesy, processed junk. It was somehow comforting to me to eat "cheese" crackers ("made with REAL cheese!"--what else have they been making it with? Think about it). It took a LONG time for me to reach for a piece of fruit instead of a bag of chips. For my son, however, the fruit is much more appealing. Praise God.
Speaking of fruit, Judah was upset tonight when I told him we didn't have any more plums. "May I have an apple, then?"
"You ate the last apple right before you took a nap on the couch."
"Then tell me what we do have."
"We don't have any more fruit. We'll have to buy some more."
"No more fruit? Why?"
"Because we ate it all."
I thought he was going to cry. Then he ate almost all of my zuchinni. Little stinker.
Oh, I could write about this all night. It's 10:00, though, and I need to join my husband upstairs and drift off to sleep. I have so much more to say, but I'll save it for another post. I'm re-reading Food Politics by Marion Nestle and I'm hoping to read Eating in the Dark by Kathleen Hart before I have to take both books back to the library. I may post a few quotes from both books and comment on them. Reminds me a little of school. Can you tell I miss researching and writing on a regular basis?
Now that James is back home, I should be on here more often. I hope so.
A quick addendum:
Now that we've discovered roasted okra, we never give it away anymore.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
"Judah get me all wet!"
Click HERE for a short video of Judah chasing Miriam with the hose after Mira says,"Judah get me all wet!"
"I'm NOT the big bad wolf, Judah. I'm Miriam Todd!"
Click HERE for a video of Miriam convincing Judah that she's NOT the big bad wolf. She's MIRIAM TODD!
Monday, June 15, 2009
Conversations with Miriam
A conversation I had with Miriam this afternoon:
"Miriam, are you stinky?"
"No."
Minutes later . . .
"You ARE a stinky tootie messy bootie!"
"I NOT a stinky messy bootie. I'm a little girl!"
Later on . . .
Judah dons a blue towel with a hood and runs around Miriam saying he's little blue riding hood and she's the big bad wolf. He shouts, "Ah!!!! The big bad wolf is coming!"
She stops and shouts, "I NOT the big bad wolf! I'm Miriam Todd!" Out comes the pouty lip.
I love that little girl.
Judah's Second Quote of the Day
"Mommy, why were you so disappointed with me when I told you I peed on the mint?" --Judah Rees Todd, age 5
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