Serious business

Welcome to JA Biz Town, where Junior Achievement attempts to teach our fifth-graders about business, money and being a smart consumer.

For four-plus hours, the kids work at about a dozen businesses, doing jobs they've been assigned in class. The day is divided into six shifts. Kids work four of the shifts and have two as breaks. On break, they're expected to go off into town and... consume!! It's what makes the world go 'round, even in Biz Town.

That's when they take their personal check register and go and spend the money they've earned. They visit the other businesses, make purchases, and keep track of what they spend. Ummm, theoretically!

As parent volunteers, we're supposed to mentor the kids as employees at our assigned business. Mine was Wells Fargo financial advisers. And yes, the kids were expected to sell investment packages to the kids who walked through the door on their breaks. Our mutual funds then went up and down in price throughout the day, as shown on the ticker outside our door. Of course, at Biz Town, every fund ends up a winner. Wish it was that way in real life, don't you?

We're also supposed to help our employees with their personal finances. That was tougher. If they didn't keep track of their check register, we could hardly help them, because we stayed behind in the business while they went off spending money. During the midday break, they insisted on filling in their check registers from memory. Fiction!! (Ah, but how many of us are guilty of the same thing, hmmm?)

While I was busy at Wells Fargo, Emilyn was diligently doing her job: City Hall art center director. She was in the nonprofit sector. Her job was to curate the art exhibit, and also market it to her fellow Biz Town citizens.



It was tough not hanging out with her all day, but they try not to pair parents with their own kids. I'm sure that makes sense in many cases...

Emilyn made a great speech at the opening town meeting... and she seems so grown-up, too!!



In all, it was a great, if exhausting, day... and I think the kids really learned a lot. Talk about learning by doing! If nothing else, they got a taste of what it's like to do a real job. To see the rest of our pictures from Biz Town, click here.

Coming home . . . to a hectic week !

It's great to be home... but what a busy week! Just a few hours after we got back, I had training for the JA Biz Town field trip... On Tuesday, Emilyn had rehearsal for the All-Parkway Strings concert, which was Wednesday. Because I was scheduled to work six days in a row, I missed it. Sorry, kiddo! :(

Then, Thursday was the field trip to Biz Town. Great day, but so much work! And tiring! (Another post will tell all about it.)

Then I worked Saturday... and Sunday... Finally, a blessed day off Monday. And we got the blog all updated with vacation news. Whew! Back to a routine that's a little more manageable! It was tough to come back from the beach into all this melee, but at least things are now back to normal.

At Lambert's, even the salads are huge

We love going to Lambert's. We love the pass-arounds. We LOVE the throwed rolls with sorghum (which is NOT throwed, but rather kind of plopped. And drizzled.). But we just flat-out cannot eat the amount of food we are served there. Seriously. The portions are elephantine!! This place must throw away enough food to keep small nations happy for a week.

So, Steve had a plan... This year, I'm gonna get a salad. Yeah, OK...

I guess that plan didn't work! Not only were we basically full of throwed rolls by the time we got our food... The chef's salad was as big as a garbage can lid. Check out Emilyn's stab at it:



I had two scoops of chicken salad... Dolly Parton-size scoops... But that's easily the most modest thing I've ever managed to order. The pork steak (which I love) comes in a 12-inch skillet. And fills the whole skillet. (Check out more amazing food facts from Lambert's.)

Well, Allen caught a roll this year, which was very cool. Actually, it was very hot, and he caught it with his hands against his face... But other than a little pink cheek, he was fine!

And the moral of the story: The food is huge, but the check was the smallest of any place we'd eaten on vacation. Go figure!

Surf's up. WAY up.

A sunny morning turned way windy and rainy as the Gulf churned outside our window. Heading down to the beach in weather like that is its own kind of special experience. On days like that, it's not a friendly pond to paddle in!

(I really am getting better at self-portraits! And it's my new Facebook profile picture.)

We had an extra frozen pizza to go through, so we didn't go out for lunch. But we drove up to the Pelican mall to visit Sweetie Pie's for the first time. Boy, do they have pie. We had three different kinds. And yes, the meringue really is that tall. But how much meringue do you really want to chew on, seriously? (And it was chewy.) The pecan pie was really great, though. No meringue on that one.

We all spent a little time out by the raging waves, to say goodbye to the Gulf for another year. To see all the pictures from our last day, click here.

Best weather yet ! And one busy day

Finally! A chance for us pasty Midwesterners to catch some real rays!

Friday was the best weather yet. And a good thing, too... The clock was ticking on the Crabbe Spring Break 2010!

We spent another nice morning on the beach, with Allen crawling around in the tide pool... Lunch was the Shrimp Basket, where you can get a lot of food for not a lot of money! And they really have the best grilled fish around. Steve had triggerfish, a first for him!

We were super-full, but we waddled across the parking lot to Philly's, a brightly colored octagon up on stilts, right on the bayou, where they serve Yankee delights like cheesesteaks and, more importantly, Hershey's ice cream!

Allen had a concoction as brightly colored as the walls inside... Superman flavor, a swirl of strawberry, banana and blueberry -- but much more colorful than any of those things in nature!

(We are seriously considering painting our house in multiple beach colors. I wonder if Ballwin's zoning laws frown on this?)

And, as luck would have it, we picked the best weather day to go on our sunset dolphin cruise. As we got to Cetacean Cruises in Orange Beach, we noticed that the place is a little spiffed up since the last time we were there. They still have the tiki hut, but there's a cool dolphin statue out front now, and a nice waiting area!


We saw a car with Missouri plates in the lot, with a sticker from the Metro East (Illinois) area, so we knew there would be some fellow St. Louisans aboard... Boy, were they easy to spot!! Tee-hee. The guy from Oakville (south St. Louis County) never quit yapping the whole time, Steve said.

Captain Phil and our guide/deckhand, Tracy, were really awesome. We learned a lot about the dolphins, and we went up into the bayous to where the fresh water met the salty stuff. (Pretty shallow! But we never ran aground.) We saw pelicans (Mommy's favorite) and herons, and the sunset and scenery and weather were just all really beautiful. Right about there, as I was dreaming about me and Steve one day running a dolphin cruise boat, I achieved that semi-gelatinous state that I yearn for all year long: Relaxation. Real relaxation. It eludes me 51 weeks of the year. Thank goodness for our week at the beach!!

On the way back, as a chill came back into the air and the sun set lower, the kids got to drive the boat. Allen and Emilyn were the youngest aboard... Allen took a turn first, and I captured this photo of him at the wheel:


Later on, I posted it on Facebook and remarked how he "looked like a Ralph Lauren ad waiting to happen." Well, my friends loved it, and Alex quickly posted this on my wall:


What a laugh riot! I wondered who was going to get a "cease and desist" letter from Ralph Lauren first, Alex or me. Alex is sure that Allen is going to get a job out of it, and make us all rich!

For all the rest of our photos from the cruise and a busy day all around, click here.

Real live - and dead - sea critters

Warmer! And sunny! And so we headed out for some much-needed beach time. The Gulf was smooth, and there was very little wind. And there were lots of creatures to find...

Emilyn immediately started wrangling sand crabs. She has a real affinity for locating them. And then Allen kept finding coquinas, pretty-colored little clams.

I waded out into the surf with my net, looking for shells, and wound up grabbing a baby flounder, about the size of a quarter! Who'd a'thunk it? AND we saw the requisite big dead jellyfish washed up on the sand bar.




Lunch at Wintzell's Oyster House, a new-ish place where the old Ruby Tuesday was. Who goes to Ruby Tuesday at the beach? Apparently, no one. Wintzell's is a local chain place, apparently famous for all the quaint sayings that are posted on the walls. Even funnier when your deadpan 4-year-old insists on reading them all.



After lunch, it was back in the water... Let's face it, we were desperate for some real beach time!! And we got our first good pictures of Allen in the waves. Plus an actually good self-portrait of Mommy and Daddy!



To see the rest of the pictures from Thursday, click here.

ONE more too chilly day

Each morning, about 10 degrees colder than is normal for this time of year. The heat on in the beach house instead of the air conditioning. The locals were really feeling it, too. A rainy and cold St. Patrick's Day parade and pub crawl, to be sure! But we still saw some hardy souls drinking bloody marys at 9:30 a.m.

But the ferry runs even on a cloudy and cool day, so we headed out to Fort Morgan for the ride to the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and Estuarium.

There was plenty to learn about, so that kept Allen happy... We saw little alligators, turtles of all sizes, and some really big fish. And jellyfish! And got to touch horseshoe crabs in the touch tank.


For more pictures from Wednesday, click here.

Another bad beach day . . .

Windy and cold, so it was off to the National Museum of Naval Aviation, in beautiful Pensacola, Fla. So nice to take the Perdido Key route and see some of the new buildings going up, as well as many of the lots still left empty in the wake of Hurricane Ivan in 2004. Which means we can still buy that piece of Gulf front sand. If we can come up with $5 million...

As Daddy went to look at all his favorite airplanes, I took the kiddos around to climb in the old trainers.

The trip to the museum is almost always followed by a trip to Lillian's, the pizza joint that moved across the road after the hurricane. At their big, new concrete outpost, they still have some pretty darn good pizza. And Allen loves the carbonara. And the pizza clock.

Around sunset, though it was still chilly and windy, we went to check out the new Gulf Shores fishing pier. The old one was destroyed by... guess what! You got it. Ivan again. But the new pier is really nice, even though the state park charges you just to walk out on it. It's big with fishermen, so Allen got his first real close-up look at fishing. Pretty cool, actually. And the seagulls really like the fish guts that go over the side at the cleaning tables!


Warm baths all around when we got back to the beach house! Brrrr! For more photos from Tuesday at the beach, click here.

Best beach day, right out of the gate

Warm! Sun! We deserve it after the winter we had. As I was hugging Steve on the beach, he said: "We survived another winter!"

And we didn't have to wait long for Allen to get the swing of the surf.


Second beach lunch: Original Oyster House, as is tradition... It's where we got Grammy Shark, aka Swimmy. And Allen even knows that now, so he's always very excited to go there. And look! More goofy photo ops!!


To see all the photos from Monday, click here.

What a windy day to arrive !

Pretty warm, but *much* too windy to get to the beach... First beach meal at the Crab Trap, as is traditional! Steve found a menu on the ground outside the patio seating area! Score! While he took care of the theft, I handled the vandalism:

The beach house was as awesome as ever... maybe bigger than our actual house, and a whole lot cleaner. And look! Someone's taking towel origami lessons!

Good day in the car, but . . .

Allen and Emilyn were very good yesterday in the car! And we had simply the most delightful Greek food in Blytheville, Ark.! No, really!

And Que Sera Sera still has the best red beans and rice with andouille of all time!!

Things went downhill rapidly at bedtime, though. Allen is not using a playpen, so he was very restless... Emilyn couldn't sleep either. Finally, near midnight, I sent Emilyn to bed with Daddy and I took the pullout with Allen. I got him to sleep right away... for 5 minutes. And again. For 3 minutes. And again. For 2 minutes. And so on. And so on. And so on. The kid woke up every 5 minutes from midnight to 5:30. And since 5:30 was really 6:30, I just said the hell with it and gave up.

There's no telling how a totally sleepless boy (and one cranky Mommy) will behave today! But there's beach at the end of the tunnel, so we soldier on.

Fifth grade All District Choir

Congratulations to Emilyn and all the Sorrento Springs fifth-graders who sang Saturday night with a couple hundred fifth-graders from throughout the Parkway School District!

A big treat for the younger kids was a special guest appearance by the high school a capella groups, boys and girls. They were fresh back from a competition where they scored really well. And they sang beautifully! I think the fifth-graders got a big charge seeing what they could achieve if they keep practicing... (The boys were cute, so that didn't hurt either!)

We sat alllll the way across the gym at the tippy-top of the bleachers, so it was a great test of the zoom on my camera! Also, probably the most stable video I've ever shot, because I sat the camera on the bench next to me. Check out the stirring, patriotic finale! Click here for the rest of the videos.