Shopping, letter grades and a shameless plea

Shopping, letter grades and a shameless plea, fun and games and a little road trip for the Carr’s in the week that was – Week 30

Vote for me (please!)
When I started my blog, my intent was never notoriety. Don’t get me wrong; I could use my 15 minutes just as much as the next guy, but the idea was more of an electronic breadcrumb trail of my family life in the form of a weekly recap. Sometimes funny, sometimes not, sometimes late and sometimes not but always an easy, quick read and fun look into what happened with the Carr’s for any given week. Mostly designed for the enjoyment of family and friends, but never held back from the general public I case someone finds it interesting. I have been checking out a bunch of other blogs and found several “best of” awards and found a nomination form for “Canadian Blog Awards – 2009” and thought why not.

I am nominated in the family section with 32 other very cool blogs, with literally thousands of readers each, so I am not holding out much hope for a top place finish, but maybe top 10 would be nice, so please help me out and cast your vote if you can!. On December 12, they will release the top nominations in each category so I will keep you posted!

A, B, C, and a D
This is the time of the school year where we stop and look back and discuss a little thing called progress. The hope is that you are at the least a little a head of where you where the last time you did the look back, in an academic improvement kind of way. You get to put all your efforts and work into 1 of 5 or 6 categories and I am very happy to report the girls have done very well on their report cards, landing in the top 2 or 3 categories. A’s, B’s and C’s for both girls, and one little D. It would seem that one of the girls is not enjoying reading as much as we would like her to and for her effort (or in this case lack of!) she was given a little carrot dangling incentive in the form of an almost failing mark. Perhaps, she needs to start reading my blog.

Road Trip
Well as Nathalie’s Facebook status “love that after 20 years we can still be totally spontaneous!” states, we are still able to make last minute decisions, and fill the car and point it wherever and just go. We had already planned a shopping trip to the US for Saturday, so I guess it was not that “spontaneous” but grabbing enough clothes and leaving a day earlier and now staying a day longer, oh and driving a couple hours further, makes it unplanned in my books. So we end up in Detroit, Michigan instead of Buffalo, New York, for our little Carr family Christmas Shopping road trip.

There is nothing like a trip to a mall on a busy pre-Christmas shopping excursion to give you a little perspective. First, I am so happy that my kids have never been the ones to pull the middle of the mall temper tantrum, after finding out that they are not getting the latest whatever and I am also very happy that I am married to the best shopper in the world. Not only does she know product pricing, and if it is a good deal or not, but she has some kind of fancy magnets in her pockets that attract “the crazy math discount on discount deals”. There is know one that can get as much stuff, for as little money and in the end, have the sales clerk laughing to the point that they want to give an extra 5% off the whole thing.

In closing
I love my iPhone and so do the girls but not because they Google street map their friends house, but because it has a video recorded, and they love making these mini movies. I must have 20 or 30 of these little 15 – 30 second files on my phone, and they are so funny but so far my favourite one is a little song. I thought I would close, by sharing it with you!

Have an awesome week, thanks for reading, and please don’t forget to vote!
Jim