Our adventures on much more than a three-hour tour . . .
Sebi's BYU Party
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For months now, Sebastian has been telling anyone who would listen that he wants "A BYU Party" for his birthday. Secretly I felt it was because we are bad BYU fans and completely indifferent to any and all athletic teams that the place holds so much allure for our kids. We didn't even have any BYU apparel or paraphernalia until this year. Despite this, we tried to pull something together.
We had 12 first graders and our whole family up on campus running two teams (Team Blue and Team White) around trying to find a dozen or so clues for our digital camera scavenger hunt. After an hour of running and posing, we taught them all the lyrics to the fight song, showed them highlights of Jimmer Fredette and fed them bagel pizzas and legendary BYU mint brownies.
In planning the event, the professor and I had scoured the bookstore and other local venues for BYU stuff. With the stiff prices they charge, we couldn't even afford to get them each a keychain ($7.99 for a keychain. Really? I say. Really?!). Enter Curtis to the rescue. He brought two huge bags of swag over and we made gift bags for everyone that even Oprah would have been proud of.
The inadvertent side effect was a pretty hard sell for the university. It was about the time we got to the olympic torch that one of the kids screamed "This place is the GREATEST! I am SO coming HERE!!!!"
@ Jessica: We know it, and we DON'T UNDERSTAND IT. In fact, this comment made the professor decide he's going to the registrar's office with a list of 10 students of his. He wants to say "what are their stories? They can't write a paragraph to save their lives, they quit showing up to class three weeks in, they flunk over and over and over again -- who are these other folk who aren't getting in? Are they decapitation victims?" @ Ron: both teams won. You can still get away with that in first grade, and we had enough SWAG that everyone got all the prizes. @ Deb: I love, love LOVE Kate's party. I've got to show pictures to Rob. Sebi is 7 now and we're not for it! @ Ann: sounds like you should have been with us for the party. You could have had a lot of very enthusiastic first grade boys singing to you -- an ideal birthday, no? OK then, we'll do lunch instead.
I finally got up the nerve to try my own Mohr im Hemd. This was the dish that we always ordered if we found it on the menu. It translates as "The Moor and His Shirt" which is so politically incorrect that it isn't easy to find, even though it is a traditional Viennese dish. It is a steamed pudding, like the Christmas dessert I grew up on and it is very moist and very chocolate, though not as sweet as an American dessert. It was successful enough that Rob had me make it twice more in the same weekend. Happily, after learning how to make it, I feel less guilty about eating the stuff. How often does that happen? Here is the recipe I used, as opposed to the top secret family recipe that I don't even have, or the recipe from my Austrian cookbook that asks for 'gratified butter': MA's Mohr im Hemd 3 bread rolls, crusts removed and cubed 1 c milk 3/4 c unsalted butter 1/4 c sugar 8 oz best and darkest chocolate you can find 8 eggs 1/2 c sugar 1/2 c walnuts, ...
Have we mentioned that Rob is now the Cubmaster? It was something of a shock, but it has been great for getting the boys excited about scouting (and let's face facts: Rob and I are lukewarm at best on a paramilitary, homophobic, psuedo-Hitler Youth organization, so our boys were destined to embrace it wholeheartedly from the start). One of the first arguments that Rob ever won with his parents was over scouting. They had moved into a neighborhood with no other kids his age, and so his eagle project would have been almost entirely solo (with some help from his younger brother). He proposed that instead of getting his eagle, he work towards becoming a Sterling Scholar in foreign languages at OHS. His parents finally agreed, and he did make Sterling Scholar at OHS, and went on to become the statewide foreign language Sterling Scholar. So my husband is one merit badge and an eagle project shy of his eagle, which just so happens (Freudianly?) to be exactly the same as my brother, Mr. T...
A Halloween Guest Blog from the Professor Because we are evil to the core, your humble Professor and Mary Ann stay up nights thinking of all the different ways we can ruin our kids socially. We eat vegetarian fare from the Moosewood Cookbook, we listen to Brahms and Faure and Stawberry Switchblade (only MA on that last one), and we do not do TV. Our final fiendish plot (inspired by Michael Chabon and Dr.Who) is to put our kids in our own nosatalgia warp. Instead of exposing them to Avatar (loathesome) and Justin Bieber (what the @#$% ?), we hook them up with Bill and Ted (Prof), The Scarlet Pimpernel (MA) and, as can be seen in these Halloween shots, we have introduced them to Star Trek. Awkward Family Photos, here we come! It all started with Sebi. He is half Vulcan, it seems, and on any given day he already looks uncannily like the young Spock in the most recent Star Trek movie. All he needed for the full transition: some ears, of course, and the appropriate haircut by our favorit...
Comments
@ Ron: both teams won. You can still get away with that in first grade, and we had enough SWAG that everyone got all the prizes.
@ Deb: I love, love LOVE Kate's party. I've got to show pictures to Rob. Sebi is 7 now and we're not for it!
@ Ann: sounds like you should have been with us for the party. You could have had a lot of very enthusiastic first grade boys singing to you -- an ideal birthday, no? OK then, we'll do lunch instead.