I Got You Babe

STILL GOING STRONG: Here are CJ and Annabelle with a pair of newlyweds. The ghoulish bride and groom were from our Halloween costume party themed wedding, Oct. 26, eight years ago.

Grab the groom's hand and they start singing (and dancing to) "I Got You Babe." We all love getting them out every Halloween season. It's always nice to hear them still singing away!

I'VE GOT RHYTHM: Today was Musikgarten. In preparation, the kids did this week's homework, which involved transcribing a song, playing a couple of songs on the glockenspiel and singing along with a CD for a couple of other songs.

One of the songs they had to sing was "Cockles and Mussels." The first verse is:

In Dublin's Fair City
Where the girls are so pretty
I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone
As she wheel'd her wheel barrow
Through streets broad and narrow
Crying cockles and mussels alive, alive o!

After singing it, CJ asked me if Molly Malone was a real person. I told him I thought there were probably hundreds if not thousands of Molly Malones, and that there's a good chance that the song was, indeed, written about one of them.
They also had to find note cards that matched measures from "Who's That." Instead of singing the song in correct tones, I had them use their glockenspeil mallets to hammer out the rhythm as they said the song. That was good practice - they could really 'feel' the difference between half, quarter and eighth notes.

The were each supposed to bring something Irish-inspired to class today. Annabelle wore a ring her grandma and grandpa bought for me in Ireland several years ago. CJ wore a "Made in Ireland" t-shirt (which is only a small part true in his case).

We didn't go to yoga today. I just wasn't up to that commute. I'm on day 6 of the plague.

ABCD: This morning, for whatever reason, CJ was asking me about vitamins. He wanted to know which vitamins were good for what and how you get the vitamins.

I went to Thinkquest and found lots of projects about vitamins posted there. We read up on A, B, C, and D and where they come from and it really underscored the fact to me that CJ, especially, should be taking multi vitamins every day. Of course he can't stand taking vitamins.

PUMKINSHOP: Annabelle's been asking to Photoshop for the past couple of days, so today I had the idea to morph the kids' faces onto a pumpkin.

We started by shooting a photo of one of the pumpkins we got on our trip to the farm in Snohomish County a couple of weeks ago. Then we shot mug shots of each of the kids.

First, Annabelle isolated her face in Photoshop, and then we cropped the pumpkin photo. We dragged Annabelle's face over onto a layer behind the pumpkin and carefully erased the pumpkin were Annabelle's eyes and mouth were. We did likewise for her nose, but adjusted the opacity, so it didn't pop like the eyes and mouth.

We were all sufficiently creeped out by the end result. Tomorrow we'll turn CJ into a pumpkin head.

DAMMIT, JANET: Tonight the kids got their first dose of the "Rocky Horror Picture Show," Never too young, right? Tonight's episode of "Glee" had a RHPS theme, so they got a made for network TV at 8 p.m. version.

CJ was highly amused by "Dammit, Janet." He thought it scandalous that they'd use that word in a song - over and over and over - and was grinning ear to ear while listening to it. Reminds me of when I was a kid about his age, how we used to love it when "Leroy Brown" came on the school bus radio and we'd all scream/sing "He's bad, bad Leroy Brown. Baddest man in the whole damn town" and think we were really getting away with something.