Janet's Blog

Yesterday, I fixed pigs-in-a-blanket for supper.  You know, wieners wrapped up in dough, and baked in the oven.  I take a short cut, using canned crescent roll dough, but Levi and Victoria love them anyway, as most kids do.  They like to help make them, too, almost as much as they like to eat them.  Hot dogs are not on the menu at our house very often, though. When I was growing up, we never had hot dogs for a meal at home, because Dad didn't consider hot dogs to be real food.  Oh, they were fine for a picnic or at a carnival, but we just never ate hot dogs at home. I grew up in Fairbury, home of the Fairbury Brand hot dogs that have been hawked at the Nebraska Cornhusker football games for so many years.  I doubt if Dad knew that our school's hot lunch program served up hot dogs, in some form, at least once a week.  I heard that Roode's, the company that produced the bright red wieners, donated the hot dogs to the Fairbury schools, or at least...

Where has this month of May gone, anyway?  Where has this school year gone?  Today was preschool graduation, my last day with students until August 14th.  Most of them are moving on to kindergarten in the fall, and a handful are just moving--to Scottsbluff or Morrill or Oklahoma.  Ten or eleven of my current students will be back in my afternoon class next year for pre-K, their last year before kindergarten.  But most of next year's kids will be new students. The walls look so bare without our students' unique paintings and collages, since we've already taken down all of the kids' artwork and sent it home.  Our morning students loved playing in shaving cream today.  They didn't know they were actually cleaning the tables--after all, shaving cream is just soap.  The kids helped pull up the masking tape that marked their designated seats on our area rug; one little girl cried because removing her name from the carpet made this day seem so final....

When we moved into our house more than twenty years ago, we decided to use our living room as a music room.  So we installed our small black spinet piano, Bill's electric organ, and my grandma's old pump organ in the living room and, for a while, that's all the furniture we had in there.  But, over the years, that room has served as a graveyard, of sorts, for dead and dying instruments. Oh, we have plenty of fully functional instruments in the house--several working guitars, Victoria's flute, and the baby grand piano that eventually replaced the spinet.  But even that cherished baby grand was reclaimed and rescued from near-death, and was rebuilt and refinished by a master technician so our family's budding musicians could play it. Bill's electric organ sits against the wall.  It's the one his Grandma Lucas bought so he could take lessons.  It's survived a couple of flooded basements, so some of the stops don't work quite right anymore.  B...