The Search for Miss Direction: Who Purloo?

First and foremost - Happy Birthday to my wonderful sister, Michelle! Hope you had a wonderful day, babe! Glad we got to see you and spend some time hanging out on Sunday. Hope the minion lights arrive soon :D

There may be no better way to spend a crisp Fall morning than with the best friends a girl could ask for to chat with, kiddos to run and play around and apple pie/crisp for everyone! Because of the way the weeks fall this month, we had an extra week in between MOPS meetings and I was really starting to miss everyone. When the fabulous Amber was over last Tuesday we had enough pie filling left over to make a full pie and I happened to have an unbaked crust in my freezer. So we filled it up and invited everyone over! It was a great way to spend the morning for sure.

And mad props to the Bean who with really minimal assistance cleaned up without any fuss after everyone left. (And in all fairness, everyone did pitch in before they left some too.) I had hoped to get our South Carolina craft going, but as a treat, I instead told her she and A who was here visiting this afternoon could watch "The Little Mermaid" She and I are flying solo tomorrow night for awhile, so I think we'll try it then. It is definitely a girls only project and we'll get it in eventually! She and A (who are referring to each other as 'my sister' - love it!) were too cute totally captivated on the couch. The Bean was giving the play by play a scene before.

While the girls movied it up, I took the chance to do some prep work on dinner since yet again we were all going to be split up for the evening. It's going to happen again tomorrow night too, and it's starting to get to me a bit. By the time I get NJ home from the bus it's after 4:30 which leaves us less than four hours together (only about 2 with Grant) every night. And it's really not that we're over-extended on what it is we're doing either. Just takes some adjusting, I guess.

When Noah got home we grabbed the mail and discovered a really really neat mail call! This postcard arrived from Rhode Island and I actually had to track down where it came from! My friend, Morgan's husband's boss's mom lives in Rhode Island and she sent us a post card! How cool is that??? Have I mentioned lately how much this project has inspired me when it comes to the true goodness in people? Many thanks to Morgan, Joe, Sherry and Marcella for getting us some Rhode Island mail!

Tonight (eaten in shifts) we sat down to feast on Purloo. Don't worry - I had NO idea what it was either. I mentioned the Gullah people in last night's blog and this dish originated with them in the lowcountry. It is a really simple dish to put together and I knew it'd be a hit around here. According to South Carolina chef and owner of Gullah Cuisine, Charlotte Jenkins, "Any time you add meat to rice and cook it all together in one pot, that's a purloo." Whatever it's called, eaten in shifts or not, my crew loved it. I made this fun Cream Cheese Biscuits to go with it tonight. The recipe comes from former South Carolina Senator Ernest F. Hollings. I decided to make them drop biscuits for convenience sake tonight and only made a third of a batch and they are GONE. Apparently my family likes South Carolina cooking... We also managed to polish off the tiny sliver of apple pie and bit of apple crisp that was left, too.

As soon as NJ got done eating he and I left Grant and the Bean to finish dinner while we headed off to Beechview for a reading night for first graders. Noah's interest in reading in the last couple of months has skyrocketed! I was glad to go and get some ideas on what might be good fits for him reading wise (I'm kind of over Captain Underpants...) and hear how awesome he's doing. Super proud of him. And it was nice for him and I to get to spend some solo time. I've really been missing that. We got to spend a good half an hour in his classroom cuddled up with him reading to me. (A poem about boogers of all things...) That's my boy!

By the time we made it back home there wasn't really time to squeeze anything else besides baths in, so maybe we'll get to tackle some more South Carolina related material tomorrow. Speaking of tomorrow, the Bean and I are off to the Pumpkin Patch in the morning for her field trip, I'm hoping to get in the We've Been There State (because we all get stickers, yay!) and tomorrow night Grant and Noah are off at a Cub Scout Den meeting. Speaking of Cub Scouts... Though it's not been widely made known yet, I'm excited to share that I'm going to be the new Activities chair for Noah's pack, (I know, I know because I don't have ENOUGH going on already.) Anyway, need to start thinking about what kind of adventure would most excite a group of 6-10 year old boys... On that note, I'm off until tomorrow! So until then...

South Carolina Fun Fact of the Day: The walls of the American fort on Sullivan Island, in Charleston Harbor, were made of spongy Palmetto logs. This was helpful in protecting the fort because the British cannonballs bounced off the logs.