Our Year in Review

California A look Back before it fell in the ocean - a state fair school...

This was part of Tilly's 5th grade state fair project. She choose California for the project, this skit/report, coresponding with a pen pal from California, serving a state food, writing a report on a feature of the state (she choose the pacific coast highway, creating a visitors brochure, a display board, dressing like a historical figure or traditional dress (she was a movie star), and completing a binder with all the state facts made this project a big one. With the help of her friends the video report is funny and educational!

Cooper Plays

Cooper started guitar lessons in mid-October...he is hooked.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Kathy Kelly

In 2004 I served in prison with Kathy Kelly. A unique, strong and amazing woman who is fighting with all that she has for what she believes.

Kathy (born in 1953) of Chicago, Illinois is an American peace activist, pacifist, three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and one of the founding members of Voices in the Wilderness. In 1988 she was sentenced to one year in prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites. Kelly served nine months of the sentence in a Lexington, KY maximum security prison.Kelly helped organize and participated in nonviolent direct action teams in Haiti (summer of 1994), Bosnia (December, 1992, August, 1993) and Iraq (Gulf Peace Team, 1991). In April 2002, she was among the first internationals to visit the Jenin camp in the West Bank.

When I met her in the spring of 2004, she served three months at Pekin federal prison for crossing the line as part of an ongoing effort to close the School of the Americas, an army military combat training school, at Fort Benning, GA. More recently, she has visited Gaza and Pakistan, writing eyewitness accounts of war’s impact on civilians.
Kathy Kelly is no stranger to coercion. For refusing to pay federal income taxes s her teaching salary was garnisheed; for repeated visits to Iraq to distribute toys and medicine to children, she and her associates have incurred thousands of dollars in fines, along with threats of imprisonment.

While reading the news that David Dellinger, one of the famous Chicago 7, had died in May 2004, I found that Kathy knew him personally and loaned me his book to read. She wrote several articles about the ladies she met while in Pekin Federal Prison which I occasionally have found on the internet. She was not your typical inmate. She certainly made an impression on me as a woman who lived life according to what she believed and was willing to give up everything for it including her salary, her freedom and even lay down her life.

Beatles for Breakfast

I had the day off last Friday. It had been a long week. We all were fighting the flu, Cooper and Tilly stayed home from school two days and I tried to be at work and at home with them at the same time. Tilly was home one day last week, I am not sure what we had was H1N1 but two girls in my children’s ministry at church had been diagnosed and Tilly told me that the boy that sits across from her had been out for a week with what they thought was Swine Flu. My flu started last week and every couple of days a new symptom popped up. Runny nose, sore throat, horrible cough and then a retched stomach ache. I was glad it was Friday and even happier that it was my day off, although I was planning on working from home and going into work for a couple hours.

I decided that Friday morning was going to be special, we all needed some fun. I cranked up all my favorite Beatles tunes and decided it was going to be Beatles for breakfast. I belted out “Here Comes the Suns…doo da doo doo…” as I mixed up some pancakes, Tilly and I slow danced in the kitchen to “Let it Be” and “Yesterday” between flipping the pancakes on the griddle, we all “Coo Coo Ca Choo-ed” at the table, and we silly danced to “Get Back” and “Sgt Pepper”. My favorite moment was while I brushed Tilly’s hair, the kids both sitting on my bed, all 3 of us rocking back and forth singing “Ob La Di Ob La Da life goes on…oh Lalala life goes on”. Cooper and I looked up the guitar chords for a couple Beatles’ songs that he might learn to play. I was still singing the lovely ballad, “I will”, to them as we walked out the door for school. I think I played “Blackbird”, my all time favorite Beatles song twice (I was so inspired that I made a Pandora radio station off of “Blackbird” that I listened to while I worked on the computer later that morning).

It was a fun and memorable morning. Isn’t it nice to share something that you love with your kids? I am not even sure they knew I liked the Beatles before that day, I guess maybe I had forgotten too.

My New Blog

I have been so busy and unable to keep up with this blog, so I decided to start another blog. That kind of backward logic always gets me into trouble.

Actually, it’s because this has been a really rough year at work (I know that most of the country can say that). Between the 10% pay cut, commission checks that are as pathetic as my sales and our 4 day work week, my income is on target to be about ½ of what is was last year. I am not complaining though. I still have a job and God has provided for me without fail.

In June I lost my biggest account, plus their sister company. Half my corporate clients have been on a spending freeze for months (although it seems that it looseing up in the last quarter)
At the end of August I made up my mind that I was going to change the direction my job was going by putting more effort towards it. That is one thing I have always liked about sales, for the most part you get out of it what you put into it.

I decided to make a deal with myself that I would go full throttle, working more hours and thinking outside the box, for 6 months as an experiment to see what the ROI would be for me. Not that I had been giving less than my best at work but it had been so stressful this year that I often couldn’t wait to leave work. Once it was 5pm I wanted to leave it all behind and I did. Working more, a couple hours each night, working 5 days even if I was paid for 4…meant giving up some things that were filling that time normally. I watch far less TV, I spend less time on the computer blogging or browsing Face Book, etc. Working from home on the weekends and for a couple hours after the kids go to bed each night has become pretty routine for me (I can log in to my work computer from my home PC). The 9:30 to Midnight block used to be filled with finishing up a couple chores and then watching TV or sitting at the computer. The chores can’t be skipped so…bye bye free time. I have tried not to take any time away from my kids. I will skip the chores if, say, Cooper wants to play a game of Boggle or Tilly wants me to help her with something. I am still working on juggling my new dedication to work while maintaining my essential order of priorities.

The tasks of my job pretty much falls into 3 categories.

1. Sales/Developing New Business…Prospecting, cold calling, relationship building, keeping enough prospects in different stages in my sales funnel that I continuously bring new business in.
2. Account Management; presenting product ideas, quoting and writing up orders for my current clients as well as managing the online stores of my program clients.
3. Marketing; I send a weekly email blast to around 3000 contacts of our sales team, I set up promotions and now I have started a business blog.

So back to my original point…My new blog’s http://www.sullivangroup.blogspot.com/ has replaced what used to be our companies “monthly specials” link on our website.

There was really nothing special or monthly about the page before. We had a hard time keeping the specials up to date and I rarely ever got orders from those who found the link. I wanted a page where we could have up to minute specials and sale notifications on a more diverse product offering than just the half a dozen items we would call our “specials” for 3 or 4 months.

I wanted a place where I could pass on all the products and ideas I run across as I am searching and sourcing products for customer projects and quotes. I send one email blast out a week, anymore would be annoying, usually featuring one specific product. With the blog we can post as often as we like and include a bigger variety of thousands of products available with logos that we offer.

I have just started to promote the blog, I wanted to have something there to look at before I sent customers and prospects to it. I am still trying to find the right voice for the writing, oscillating between sticking with the professional image that Sullivan’s projects and adding a little humor or irreverence to make it more enjoyable to visit the blog. I want to stick to the main objective, which is to present product ideas, educate visitors to the products available, and provide up to date sales and specials. But I also want to vary the posts to reach a broader audience.

See what you think of the new blog? And of course send all the referrals you can think of to it…or let me know if you know someone who buys promotional products and apparel for their company.

And of course I will let you know what the return on my Full Throttle investment is.

My Rock Stars

Rock Star Tilly and her rescue dog Grizzom (known here as Grizz-Master-D) were in the Apple Festival Pets and Pals Parade of Fashion Show again this year.

Prayers for a Solider and his Mom

An entry from the journal that I kept while in Pekin Federal Prison

March 21, 2004…

“I’ve been praying for Dustin since Kim arrived.
Her son was headed overseas. She was trapped inside this prison. The separation bigger and deeper than mere imprisonment divides. I wrote her a prayer straight from scripture…"hide him in the shadow of Your wings until these calamities have passed…let no weapon be formed against him…etc” She hung it on her bulletin bored and prayed it every night – a sincere fervent prayer from a mothers heart.
He died. Shot and killed in a training accident.
A brash employee delivered the news. His body is still in Germany – out of Iraq in a body bag. Her tears. Her anger. She tore down my prayer from her bulletin board. She called out to me when she saw me stand by her bed. “You know…Rocki…You know how much I loved him.”
How could this happen. Did my prayers come back void? Why God?
She is strong. This administration is weak. The circumstances sting.”

Kim Legore's stay in prison was tragic. She arrived to Pekin Federal Prison Camp about a week or so after I did. She and I spent time in the "bus stop" together. The "bus stop" is a 13 man room where inmates live when they first arrive in prison before being assigned a bunk. Our stay in the "bus stop" lasted a little over a month. Kim was in prison on a paper crime. She was a bail bondsman and she insisted on cash for a bond from a particularly sketchy client. A prosecutor then accused her of accepting drug money, and Kim was convicted of money laundering. Kim believed she wasn't responsible for determining how her client had raised the money. She did not get a lengthy sentence – I think it was 9 months. But it still seemed excessive to me.

As she was going to prison her son 19 year old son, a solider in the U.S. Army, was headed to Germany and then to Iraq. He was in her every thought. She was worried about him and we discussed her concerns often. On the page before this journal entry I scratched a prayer list, “Dustin in Iraq” is part of that list.

He was killed in a training accident in a city north of Baghdad. See a memorial page for him here.
I can remember when the news spread across the prison. I literally felt like the wind was knocked out of me. I was certain that the information was incorrect, after all I had been faithfully praying him and I had all the confidence in the world that God's hand was protecting this solider. My faith was shaken and then strengthened as I let Jesus speak to me through my anger. I found myself able to not question why God had let this happen but to believe through all things that God was good, all the time. Kim was given a short 3 day furlough to travel back home to watch her son be buried and then brought back to finish her prison sentence.

72 days later Kim’s other son, Sean, who was 29, died from complications during back surgery.

I do not even know how to comprehend what Kim went through. A woman who lost both of her children within three months time while forcibly separated from her relatives and her community. Grief was an understatement.

I have not thought about Kim in a long while. I pray that Kim has let Jesus speak to her through her anger and that she has come to believe that God is good, all the time.

Boys at the Lake

Shooting Prayers

Well, tonight was the last game for our rec league soccer. (We still have the whole fall season ahead for Tilly’s travel league soccer)

Cooper and Tilly’s team, the Foxes, took third in the tournament…for the second year in a row. The first game of the single elimination tournament was probably one of the most fun soccer games I have ever been to.

That game they played Saturday night under the lights at the soccer fields. The whole team played full throttle for the entire game. They were equally matched and ended up tied 1 to 1 at the end of the 4th quarter. After two 5 minute over time periods they were tied 2-2. The game came down to a sudden death shoot off. The coach from each team sent a goalie and 5 players who each had a turn, one on one, to shoot a goal from the penalty line. After those 5 all took a turn we were still tied. 5 more were sent out to shoot. 7 kids from each team shot at the goal before the Foxes were declared the winner. You would have thought it was the SuperBowl. It was exciting, tense, kids screaming, the crowd rooting, parents holding their breath…it was fun.

But here is my favorite part of the night. When Tilly was sent out to the middle of the field to wait for her turn to shoot during the shoot out, she and two of her teammates decided to take a minute and pray aloud together.

When the kids were recounting their part in the game to me that night, Cooper mentioned that he was praying too.

Win or Lose…I am so glad the kids remembered who to turn to when their facing a challenge...the One who is in charge of everything…the One who can give them strength and courage, the One who is their help and friend.

My Prediction for the 2009 Christmas Toy Craze

What can make a normally sane adult stand in the rain for 9 hours in the middle of the night waiting for a store to open, or turn a mild mannered mama into a maniac who will push down other mothers to get there goal? Wacky but true every year there is some sort of must have toy to hit the shelves before Christmas. Think...Tickle Me Elmo.

In 1984 shortly before Christmas Cabbage Patch Kids, created by artist Xavier Roberts arrived and created chaos in toy shops across the land as parents competed to buy one of the sought after dolls. My mom had a friend traveling in California bring home a Cabbage Patch Kid Doll for my sister and I.

Here is my prediction for this years craze...ZhuZhu Hamsters. If your smart (or if you cave to all the pressures of Christmas advertising every year) and you have little kids you will go out and buy one right now. Mark my words.

“Our Zhu Zhu Pets Hamsters are truly unlike anything on the market,” says Craig Ceranna, Marketing
Director of Cepia, LLC. “They drive around in little cars, zip up ramps and spin down slides, run in their
hamster wheels, and get into all sorts of crazy situations. But those are just the vehicles! The hamsters
even know what room they’re in. They make toilet-flushing or teeth-brushing sounds when they crawl
into the bathroom and sleeping noises and alarm-clock sounds when they go into their bedroom. They’re
completely interactive as if they have a mind of their own. Zhu Zhu Pets not only appeal to young children;
they charm and fascinate people of all ages.”

http://www.zhuzhupets.com/main.html

Girls at the Lake

First Day of School

First Day Back to School 2009 - Tilly is in 5th grade and Cooper is in 4th grade.

First Day of School 2008

First Day of School 2007 First Day of School at Nappanee Elementary - 2006 Tilly is in 2nd and Cooper is in 1st.

First Day of Kindergarten 2005
First Day of 1st grade 2005
How can it be that I have a 4th and 5th grader!

Time could not be going faster!

Summer Camp

Inside the journal that I kept during my stay at Pekin Federal Prison I found a picture that my friend Becky had sent me in a letter. It was a picture of us at summer camp. We must have been about 10 years old. Becky Sumpter, Sheryl Martz, Debbie Pippenger, and I went to Camp Tannadoona together. The three of them are on their knees in the picture holding the sign, I am standing behind Becky on the right. We are posing at the top of the stairs. At Camp Tannadoona you have to take 99 stairs to get down to the lake, the hard part is climbing back up those stairs after your done swimming.

Becky wrote letters to me while I was imprisoned, I am sure she sent this picture just to make me smile. It did then and it did again the other day when I rediscovered my journal.

Perfect timing really because Tilly just got home from Quaker Haven church camp today. She had a blast. She enthusiastically has been telling me about all the fun things they did...capture the flag, a talent show, silly cabin capers, boating with her counselor (who told Tilly's grandma when she picked her up today that Tilly was her all time favorite camper), KP duty and scavenger hunts. She also told me about "cry night" - she said that cry night was the night that the pastor preached about all that Jesus had done for them and they all prayed. And that "everyone cried"..."even the boys" she said.

I think Tilly got a kick out of seeing my picture from summer camp. I am so glad that she and Cooper both had the opportunity to go to camp again this summer. They both say they can't wait until next year.

New Year 2005

Copied from my journal while I was at Pekin Federal Prison, this would have been my 2nd holiday season that I spent in prison.

"Dec 31 New Years Eve

We had a nice get together in the alley - Champagne glasses made out of cut and filled clear plastic water bottles.

We picked resolutions out of a bucket...mine said "You will start to believe in people, otherwise tomorrow it could be God himself you won't believe in."

We had a quintet sing a harmonious Auld Ang Singe with altered lyrics ... "Oh Free Us All" - La La La.

It never ceases to surprise me - the human capacity to make the best in any circumstances."

• An "Alley" is what we called the hall that our assigned room was in. There were 4 alleys per housing unit. On each alley there were about fifteen 2 man rooms and two 3 man rooms sectioned by cinder block half walls on both sides of the alley. The party we had was mostly ladies from our alley gathered at the end of the walkway.


• I can't remember if we toasted with soda or possibly contraband grape juice from the kitchen, I do remember the champagne glasses that one of the ladies made by cutting the tops of water bottles off, filing the edge and gluing it to the cut off bottle bottom -(I drew a simple illustration in my journal) Who needs Martha when you have creativity like this...even though Martha Stewart was serving time in a federal prison at this time I bet she never made champagne glasses out of water bottles!
• The ladies who sang the Auld Ang Singe had beautiful voices and harmonies. The extra verse of original lyrics was beautiful, although I do not get that across in the journal. I wish I would have wrote it down.


• Stuck in pages of the journal is the little piece of paper that I drew out of the bucket with my fortune cookie style resolution.


• We tried hard, especially during the holidays, to take our minds off the fact that we were all away from the ones we loved and longed to be celebrating with. Although I attended this party in my grey sweatpants and white t-shirt, it was one of the classiest New Years Parties I have been to.

Prison Journal

As you may remember the entire contents of my house was packed into boxes and taken away to be cleaned after we had a small but smokey furnace fire in January. Well it is July and I hate to admit it but I am still unpacking boxes.

Last night, as I was trying to sort the contents of one of the unpacked boxes, I discovered the journal I kept while I was in prison. I had not seen it since 2005, I almost forgot that it existed. I am sorry to say I was not very diligent about keeping a journal, sometimes there are weeks between entries. I wrote so many letters to family and friends that I did not feel the need to write to myself. Yet still there are many entries that take me back to the very day they were scribed. My mom sent the journal book to me for Christmas while I was in Pekin Federal Prison.

There are a few little notes and pictures stuck in the pages of the thin hard back fabric covered book. These little scrapes and clippings bring back a flood of memories - some foggy and some crystal clear.

One of the notes tucked in my journal is the complete lyrics to the Beatles song, Rocky Raccoon. Another inmate, Lucy, wrote them down and gave it to me. I cannot remember why exactly. Just a piece of notebook paper with her bubbly college girl hand writing. At the end she fills up 7 lines with Do, Do Do Do Do Do, Do, Do Do Do - etc.

She was a funny girl. She was probably just bored and had that song in her head, you try writing the lyrics to a song you love without hearing the song. It is harder than you think...I am sure that we talked about it as I am a big Beatles fan too. The lyric sheet was probably a gift to me to make me smile.

Her "room" was just across the "alley" from mine. We called the walkway between the half walls that made up "rooms" the alley. Each housing unit had four alleys. So the ladies who lived on your alley were the ones you saw the most.

Lucy is epileptic. I saw her have several seizures while I was there. Waiting for a nurse to come from the FCI next door was intense during a seizure. She is a dynamite softball player. She comes from a good family, her dad was the fire chief in Bloomington, Il (or somewhere like that). Lucy is a super bright girl, a total math whiz. She had gotten through a couple years of college before she acquired a horrible heroin addiction. She ended up robbing a bank to support her habit which landed her in federal prison.

(Little bit of useless info...all bank robberies are Federal crimes because they are FDIC ...let me tell you that there were more than a few bank tellers in that prison, guess it's too tempting for some)

Lucy could tell some crazy stories about her life as a heroin addict. She robbed her own money bag when she was manager of a sub shop and said she got mugged...she made the report in the police station while holding onto a bag with a sandwich and the missing money.

I hope she is doing ok. I occasionally look for her on Face Book, but so far I have not found her. I pray that she got to go back to college and that her parents gave her another chance.

Bikini Bandit

SOUTHAVEN, Miss. – Police in Mississippi say a woman was carjacked by a bikini-clad suspect, who they say later tried to rob an RV dealership. Southaven Police Chief Tom Long said the suspect, a 24-year-old woman wearing a bikini, approached another woman in her driveway and demanded the car on Thursday. The woman gave up the car without a fight, asking only for time to remove her young children from inside.
Long said the suspect then drove the car to the RV business, where she told employees she had a gun and demanded money. The employees did not believe the claim and restrained her until officers arrived.
Police said the suspect appeared to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol. She was charged with carjacking and assault.
___
Information from: DeSoto Times Today

I get a kick out of stupid news stories...and this one had me laughing today.
Two things...
1. It is sort of hard conceal a gun in your bikini, no wonder they did not believe she had a gun.
2. An RV Dealership doesn't seem like the best place to hit up for cash now a days.

People like this make me feel really smart. Maybe that is why I got a laugh out of this story.

I Blog Do You?

In the beginning of 2008 my cousin and friend, Steve, started writing a blog. He called it and addressed it, I Blog Do You? "Good question", I thought. I enjoy reading blogs from local folks, especially Steve, as well as blogging pros now and then. In January '08 my kids, Cooper and Tilly, jumped on the blogging bandwagon and began reporting their lives on their own blogs.

In April 2008 during Spring Break I took the opportunity of a quiet house (my kids were staying with grandma) to answer Steve's question..."Yes, I blog too." I said as I set out to carve out my own corner of cyber space to publish my thoughts.

Blogging was great fun to me. I love to talk and tell stories, blogging seemed a natural fit. I am an ok writer, as far as getting my thoughts across. But I struggle with punctuation and grammar. I write like I speak...long run on sentences, reiterating myself several times.

I began filling my blog with things I thought people might be interested to read...my experience in prison, my ministry born out of that experience and my life as God was restoring me. (click the links for an older post in that category). I write alot about my kids, because I know everyone is waiting with baited breath to hear the true and amazing stories of Tilly and Cooper. Well, my mom who lives 2000 miles away is probably the most appreciative of this. (oh and maybe Grandpa JB, who lives close by but who cannot get enough of those kids). But I have always wanted my blog to be something more than just a family memoir. I wanted to use this media as a way to share my testimony, a written tale of God's Grace.

I watched my stats for the first year or so, seeing how many people visit my blog. Some days dozens and sometimes barely any. I was always surprised to hear from people when they told me they had they been reading my blog. Old friends, and friends of a friend of an acquaintance, others I have never met other than in the blogasphere.

I have not looked at my stats for months...I am afraid I would confirm what I suspect, no one is reading my blog. As it turns out if you want people to visit your blog you have to actually keep writing posts! And I have been hit and miss, at best, in 2009.

So now I answer Steve's question again, "I blog do you?"

"uhh, sometimes..?"

I am not sure why I can't seem to get back in the blogging habit. I think of ideas that I would like to post all the time, but I do not take the time to focus my thoughts into comprehendable paragraphs.

I am going to keep blogging, at a much less prolific rate than my buddy Steve or some of the other bloggers I enjoy.

Oh Well, I have a feeling that Steve might be the only one reading this.

And he withdrew his question this week...he moved his blog from www.iblogdoyou.com To just www.stevegall.com - I guess I don't have to worry about changing my answer.

Summer Camp

Last Sunday we dropped Cooper off for camp at Camp Mollenhour DNR Conservation Camp in Silver Lake, IN. We had been talking about it for months, he had been so excited.

Normally the kids both go to church camp at Quaker Haven, which is where their Grandparents go to church and is on the same lake where they live. The kids know that camp like the back of their hand. It is very familar, they can even canoe across the lake to say hi to grandma in the middle of camp.

But this year Cooper heard about Conservation Camp and it really seemed like a camp for him. At Camp Mollenhour boys ages 9-15 can go for a week to learn about boating, hunting, fishing, wildlife and other cool stuff that Cooper loves.

On Sunday right before we left Cooper got cold feet. He had been super excited but when it was time to load up and head for camp, he did not want to go. He was nervous. He did not know a single person at this camp, had never been there before and all of the sudden Sunday through Friday seemed like a really long time to my 9 year old guy.

We told him he had to at least try it. That if he got too homesick he could come home. When we dropped him off, I was the one who got nervous. It seemed that Cooper was one of only a few 9 year olds at camp. Most of the boys were 12 and up it seemed. In fact when I made his bunk up and got him settled in the cabin I looked around and all the boys in his cabin were 13 and 14 year olds, maybe a couple 11 and 12 year olds. Alot of the kids seemed to know each other and had been to camp before.

I was not preparred for being so sad to leave him! I was worried about him all week. I could not stop thinkng of him. Did I packed the right things? Is he meeting friends? Every morning I would wake up and think, "Cooper is in the water." At Camp Mollenhour the director turns on a siren of a sheriffs car at 6am every morning and the boys have to hustle out to the lake to jump in and wake themselves up! It was in the fifty's every morning this week and I wondered if he was freezing. I even put Cooper on the prayer chain at church.

We picked Cooper up from camp yesterday at 6:00pm. He had a great time. He shot clay pigeons with riffles, identified fish, he scored 92 % on his Hunting Saftey DNR test, he earned DNR patches in both hunting and boating saftey, he fished with bass pros, rode in fan boats, swam and scuba-ed, shot a bow and caught a baby milk snake named Spot. And he learned this pledge... I give my pledge as an American to save and faithfully to defend from waste the natural resources of my country - it's soil and minerals, forests, waters and wild life.
.

Nintendo Rules!

For Christmas my daughter, Tilly, got a Nintendo DS Lite. I bought it from Amazon. I picked the super cute Ice Blue with a little patten leather carry case. She loved it. We all loved it. The whole family got hooked on playing Brain Age, trying to out intellect each other in the brain games.

In April, Tilly's DS would not turn on. We charged it and it still would not turn on. We tried plugging it in to different outlets to see if that was the problem. The charging light came on but it seemed as though it was not charging at all. It was just dead. At the time we were just getting ready to move back into to our house after being displaced by the fire and figuring out what was wrong with the DS was not high on the priority list. I knew I could not return it to Amazon as they have a 30 day return policy. We had not kept the box and I was not sure what the warranty was on the game system.

One evening in the beginning of June I went on Nintendo's website and started the product trouble shooter. After the website could not recognize the serial number from Tilly's DS (turns out when you buy a product online the serial number is not reported with the purchase, unlike when you buy a product at Walmart and the number is registered as it is scanned) the trouble shooting ended with a phone number to call. As I dialed I was thinking "oh great, I will be on hold forever and then end up talking to someone who barely speaks English..." Nothing peeves me more than bad customer service.

But surprisingly I was about to be impressed with Nintendo's customer service. I was directed by a short automated answer system to a real live human being within a minute of placing my call. She was nice and helpful and American. She ran me through a couple of simple, quick tests - like plugging it in and asking which lights came on. After about 2 minutes she told me that she was emailing me a pre-paid Fed Ex label and asked me if I could provide a box to ship it to Nintendo's service center. She gave me a service tracking number and told me I would be able to track the progress of the repair. It took 13 days from phone call to receiving the DS back. That is pretty darn good considering it took me a couple days to mail it and it had sent to California and back.

The DS works perfectly again. And my year long warranty started over from the time it was repaired. Now that is customer service that keeps customers! Even though I had a problem with the product I am still raving over the manufacturer! I am officially a Nintendo Fan.

I'm Bored...Idea #2

On Saturday evening after a day in the sun, soccer try outs, grilling steaks for dinner and bike riding...Tilly came to me saying..."I'm Bored."

So we decided to make salt dough. I had not done this for years but it is super easy, made from stuff you usually have in your cupboard (although I did have to run down and borrow some salt from Kristi because we were short) and kept us busy for hours.

1 cup salt

1 cup water

3 cups flour

2 tsp oil

And presto...instant entertainment. Hands are busy, creativity is cookin', a quiet time for great conversation, a cheap and easy way to mix up some mother daughter memories.

We are planning on painting our creations the next time she is bored.

If You're Bored...Idea #1

Our summer days and nights have been packed full of recitals, ball games and sleepovers and such. All through the spring and the first weeks of summer vacation we have been running at a crazy pace. But now that are between baseball and soccer seasons our pace is slower and I find my kids saying "I'm Bored...".
I actually think my kids are pretty good at entertaining themselves. They have great imaginations and still find many adventures to get caught up in. We live in a neighborhood full of kids and they are independent enough this summer to ride their bikes to their friends houses and play in backyards and at the park or the school playground. Yet still, with all the hours of free time they have on their hands...I hear from time to time..."I am bored..."
If you are finding yourself in a similar situation here is an idea...

Go to Bonneville Mill in Bristol.

We took a picnic up to Bonneville County Park on Friday with our cousins, The Galls and The Millers (who are visiting from Nevada). The kids had a wonderful time...and so did the adults. Steve scheduled a private tour of the mill by calling the Elkhart County Parks Department. The cost was $1.00 per person. We had a group of 12. The tour of the historic mill that grinds corn, wheat, rye and buckwheat was interesting and kept moving at a good pace. The tour included many nuggets of education not only about history, but of gears and pulleys, machinery, agriculture and even nutrition. There were hands on activities and they turned the mill on so we could see one of the original giant stones grinding corn.


The park is a beautiful place with a look out tower to climb, a stream to wade in and plenty of areas for a shady picnic. This county park is located in the heart of Elkhart County. The park is open everyday from May - October from 10am - 5pm.

If you are in Northern Indiana this is a great close by, get away for the day.

Crazy Day

This Saturday looks like it will be quite the crazy day for us and I am wondering how I am going to be everywhere I need to be...

8am - Little Paws Playground Work Day - re-sealing and making repairs to our community built playground to keep it safe for our community.

9:30 am - Cooper needs to be at the park to warm up for his 10:30 baseball game.

Noon - Cooper has a double Header - he will be playing back to back games to make up for a rained out game earlier in the season.

2:00 pm - Tilly's travel soccer team, the Pumas, have their Tourney this weekend at the Jr Irish fields up by the airport in South Bend. Her first game is at 2:45 pm.

5:15 pm - If they win the first game - which they surely will - they advance to play again.

7:00pm - Tilly's dance recital begins in Warsaw. Her dance is not until the second half of the show and it takes an hour and 10 minutes to drive from the Jr Irish fields to Warsaw High School, so we figure that we can let her play for a good part of the game and still make it before intermission. Her team is already down one player for the second game - another girl who is in the dance recital - so they will need Tilly to be able to sub out.

I try not to let Tilly and Cooper's schedule's get to crazy by limiting how many activities they participate in at the same time...but somehow things all boiled down to this week. Everyday we have had running to do. In a couple weeks things will slow down. At least until Kiwanis soccer starts in July.

Memorial Day Weekend!

Our weekend was great fun that included...

a Little League Game...

Fun with Grandma and Grandpa at the lake. Both the kids went swimming off the boat in the middle of the chilly lake! We all played in an awesome family/neighborhood ball game. Family ball games are a tradition all summer long for the Stillson's, but this game was especially fun because Aunt Jess (an amazing left fielder:) was visiting from Arizona and we recruited some neighborhood kids to join us, so we actually had an outfield.We walked (well I walked, the kids skated on their Heelys) in the Goshen Memorial Day parade to show our support for our favorite candidate for sheriff...Julie Dijkstra!

I love holiday weekends!

Soccer!

To see Tilly and the Northwood Soccer Club Pumas in Action Click to enlarge.