Anyway, I'm excited about one thing. We're going to switch to a cheaper health insurance plan. We've always just been with the insurance Brent's district signed us up with, BlueCrossBlueShield. The premiums are so painful and just keep going up. I was at a Valentine's party a couple weeks ago and the topic of health insurance came up, I shared how much we pay each month and our deductible and everyone there nearly fainted. They were all shocked. My friend with 5 kids yelled, "Holy cow, WE don't even pay that much!" - So I figured we should probably look around. Then I was lucky enough to be out with a friend at ChickfilA one day and we started talking about money and such again and she told me about their plan and their "insurance guy" that is fantastic. So I've called him and he's visiting with us tomorrow night. It looks like we should be able to shave a good $150 - $200 a MONTH from our budget AND our deductible will be about $800/year less!! So that's what I'm excited about.
Brent is stressed out at work. This is the worst time of year for us. The TAKS tests are getting closer and closer and his students aren't getting any more motivated to use their brains. It wears on him.
The girls are good. Mariska is excited to be thinking about kindergarten already, since we toured the charter school she'll most likely go to a couple days ago. Brynley is talking a bunch, although we're generally the only people who can understand her.
We went over to our neighbor's house the other night and played a neat game they and another couple they are friends with invented. At least I think they made it up. They called it "Rapid Scrabble". It was so much fun and I wasn't nearly as horrible as I thought I'd be! Although our friend James is a human dictionary and smoked us all. But anyway, you take all the letters from 3 Scrabble games and mix them all up, faced down. Each player (6) gets 14 letters to start. At the same time you all turn over your letters and make as many words as you can, they all have to line up and connect just like in regular scrabble. Once you are done using ALL your letters, even if a word is incomplete, as long as it's in part of a real word then you can say "draw 4" and everyone has to take 4 more letters and go from there. The first person to use all their letters (once all of them are in play) gets a bonus 10 points. The person with the longest word gets a bonus 10 points. Any letters you couldn't fit into your words count against your points. You add up your points and see who wins!! It was so much fun and seriously addicting! I had a great time and we're really tempted to run out and get a bunch of scrabble games!! I don't like regular scrabble, but I highly recommend this game! 
2 comments:
Do I get to be one of those friends? :)
I've played a version of that game years ago called Speed Scrabble, and I think there's an official version out there called Bananagrams. My version only uses the letters from one game but it's the same concept, only the words have to be complete, you start with 7 tiles, and you only draw one each time someone calls "go" for finishing their letters. If everyone is stuck then everyone just draws another tile until someone can finish their letters. I love it, but Collin only barely tolerates anything to do with Scrabble and word making games. Alas.
I used to love games like that. Now, my older kids want to play and they are getting better at it, but it's so hard to play with kids! Ugh!
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