The Final Four

This weekend I competed in a regional competition in Austin to be on VH1’s “The World Series of Pop Culture.” We had watched the first season last summer, so when Mark saw they were having auditions in Austin (the other cities were Chicago, New York City, LA and Orlando), we knew we had to go for it.

Shauna, our cousin Kristin and I made up a team. We were called “The Anthony Michael Hall Monitors.” Shauna thought of the great team name, and it was a big hit. We made matching t-shirts with a picture of Anthony Michael Hall on the front and we each had a different quote on the back. The first step was to take a 50 question written test (individually) on Saturday afternoon at the Marriott in downtown Austin. If your team passed the test you went on to be interviewed by the producers. Our team passed!!! We were so excited. Only 3 teams passed from our session of about 35 teams. We went on to the interview and the producers said they were picking only 8 teams (out of about 200 teams) to compete in a mock competition the next day. So, we didn’t know how good our chances were of being picked as one of the eight teams--but they called on Saturday night and told us we had been chosen!!!

Then we went to the mock competition on Sunday. It was set up like the real show with cameras, lights and all that. We won the first round--beating a team made up two people from LA and one person from New York City. I did horribly, but Kristin won it for us. It was down to the final four teams, and sadly we were eliminated in the round of four. But we are proud we made it to the final four! There is still a small chance we may be chosen to compete in the real competition in New York City in March. They pick 9 “wild card” teams out of the 35 teams that made it to the finals in all of the cities where they did auditions. So we’ll see. At least we can say we were one of the top four teams in Austin.

David posted some photos from the audition on his blog. Click here to see them.

In other news...Luke had a bad cold for about a week. It was pretty

terrible. Then I caught the cold. We are both still dealing with a runny nose but we are on the mend. Thankfully, Sharon (Grammy) was able to come and take care of Luke so I could rest and get over the cold quicker. I wanted to be sharp for the pop culture competition! Luke is really close to sitting up on his own. He is growing so fast! We got him a Baby Einstein exersaucer and he loves being in it. It took him a few days, but

he figured out how to turn all the way around in it and play with all the toys. We started feeding him rice cereal. He seemed to like it okay but we haven’t starting pushing solid food yet. I think this week or next week we will start feeding him rice cereal every day and then move on to a vegetable. That should be fun.

We find out on February 19 if we will have a new little niece or nephew in July. We can’t wait!