Alone

I am alone in my house. When was the last time you were alone in your house for any substantial amount of time? I am all alone, and I LOVE IT! My parents picked the kids up about an hour ago for the weekend at the lake and I am by myself, and thoroughly enjoying it. Dennis will be home in a couple of hours, and tomorrow after sleeping as late as possible, a quick trip to the grocery store, some household chores and a jaunt on the treadmill I am off to spend the night with my grandmother, but tonight I am alone and am doing NOTHING. Right after they left I flicked on HBO and Juno was just starting, which made me happy. Dennis is going to pick up take-out for dinner so I don't have to cook, which makes me happy as well. I am alone, and I am feeling relaxed for the first time all week. We had a super busy week here. Jack had Church Camp (which is CCD all condensed into one week in the summer) and he totally loved it. Abbey went to the YMCA Camp with my mother and she totally loved that. I worked 4 days, and we left super early every morning, all 3 of us slogging out to the minivan so that I could drop them off at all of their respective destinations. Off to work I went only to rush out to pick them each up at their respective places, rush to Taekwondo, throw dinners together and prod them into taking showers. Since I worked every day I was up folding laundry, scrubbing toilets and doing my normal daily day-off activities at like 10:00 at night. We were all exhausted and this morning I could barely drag my ass out of bed, but tonight, I am relaxing. I am alone and I'm loving it. Did I mention that?

Just Call Me Mrs. Weasley

In recent months I have spent a little bit of time on Facebook, much of the time taking useless and random quizzes. I wondered when all layed out what Facebook quizzes say about me. Let's take a look, shall we?

In the Facts of Life I would be Mrs. Garrett

My Spell of choice is to Stupify

If I were a Death Eater I would be Lucius Malfoy

If I were an Entourage character I would be Vincent Chase

I should marry Ron Weasley

Ironically, my Harry Potter Character is also Ron Weasley

My Hogwarts House is Hufflepuff

My Hippie Name is Freedom Daisy Sunshine

If I were an 80's Toy I would be a Lite Brite

If I were a Star Wars Character I would be Luke Skywalker

If I were a Billy Mays (R.I.P.) product I would be the City Sliders (hamburger makers?)

If I were a 90's sitcom I would be Boy Meets World

If I were a Muppet I would be Scooter

If I were a Random Object I would be a slice of American cheese

My aura is blue

In a past life I was a Jester

In a horror movie I am the besieged protagonist, watching all my family and friends get killed off but surviving

I should live in Maine, but when I go camping I should stay in a travel trailer or 5th wheeler

I would survive 5 minutes in the Ghetto and 5 minutes in an alien invasion

I am 42% crazy, 15% bitchy, and 100% girly

Facebook deems that my life is "Average" and that in a movie about it Debra Messing should play me

Finally, I am 79% addicted to Facebook

Too Gross To Look At

This morning the kids and I had to get up early and be out of the house so that everyone could get to their respective camp locations and I could get to work. Since we were rushed for time (what? I know, shocking) I grabbed Jack pancakes to eat at my dad's and Abbey ate a delicious looking bagel with cream cheese in the car. At least it was delicious looking when I gave it to her. The entire drive she was licking and biting it, sucking off all the cream cheese, while Jack made gagging noises and exclaimed a million times that he was NEVER going to look at Abbey again. He most definitely WAS NOT going to ever watch her eat anything that is so gross and disgusting again. He sat with one eye covered telling us again and again, and again, that he just couldn't look at her. She was too gross. Abbey responded by waiting until he snuck a peek and then opening her mouth to give him a nice big view of chewed up cream cheese and bagel. Ahhh, sibling love.

My Beloved One,

I received this e-mail at work yesterday. I just can't believe my luck! A couple of days ago I was worrying about refinancing so we could consolidate some debt, and now this. Well there is certainly no need for us to re-finance now, thanks to Mrs. Anderson we are now MILLIONAIRES. Alleluia, my prayers have been answered. This is what it said.

My beloved one,

I am Mrs. Rita Anderson from Luxembourg, I am 51 years old; I am now a new Christian convert, suffering from long time cancer of the breast. my late husband was killed during the gulf war, and during the period of our marriage we had a son who was also killed in a cold blood during the War.I have since lost my ability to talk and my doctors have told me that I have only a few months to live.wealthy and after his death, I inherited all his business and wealth. I selected you after visiting the website for this purpose and prayed over it, I am willing to donate the sum of ($18.5Million) It is my last wish to see that this money is invested to any organization of your choice and distributed each year among the charity organization, the poor and the motherless babies home where I come from. I want you God fearing, to also use this money to fund churches, orphanages and widows.

Mrs.Rita Anderson.

Well sure Mrs. Anderson. I will take your money and distribute it to who? The motherless babies? From where? Is that even how you spell Luxembourg? Let me guess, I just have to send you a message and then you will tell me to send you, oh, $2,000 or $3,000 for some sort of transaction fee and then boom, just like that, I'll get the $18.5 million. Yup, thanks a lot Mrs. Anderson. You've just made all our wishes come true.

To Blog Or Not To Blog, That Is The Question

Lately I've been feeling a little bit, well, blah about blogging. In the beginning I felt like I had all these ideas and thoughts running through my head that needed to get out. My kids were doing a lot of things that were either damn funny or damn cute, and so totally blog-worthy. But lately? Although they are still funny and still cute, they haven't done much that is very blog-worthy. We are just busy living our life. Work and house stuff and summer fun. Camps and cookouts and bug spray. Not very blog-worthy stuff in my opinion, so I just haven't been writing. Last year when I went on vacation for a week I could not wait to get home and blog. I missed it. This year? Not so much. It was nice to not even think about it, and it took me a full 3 days after we got home to even write anything at all. It's not that I don't want to write. I would love to be so creative that I could write a hysterical or touching or brilliant post every day, but apparently I am not that creative. Maybe I am having some sort of writers block that will come undone soon. Maybe not. I was starting to stress out a little bit about my lack of good posts when my tell it like it is friend told me to relax. Blog, don't blog. People will get over it. They like to read, but no one is going to die if you don't write an interesting post every day. And you know what? She's right. You'll all be just fine.

Scout Camp Happiness

Jack went to Cub Scout Camp all this week. He LOVED it beyond belief, and he also apparently is some sort of archery bulls-eye shooting savant. Tonight was the "wrap-up" event where I was painfully reminded that 1) I do not like the woods 2) I do not like dirt and 3) I do not like bugs. We sat in a giant dust ball on filthy wooden benches in front of a roaring campfire in the first real heat of the summer, while each "den" put on skits and sang songs. Abbey thought this was a good opportunity to play in the dusty dirt by my bug bitten legs. My feet were black, my clothes were trashed, but my son was happy. And dirty. Check out this picture I took of his feet when we got home, right before he was cleansed in a nice long tub.

Guardian Angels Do Exist

Do you believe in guardian angels? I do. I've always felt that everyone has someone looking out for them, and that each individual has their own personal angel just for them. I'm not positive but according to my few interactions with the Ouija Board in college my own guardian angel has the initials XB, and is a young girl. If you didn't believe in guardian angels before it is hard not to after reading this story out of Canada. A 3 year old boy wandered away from his family's campsite, taking his ride-along toy fire truck with him. He somehow took it into the river and rode it for 8 miles, over 2 hours, down the river before being discovered by a boater out searching. He had on NO life jacket and was completely UNHARMED. 2 hours! Floating down a river on a toy truck. It is unbelievable that he never fell in or hit a rock. Now, I am pretty sure that little boy, yup, he has a guardian angel.

Like A Warm Blanket

Since I can remember we have always spent a week of our summer vacation with my entire family. I'm talking aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents, family friends. Until I was 12 we would go to the same place every year, North Haven Maine. This was a tiny tiny island off the coast of Maine way up. We used to leave our house at midnight (so exciting when you are a kid to drive in the dead of night) and drive all night. My dad would have to take a nap that day to "get ready" and our little Subaru would be PACKED to the gills with stuff crammed everywhere for our week away. Since there was no grocery store on the island we would have to bring ALL of our food with us, along with anything else we would possibly need for the week. Thinking about that now seems ridiculous. I can't imagine having to pack not only our clothes and stuff for a week away, but all the food too? And the booze? Did they pack 30 packs of Bud Light in the car? I can't remember, but it must have been there somewhere. At least there was vodka and manhattan mix, thats for sure. I can barely get away with packing for a weekend away without bringing 4 giant bags. But off we would go in the middle of the night, stopping every year at LL Bean (open 24 hours for some odd reason) to gaze at the giant fish tank while wearing our pajamas. We would arrive at the ferry station 2 days later (OK, so I guess it was about 6 hours but to us kids it seemed like a very long drive, and we were probably sleeping most of the way so it must have seemed like a week to the parents).

After a 5 hour ferry ride (again, my memory may be stretching the length of this trip as well) we arrived on the island and drove the 3 minute drive across to the other side to our cute as a button cove. 3 cottages in a semi circle around a quiet rocky ocean cove. Our place was named "Aunt Annies" and was an old 2 story house that I'm sure was haunted by the ghost of Aunt Annie herself. Her body may actually have resided in the lumpy couch. My cousins got the awesome place on the water called the "Anchorage" and when the tide was in the water was directly under the porch off the galley (that's a kitchen for all you non-nautical people). It had a bunk room with 18 bunk beds (again, there may have been around 4 but when you are 6 years old everything seems HUGE). My great aunt and uncle's place was basically 2 trailer type rectangle structures pushed together. The first had the deck and kitchen and the second had the bedrooms and bathroom. It was so cool, you had to actually leave the bedroom and walk outside and around to the front to get into the kitchen. For the life of me I can't remember the name of it though. Everything smelled like the sea air and we would have to wear lots of sweatshirts and collect starfish and dry them out on the rocks. We would find sea glass and go out in the row boat and swim in the freezing cold 45 degree water. We would dig for clams and my uncle would cook steamers and chowdah and the adults would have cocktail hour starting every day at 2. My cousin Colleen and I would find out who was eating the best dinner at what cottage and eat there. We slept in the bunk room, at haunted Aunt Annies, in the back beds of the rectangle trailer with all the old magazines. There was no t.v., no phone. We listened to our Fisher Price radio and put on shows for ourselves. I always felt safe and loved wherever I went in that cove, and vacations spent there make up my most precious childhood memories.

Fast forward 20 some odd years ahead and what do you find? We are STILL vacationing together. Some things have changed. We no longer go to our dear North Haven (I heard Aunt Annies actually sunk and collapsed right into the marsh behind it) and we have since lost our beloved Uncle Dick, but we do go to our cottages on the lake. Our places are a little more spread out now (although with the way our group has grown that is not exactly a bad thing). We now add our own spouses to the crew, as well as all the kids we've gone on to birth. This year on the Fourth of July there were 26 of us, all decked out in these super cool matching teal tee-shirts.

The best thing about our week away is that I still feel the exact same way I felt when I was a little kid. Like being wrapped in a warm blanket for a week I am completely safe, loved and protected. I love that for one week we all stop our regular lives and come together to just be together. I love that Jack and Abbey will grow up having their very own memories of their wonderful vacation weeks with their cousins, their aunts and uncles. I love that we all still get along well enough to actually want to spend a week together. We are a big close family, and I truly believe the reason we are still a close family is our commitment to having these yearly vacations together. These vacations together lead to holidays together lead to birthday parties together lead to Sunday dinners together lead to, well, lead full circle back to family.

Happy Fourth!

Can't write, family waiting in the van. Off to our family vacation extravaganza at the lake! Be back in a week.

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!