The Hurricane, the SEQUEL?!?!?

After witnessing an exchange between my little Hurricane and our cable guy last night while he was dropping off a new remote (at 7:30 no less! Yay for Suddenlink!.... and by exchange I mean that the Hurricane kept jumping in between our cable guy and Prince Charming while they were discussing remote controls and yelling "hey, SIR! I a pincess! I Awiel! Tister is Seeping Booty. I Cinnerella! Tister Tow Wite! I pwetty! Watch me dance like-a-rella! I a Cheetah Girl! I Aqua. Tister Dowinda and Mommy is Chanel!". :::::sighs::::: At least she said "sir", right?) and realizing how many people say that she acts JUST like me (Okay, okay, it was mainly my mom, and mainly when the Hurricane was in Category 3 or higher mode), the thought occurs to me that I should send my mother flowers fairly often. Okay, really I thought I should send her Vodka and Xanax, but I don't think I can really do the Xanax bit, and the vodka alone would just be sad, right?

On a brighter note, this kid is so freaking smart! She knows all of her colors, has sung her ABCs for over a year now, has been able to spell her name for about that long, too, can count to like 16, knows 0,1,2, and 5 by sight (I still can't figure out how she learned that one), can count to 10 in Spanish, is peepee potty trained (we're working on the other bit), and has a memory like an elephant (they're the ones with good memories, right?). She's also one of the MOST flipping adorable children I have ever seen, has joy radiating from her pores (most of the time :X) and has has the sweetest little voice. I could listen to her talk all day long. Most days. Who am I kidding, that IS what I do most days, lol!!

Well, if you're a semi-regular reader, (or have read more than once or twice) you know that you can never trust me if I say I'm going to blog "tomorrow". Here in JuliLand, "tomorrow" means sometime after I've slept. I never say how many TIMES I will have slept, lol! To be honest, I COULD have blogged, but I'm known as something of a procrastination queen, and I instead chose to make a nap mat cover for someone at the girls' preschool, do some embroidery, make my very first brisquet ever, blow up the bouncy house and let the girls have some friends over to jump, buy some Halloween fabric, plan some FABULOUS H'ween skirts and dresses for the girls and a few kids I sew for, and be online searching for a new dining room table and chairs that will eventually be my breakfast nook, and trying to figure out something to blog about. No wonder I'm tired!

DWTS, I won't do a HUGE recap, but let me just say that it looks like a fun season! The girls are excited about "Jake Ryan" from Hannah Montana being on there, and HRH thinks that Misty May-Treanor looks "kinda like my teacher!" LOL! DH thinks Misty May-Treanor is pretty, and I think MAKS is pretty, so we're all pretty thrilled around here. Although, I will say that I'm a little irked that they're allowing curse words on it. I'm no saint, and I'm no prude, but it was nice to have a show we could watch together without having to worry about crap like that. Eh, well, I guess we'll just have to say "you can't say that" when we hear bad words, but it still irks me.

Exercising, for anyone following my saga, lol. Prince Charming got me back to the Y this week. I reminded him that LTG wants me to just do the treadmill or elliptical, yet he managed to sweet talk me into some weight machines. Damn those gorgeous eyes of his @@. So ever my biggest cheerleader, he conned me into doing WAY more than I should have done and NOW I'm sore. I'm not sure what muscles are sore, they're in between my collarbone and my armpit. NOT a fun muscle to have sore. (I thought I had heartburn or something, I didn't know WHAT the heck was going on. Stop laughing, Lara.). Then the NEXT day, he had the nerve to get me BACK to the weight machines again. (I know, I know, it's technically MY fault, but I don't really do technicallys) After one too many "work THROUGH the pain"s, I convinced him I was done (and I'm sure it had NOTHING to do with the mathematical equation I was forming aloud that correlated the length of time I had to do those cotton-picking exercises to the length of time until he would see his wife naked again, right?) and we stopped and all was right with the world again, lol.

I'm in a blogging funk. What should I talk about?

p.s.- I realize the ridiculousness of me complaining about the language on DWTS right before I'm cussing about my husband's bedroom eyes, but it's MY blog so get over it ;)

Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.................

I will blog tomorrow, I've started exercising again, with my drill sergeant, oh, I mean Prince Charming. But for tonight, I'm going to sit here on my couch with a nice glass of Merlot and some M&Ms and wallow dreamily in the return of Maks and Alec on DWTS. :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::sighs::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Reasons that GaGa's house is better than ours

According to HRH:

~ "Ducks. And geese. And we get to feed them with corn out of a milk jug. But not the swans, they're mean and I don't like to feed them"

~ Dixie Doodlebug is here (My mom and stepdad's little princess of a dachshund)

~ Tea parties and ironing (my mom has her ironing board toy from when SHE was a little girl with a toy iron and the girls adore playing with it.... wondering how old they have to be before I can let them actually iron REAL clothes :X)

~ Because of how close we are to Aunt TeTe (Keri) and SaSa (Sara) and their families and dogs and cats.

~ Because we made an apple pie all by ourselves here

~ Because we go to Texarkana and Shreveport

~ Pop is here and he will have tea parties with us and feed the ducks with us.

~ Walking down the driveway to get the mail (we have a mail slot at home).

~ Doing homework (with school being out, HRH wanted to do school, so we bought some workbooks and she is BLOWING through them. This kid drinks in new things so fast!

~ Falling asleep with Piper (our dog) in the rocking chair every night

~ Sleeping all in the same room at night

~ Going to visit Grandmere at her "villa" (My 98 year old grandmother who lives in a nursing home right down the road from GaGa's house)

And I have to say, I pretty much agree that these are all wonderful things, but Lord almighty, I am DEFINITELY ready to get back to my own house and my own bed!!!

Ike, the update

So Prince Charming went to check on our house on Sunday. We're still living here in GaGaLand, the girls are in heaven. We did manage to draw Ike this way, and lived with no power HERE and no telephones for a day or so. But all is back to work now and we're all happy. Prince Charming was TRULY a Prince for going home, cleaning up, and most especially cleaning out the fridges and freezers for me! We were very lucky, in that we had only VERY minor damage to our house. There is a small hole in our roof, looks like a branch speared it in one small spot. It is already patched, though, and can hold a few months until the people with more major repairs get theirs taken care of. We lost two big trees :*( But all in all, we are SO happy. We should be without power there for a while, though. They're telling us 3-4 weeks, so we're just taking it day by day. I am NOT going back there with two small children and a nervous and hyper dog with no power while Prince Charming jets off to Honolulu every week. I know this much, lol!

What have we learned this week?

* If we evacuate and bring about 5 days worth of summer clothes, we can pretty much guarantee a cold snap, temps in the lower to mid 50s in the morning, where the girls say "Mommy, we're brrrrrrrrzy" over and over again. This calls for a trip to Texarkana to Target and Old Navy.

* Lucky Charms make EVERYONE happy, no matter if you're 2 or 62.

* Who needs power when you have a little ceramic picnic set and mini sterling silver tea service?

* Swans will hiss at you if you get too close to try to have them eat out of your hands, but Canadian Geese and some ducks WILL get close enough to eat out of even a 4 year old's hands. (HRH's contribution)

* Having no cell service at a place you're staying when you are a cell phone junkie is HARD. I make the 100 yard walk down GaGa's driveway several times a day to check my messages and check for texts.

* My girls, in their never ending quest for total domination of the toy world, have discovered that when I am suffering from a lack of sleep, I am more likely to buy them things rather than risk having to deal with a mini-meltdown at the store. I never SAW their little pow-wow, but they teamed up and now the Hurricane is staying awake until 11:00 or so, while HRH is waking around 6, which leaves Mommy with ZERO alone and down-time during the day.

* It is NOT a good thing to have a fall-on-the-floor-and-bang-your-forehead tantrum on a tile floor (Hurricane's contribution)

* The lovebugs can see a Redbox from approximately 2.1 miles away on the open road.

* When choosing to evacuate our house, it was quickly discovered that the only irreplaceable things to me in our house were HRH, the Hurricane, and Prince Charming. Everything else is just frosting on my life's cake.

* Mommys should always keep in their purse : hand sanitizer, an extra pair of panties for each child, peanut butter crackers, Tic Tacs, and a small container of the mini M&Ms.

Feeding the geese:
Our tree (taken with a cell in the rain, so not the best pic, but so sad to lose such a beautiful old tree :*( )

*************************ADDENDUM***************************
One more item to the list occurred to me at WalMart just now

* Even when evacuating from a natural disaster, you can trust me to find and buy fabric. Sunday, I found some zebra cotton, which is SO hard to find, I think I bought a whole bolt, and today I scored some Disney Princess print for $2/yard and some Hannah Montana satin for $3/yard on the clearance rack. The girls can have new nightgowns when I get access to my sewing machine again :)

Oh! And!

FYI, in case you're following my exercise regimen, you can rest assured that I, in my never ending quest to slack off and avoid exercising if I think I can get away with it at ALL, did NOT go to the Y on Thursday and exercise. Instead, I moved all of the mobile things in my backyard into my garage (gas grill, charcoal grill, big plastic slide, Cozy Coupe, Little Tikes picnic table, plastic Adirondack chairs, etc.) and then wrestled my patio furniture to the HUGE pine trees in the backyard (that are probably going to fall on my house tonight or tomorrow) and tied them up. In case LTG is reading this.... OMG I am SO caught up. I could skip exercising for two weeks (and I might :X) and I would STILL be caught up! My legs, back, shoulders, and arms hurt! It sucks! I guess that'll teach me to slack off, huh?

Safe and Sound

After MUCH discussion (and eyerolling and childish sighing and stomping feet on my part, I eventually just said "I don't CARE if a tree falls on my house, but I don't want us and the girls to be there when it happens" and that worked.) we have safely evacuated to my mother's house. The girls are in heaven because we're at GaGa's. :) They've already fed the ducks, and to their delight, Pop has one so tame that it will come and eat right out of their hands! I will definitely be getting pictures of that as soon as the rain lets up.

We didn't have the horrible traffic that we expected, mainly because we took back roads. The highlight of the trip HAD to be when Prince Charming and I, struggling not to laugh our butts off or even dare to look at each other, because we would have totally lost it had we looked at each other, discovered that we had downloaded the NON-radio version of "Hollaback Girl" a little too late and were trying to convince HRH and The Hurricane that Gwen Stefani was saying "Oooooh, that's my ship that's my ship" you know, like she has a cool boat! And then that "this ship has bananas.... B-A-N-A-N-A-S", because she's so nice that she uses her ship to take bananas to monkeys at zoos all over the world. I'm 85% sure that they bought it. We'll see what they say in front of GaGa. Because you KNOW if they figured out that was a bad word, they'll be using the heck out of it while we're here. They're diabolical like that.

Prayers for all of our friends and family who are riding the storm out in the Houston area.