Monday, August 31, 2015

Life in the Convent Day 1

Nothing exciting happened.

I managed to incorrectly set my alarm clock so that the Sister in charge had to wake me up to say by to AL and BOTD, supervised a pool party, and went along to the airport to pick up one of my companions.

Sunday, August 23, 2015

What I Learned Yesterday

I have every right to be Munchkin's favorite niece.

Because filling in for AL for the day while she's at Munchkin's bachelorette party is no easy feat.  For starters, AL has everyone's schedule memorized so she wouldn't have been surprised when White Tornado waltzed over an hour after his cross country practice was over because "Saturday's are ice bath days." Duh Relish why didn't you know his schedule?   Then AL has the patience of a bunch of saints because dealing with hormonal, misunderstood preteen Little Miss would take all of it.  Almost ten must have been a pretty rough age if being told that you need to redo the bathroom sink you were in charge of cleaning causes you to break in to a traumatic fit of "No one understands me." and " Nobody likes me." Cue phone call to BOTD.   Bless Grammy for taking Star and Charmer for the day.  Next up figure out a movie for the parish Block Party.  No problem.  That had to be on the simpler side of the tasks I was left with I do believe.  The next item I thought was going to be simple turned out to be the most complicated and stressful process of my day: Scotcheroos for White Tornado to take to the FFA picnic today.  No problem right?  I bake all the time, consider it a hobby really.  Wrong.  Two trips to Walmart and Aldi's, a biking trip to County Market by Elizabeth Taylor and two pans of Scotcheroos later White Tornado had his dessert for his picnic.   Great now I get to go to a parish function right after it comes out in the bulletin that I'm moving to New Jersey in a week to enter the convent.  Super awkward interactions with church people here I come.  Let me tell you they were super awkward and I got hugs from people that I've maybe only talked to once or twice in my entire life.  A well timed text from White Tornado requesting to be picked up from Grammy's pretty much wrapped up uncomfortable church people interactions.  I took the youth minister for the parish a long with me so the city girl could get an up close interaction with horses which was all fine and dandy and I think she enjoyed it, but then a tired White Tornado put a kibosh on our fun.  He then  suckered me into giving both of the little two baths because when given the option they picked me.  Thanks guys.  Charmer in being his ever flirtatious self wanted the youth minister to give him his bath and put him to bed.  She ended up doing story time and helping with prayers which Charmer drew out to be a show off.  After making sure both kids were in bed, we left White Tornado in charge and took off back to the party.  We helped clean up for a while and then I told BOTD I was going to go home with Liz Taylor, Little Miss, and WiiMan.  Since AL had taken Little Red to go the bachelorette party, it was my lucky day to drive the Red Bus, which had been fine all day minus potentially a few sketchy park jobs at the grocery stores.  All was well until I had to park in the garage last night.  Munchkin you remember that Sunday when I had my permit and you let me drive home from church and I was going to back into the garage?  Yeah, that got repeated last night except for this time the rubber flap thing got broken and there's a scratch on the Red Bus that BOTD is going to have to get filler for.  I quickly learned the fastest way to get BOTD to come home when I called him and in a voice trying not to start crying asked him to come home please.   Luckily he wasn't mad, I think he might've actually laughed when he saw me tearfully sitting in the garage behind the Red Bus.  And so pretty much wrapped up my day in the life of AL.  

I hope you guys had a great time because I don't think I can be mentally prepared to be AL again for a long time.

Happy Bachelorette party Munchkin.

Friday, August 21, 2015

She's Related to Munchkin

While feeding eating lunch today the following conversation took place between Charmer, Star, and I.

I was explaining to Charmer why it's necessary for him to take a nap every afternoon so he can grow big and strong like the White Tornado.

Charmer: "I just want to be in the crib again."
Me: "That's not the way it works.  You're a big boy so you sleep in a big boy bed now."
Star: "Yeah you have to have a big boy bed. I didn't get a big bed until I was 4 1/2."

And history repeats itself, next thing you know she'll be telling people she was in a crib till she went to college.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

The Final Chapter

After eight days together and a very enjoyable experience on the beach, we were all ready to head home from North Carolina.  The first day of the trip home had minimal highlights other than I beat BOTD at the backwards alphabet game.  Oh and we stopped in a Tennessee Walmart and Elizabeth Taylor decided to use a her "Southern" accent as we walked in...  Sunday morning led to some confusion when trying to find the church. We got there just in time for the opening hymn.  It was nice to be back in an enclosed church after doing the pavilion mass in NC.  The Charmer was really missing our home priest and tried to make friends with the priest in KY.

Our lunch stop for the day included Little Miss trying to walk home from the rest area in Frankfort, KY.  No worries I got her to come back.   After lunch, BOTD decided he would share the driver's seat for the last leg and AL drove the rest of the way.  This put AL, Wii Man, and me across the front seat of the Red Bus.  What we learned, Wii Man is paranoid about the gas gauge.  We had a quarter tank when we left the rest area and the plan was to drive until we got closer to home.  Wii Man didn't like that plan very much and so spent the next three hours informing AL every time we passed an exit with a gas station and then freaking out every time we passed the exit, to the point he was almost in tears.   He even got told that it had to be a BP and we weren't stopping at any other type of gas station but that didn't help.  Needless to say,  he turned into a much happier fellow when AL finally pulled into a BP.  He really had no need for worry considering the light wasn't even on and we stopped more because we needed ice for the coolers than anything, but hey whatever floats his boat.  AL has voted him least likely to ever run out of gas.   I'm most likely.   At least if I run out of gas I'll know where I'm at, since I consider myself a fairly proficient reader of maps.  Wii Man on the other hand not so much and he didn't appreciate AL and I trying to make map reading a game.

That concludes our Seventh Heaven Vacation Saga 2015.  All in all it was a fantastic vacation and BOTD did an awesome job picking out the vacation spot.

Thursday, August 6, 2015

She Added a Few New Words to Her Vocab

Besides hanging out on the beach and enjoying the awesome weather for the week we also spent a lot of time playing various board and card games.  Elizabeth Taylor makes a really interesting fellow player.  Turns out she's a really risky Euchre player, to the point that BOTD was regretting saying he would be her partner on multiple occasions.  She is also quite the character when playing Bananagrams.  For those of you who don't know what that is, it's a word game that basically involves each player creating their own Scrabble board out of little tiles.  Liz Taylor decided to ditch the general convention of trying to get rid of all your tiles by spelling whatever words possible that weren't proper knows or abbreviations and waited for just the right letters to spell the words she wanted.  One particular game she wished to spell numbskull, failing to draw all the letters she needed she spelled out numbscuttle.  After that White Tornado did something to tick her off so she spelled out his name and then added is a cottenheadedninnymuggins.  Thank you Elf.

One of our favorite car ride games is the alphabet game and on ride Elizabeth Taylor was really struggling to find a particular letter (I can't remember what) and was getting irritated with me and BOTD as we were breezing through the alphabet.  After passing several Bojangles restaurants she coined it as her new catch phrase and every time she didn't agree with something she declared that it was "Bojangles."  It stuck and she's still declaring Bojangles on people, we'll see how long this lasts and if she can make it a thing.

Monday, August 3, 2015

Carolina Baby! Day 2 and some....

Day 2 at the beach house started out with mass, in an outdoor church. It was an interesting experience to say the least.  Apparently the experience was a little much for the Charmer because in the 10 minutes it took to get back to the house he fell asleep.


This is actually how the Charmer spent a fair amount of his time in the car.  Vacation was just too much for the little guy. 

After refueling and sunscreening it was off to the beach for the afternoon to play in the ocean.  The fact that we were in the ocean had to continuously be reinforced to Star and Charmer since they kept calling it the pool.   By the end of the week we seemed to have gotten it down with at least Star that we were in the ocean. 

Monday brought the first full day we spent on the beach.  It was absolutely wonderful.  What I learned that day was the humidity right off the coast is intense when you're going for a run and after a stifling run Monday morning, I gave up on the whole idea of working out on vacation and chalked swimming in the ocean up as good enough.  Elizabeth Taylor learned on Monday the value of frequently reapplying sunscreen.  By the end of the day she was stop light red and in a decent amount of pain.  Little Miss, although not as red, also fell to the pain and agony that comes from sunburn.  

Liz's day after pain drove us to find different forms of entertainment on Tuesday.  AL found the Cape Fear museum and we departed for it.  The guy working the museum informed us the museum is not the biggest in the state, but it is best in the state.  I'll give it to him, it was a pretty cool place.  It covered American history starting with the Native Americans and went up until the late 20th century. Through out were interactive things for people of all ages to partake in and really there was something for everybody to see.  By the end however, the Seventh Heaven crew was ready to move on to something different.  We did a little bit of a driving tour of historic Wilmington, which is gorgeous and I would love to go back and tour someday.  To spark the interests mostly of White Tornado, but some of the other older people as well, we drove to see the USS North Carolina.  AL read up that the self-guided tour was three hours and a lot of stairs so for the present time we opted out.   


A delicious stop at a Red Robin wrapped up our day off the beach. 


Sidenote: I learned something about Star on vacation, for such a tiny person she has an amazing capability to take up an entire full sized bed. 


I ended up moving her back to her side every night and every morning she was right back to being right next to me.  She will admittedly tell you that she likes to snuggle while she's sleeping. 

Sunday, August 2, 2015

We're going on a trip

In our favorite rocket ship....

9 people, 9 days, 1 red "rocket" suburban.

T minus 16 hours till Seventh Heaven takes on the show on the road for vacation.  We're hot and heavy in the middle of packing anything and everything we could possibly need for week on the beach.  Stuff is getting real.

Due to various reasons the blog got ignored over Seventh Heaven's vacation.  No worries though there were plenty of bloggable moments that will be coming to you now that we have returned.

First of all I'm happy to report that all members of Seventh Heaven returned home alive and mostly unscathed minus some sunburns and maybe the trauma of getting knocked over by a few waves and some scraped knees.

In order to do the trip justice and not bore any readers to death I'm going to break the trip up into a few parts.  So we'll start at the beginning.  After a later start than BOTD would have liked, we hit the road on Friday morning.  Within two hours of leaving home, Star was asking from the back seat "Are we there yet?" and "When are we going to get to the beach house?" The playing of "Shut Up and Dance" appeased her for a while and didn't ask again for quite a while.

Star had a real fascination with the neck pillow.

White Tornado's appearance for most of the time spent in the car. 

The rest of the first day of travel passed rather uneventfully, mostly filled with napping, movie watching, and snacking.  Star again provided some entertainment by declaring "I am smelling the burnt stuff!" after AL opened up some homemade beef jerky for BOTD.  Turns out Star is not a big fan.

We stopped for the evening and the younger kids enjoyed the opportunity to unwind with the hotel's swimming pool.  It was outside and cold.  I jumped at the first chance to bring somebody inside.  Charmer's quote of the day came at bed time when the pizza we had for supper was affecting White Tornado.  "White Tornado's butt stinks!"

We finished our trek to the beach house Saturday and we learned a few things before making it to our final destination.

First, BOTD learned he's number one from several other drivers in the mountains.
Second, the mountains are not a good place for Charmer to decide he has to go to the bathroom "really bad!"
Third, it's not a fun when a state trooper slams on his brakes in the middle of traffic to pull a u-turn.  Especially if at that particular moment you are fishing snacks out of the back of the car for people.

We were all really glad to be out of the car at the beach house and after unloading we all got to go over to the beach which was awesome, but more on that on another day.