We Survived

Or at least externally everyone seems to have survived 7th Heaven's visit to the convent.  When they arrived the Charmer played his shy card, but he quickly recovered and turned on his normal charm with all of the Sisters.  Before their arrival I had warned one of the younger Sisters of his charming characteristics.  I don't think she believed me but within 2 hours of his arrival she was aware of his charm.

Sunday we went to Philly to check out some of the historic sites.  Star wanted to go see the Liberty Bell.  I'm fairly certain she has no idea what exactly the Liberty Bell is and we didn't actually get a chance to get up close it because of the long line.  We saw it from a second story window of Independence Hall instead.

Monday I took them around the school.  Liz Taylor came along with me to help in the cafeteria.  All the girls freaked out because we look so much a like and they thought it was cool that I had family visiting.  Then we went to the Provincial House to have snack time with the elderly Sisters.  Liz Taylor was in heaven or at least she might have been until the Sisters started talking about her following in my footsteps.

Tuesday we headed to the Crayola Factory.  It was a pretty cool place. They had a lot of really neat interactive stuff.  I spent a lot of time coloring while watching the kids on the massive playground they had inside.

So anyway all I heard about all day Wednesday and Thursday was how cute my siblings are and what a joy it was to have them visit.


On a totally different note of survival.  The Easter Triduum in the convent is a bit more intense than out of the convent even when you follow the Peggy days of obligation. Good Friday was an all day silent retreat. It was intense.  The parish I went to for all the services has a strong Spanish population and at one point I guess there were a lot of Italians there too, so all of the services were tri-lingual.  Definitely not something you ever found at my home parish.

The whole community pitches in to help prepare the Easter dinner.  I signed up for beverages because I thought how hard can that be? Just set out the trays of pop (or soda as they say on the East coast) and beer. Turns out that also includes making a punch.  Again not too hard and it actually turned out pretty well.  Some of the Sisters enjoy a glass of wine so I figured since it was kind of an important dinner I should make sure there was wine out.  I tracked down one of the Sisters and she helped me get out the right wine and then she was like here go open them.  When I told her I had no idea how to open a wine bottle she quickly told me I was going to learn right now.  So on Easter I learned how to open wine.

"I'm so excited..

and I just can't hide it." Because in 48 hours AL and some of the Seventh Heaven Crew are making their way to visit the convent.  The Srs. tell me they are excited too, but I'm not sure if they realize what is about ready to descend upon our house...

It's really a big moment if you think about it convent meet the fam, fam meet the convent.

Stayed tuned for more updates as the adventure unfolds.

Convent Q & A

Hello?  Everybody still there?  I know it's been a while.  Like everywhere else, the convent becomes a very busy place during the Christmas season with parties, Christmas programs, and last minute things before going on a home visit.  Once I got back to 7th Heaven the busy pace kept up and I was too busy soaking up every second of it to take a moment and blog.  Now after an entirely too short, but much needed two weeks spent at home I'm back at the convent.   With the New Year, I'm hoping maybe I'll get a little bit more of a routine in the posting, but we'll see what happens.  One thing I've learned in the last 4 months of convent life is nothing is set in stone, ever.

Today's question comes from Page Turner: Do you watch TV? Do you go to bed super early?

Answers:  Yes we do watch TV.  Every night after recreation we congregate in our study and either watch or listen to the news while doing other work.   On weekends, periodically we'll watch a movie. If you consider 10 early, then yes I do go to bed early. Bed time sort of fluctuates depending on the person.  Personally I try to be in bed by 10, some of my companions on the other hand are usually cramming in last minute homework at that time.   Sr. TK leaves it up to us to a point because she told us we need to be able to handle that sort of thing for ourselves so that we are getting enough rest to be able to function during the day.


And with answering Page Turner's questions, I believe I have gotten to everybody's questions from the last Reader Poll.  Once again, I ask you what you would like to know about life here in the convent? (I know some people had some questions they asked while I was home, but I've managed to forget them so if you could post them in the comments that would be fantastic. :) )

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

They Concern Me

This morning I was working in the kitchen and Elizabeth Taylor walks in carrying Star wrapped in one of Charmer's blankets.  She sets the "sleeping" Star in my arms.  Charmer then informs me that Star is "dead" and they are having her funeral.  Liz Taylor was going to burying her in the garbage can but first Charmer needed to bless her.

The kid is three.  How many three year olds know people get blessed before they are buried? Or come up with the idea of pretending to have a funeral for that matter?

Star miraculously came back to life right before being dropped in the can.  Two minutes later Charmer was dead and being buried.  At this point,  I told Liz Taylor to start having baptisms or weddings, the idea of burying each other in the garbage can and playing dead was a touch too much to handle.  I mean seriously when I was that age I definitely was not playing funeral maybe we have a future mortician on our hands.

What I Learned Today

I am not meant to be a bike mechanic. Neither is Elizabeth Taylor.

Quote of the Day

Photographer to Elizabeth Taylor and me: "Are you twins?"

Aunts and rest of Big Bad's Allstars: laughter

Me: "There's a five year difference..."

She Made It

Tonight I was excited to sit in the pew and watch as my little sister graduated from eighth grade and became a high school student.  I realize that it's just eighth grade and she's only moving to the high school across town, just the same I was happy for her and her accomplishments.

You did it kid! You survived the first nine years of your education.  So in light of the next four years, I have some advice for you to survive the craziness of high school.

First of all don't be afraid to try new things.  High school opens up a lot of new opportunities for you, take advantage of them.

Second, there isn't an elevator so don't buy a pass.

Third, even though I tell you pretty much everyday that you're a weirdo or a dork, you're a pretty cool kid and don't let anybody tell you any different.

The next four years are going to go fast and they are going to be fun, make the most of every moment before you have to go out into the real world.

Oh and by the way, I'm still taller and you're wearing heels.

Congrats Wiiman

On making your First Communion today. You did great bringing up the gifts.

Don't he and G.G. look nice?

Side note: I appreciate Mrs. S took some candids of us trying to get organized for a picture.

Throwing it Back

To three years ago today,

when the world was graced with the presence of a little boy.

In honor of his birthday today he is getting a new blog name, since to quote Munchkin "we know his personality now."  So I present to you

the Charmer, because as AL would say he could sell a glass of water to a drowning man. 

Happy Birthday little buddy! I hope you had a wonderful day filled with Let it Go and birthday cake. 

Readers' Opinion

It has been requested that this little fellow,

receive a new blog name.

The polls are now open for suggestions.

What I Learned Today

I have more bloggable moments in six hours at home than I do in four weeks at college.  Because Star's hot dog is not supposed to be cut up and she wants it on a bun,  Super Trooper needs some form of condiment for all parts of his meal, Reuben can't tell the difference between if his stomach feels like he's going to throw up or if someone punched him, Star can't brush her teeth unsupervised because the lid to the toothpaste may go down the drain, and Super Trooper has to have the pillow and pillowcase that he doesn't actually use before he goes to bed.

I love my family.

What I Learned Today

It's not a good sign when the eye doctor is studying your eye scan and asks if you have any big plans for your day, because when your answer is I just have to go to the dentist later he's going to just dilate one eye.  Then you are to get one eye dilated and look a bit odd for the remainder of the day.

You get a 24 hour grace period from the library on overdue books.

Don't get the trainee when you go to get blood work.  She can and will potentially have to stick twice because the first time she took the needle out when she was trying to switch the tubes.

Most importantly the lights on the dashboard do mean something when they start flashing on and off in the car.  On our way to White Tornado's swim meet yesterday, the battery light was flashing on and off and then the Anti-Lock light started going on and off in Little Red.  AL had me look up the meaning in manual. The battery warning said you should shut off the car and take it to get worked on, if you must be driving it for short distances turn off all extras, the radio and heat got switched off.  The Anti-Lock warning said we had brakes as long as the actual Brake warning light didn't flash on.  Ten minutes later the brake warning light came on so AL decided to turn off onto a side road and restart Little Red.  Little Red didn't start up again.  In the words of Star, "Little Red stopped in the middle of nowhere and we were "trapped"."

God bless Mrs. MC and George for coming to our rescue as we awaited  word from BOTD for further instructions.

An hour later BOTD arrived at the MC to take us and go pick up Little Red off the side of the road with a borrowed trailer. Star's highlight of the evening was the quick Dairy Queen stop on the way back to the middle of nowhere and possibly being allowed to take some selfies while we waited in the truck.

Unfortunately, after two hours of effort and a trip by Mr. MC to the middle of nowhere, the frozen trailer jack was given up as a lost cause and Little Red got left to spend the night on the side of the road. 

The Irony

One year ago, I would have been right alongside my siblings hoping, praying, and waiting for the Superintendent's phone call saying school was cancelled.  This year I hoping, praying, and waiting for them all to go back to school.  The whole getting a longer Christmas break was going to be wonderful mostly because they would be going back to school, but they're not. They're still here.

Please let it warm up and let the wind die down.

What I Learned Today

Star and I can go fishing now because we both got "fishing jackets" for Christmas.

Apparently all vest like articles of clothing are life saving devices. 

What I Learned Today

I can only make rectangular or square paper snowflakes.