Things I learned at Disney World

• It really is a small world after all... I bumped into an old friend from high school, right beside Cinderella's castle!
• Everyone should use credit cards... and not just any credit card, but one that has a decent perk program. Three of our airline tickets were paid using miles earned from our visa, and we had so many disney reward points from our other visa, we were able to eat at the park free for 2 days.
• Going to a bonfire on the first night will result in smelling like a bonfire each night thereafter.
• Katie changes her underwear A LOT during the day. For our 6 day trip, I packed her 14 pairs of underwear and she used them all. By the 4th day.
• A flight planned during Claire's naptime doesn't mean that Claire will take a nap!
• I really shouldn't try to keep tally of all the money we spend on a vacation. It's just too depressing.
• Disneyworld buses are trained to only turn right. It took 45 minutes on the convenient disney bus to drive us 2 miles down the road because we took backroads all around Orlando so we wouldn't have to make a very dangerous left turn!
• A "travel" sized tube of toothpaste lasts for 4 days. Not long enough.
• All Claire really needs to have fun is a beach ball and some water!
  
• Sometimes a "Lazy River" is just too lazy! We were barely even moving!
• I should not be in charge of packing... 15 pairs of flipflops, and not one single pair ended up in my suitcase! I had to buy shoes as soon as we got there!
• Walmart in Orlando is a lot nicer than Walmart at home! But still, who wants to go to Walmart on their vacation!? Oh, yes... people who don't pack shoes or diapers.
• The "Midieval Times" restaurant has a very low overhead. They don't even have silverware! As Katie said when they plopped a chicken on her plate, "Seriously, how am I supposed to eat this?!"
• Breakfast in the Cape May restaurant... $100. Breakfast in our room... priceless! We got to relax in our jammies for an extra 20 minutes!
  
• Balloon animals are useless. And when they pop it becomes a very bad day for everyone.
• Don't take a picture of Tinkerbell as she flies down from the castle. Resist all temptation to capture that magical moment.

• Do take lots and lots of pictures of your little girl meeting the princesses they love! These are the moments dreams are made of!

• 300 tvs to watch the Redskins game from every angle at the ESPN zone... and they still stink!
  

ADHD

I think I might have ADHD. Maybe I've always had it, but it was never diagnosed. My distractability and inability to focus on any one task has never been as noticeable as it is now. My brain is jumping all over the place~ Here's where my head's at right now:

• Geez, is it Thursday already? Another week done, another week that I still haven't gotten my Daisy leader training finished. Or started.
• I gotta make sure I stop by the bank to open the account for our troop, at least I will have done something leaderish before the next meeting.
• Ok the next meeting is tomorrow, I better iron on those patches to Katie's uniform... are we troop 1718 or 1817?
• Why on earth do I need to send in more money for Ryan's lunch account already? All he buys is milk, there's no way he's out of money yet!
• I hope that book order comes in before we leave on our trip so the kids can have some new books to read on the plane.
• Why did I buy that 5 pound bag of broccoli? No one's going to eat that much broccoli... I guess I can make some broccoli cheese soup... a lot of soup.
• I still have 12 apples left, what else can I make with apples?
• Is there an apple/broccoli dish I'm totally overlooking?
• We have to get our Disney Rewards points certificate before our trip... after saving them for 2 years, we better get a lot of free stuff when we're at Disney!
• Do we want to do Odyssey of the Mind again this year? It was fun I guess, and worthwhile. Can we fit it into our schedule? Maybe, but only if the kids are on the same team. And I can't help out too much with coaching.
• I need to figure out lesson plans for preschool next week... pumpkins...hmmm and then monsters... maybe we'll become Germ Busters and do a lesson in handwashing and flu prevention...
• What questions do I need to ask Ryan's teacher at his conference? Hmmm, how to walk the line between advocating for your child and becoming a pushy know-it-all?
• Why did I agree to be room mom? How am I going to get this fall party planned while on vacation? Am I going to get online and check email at all when we're there? I better get something out before we leave.
• Why havent' we gotten Halloween costumes yet! Shopping the week before, everything is going to be sooooo picked over!

ok, my head hurts. But for every answered question or thought process, there are 5 new questions or tangents... my mind is in a whirlwind. Boy do I need this vacation coming up!

Rock the Red

A holiday weekend, an extra day to procrastinate all the things that are piling up on my list. I am gearing up to really tackle my to-do list that has been catching up with me. Tim is in the middle of tiling the fireplace. Ryan has just started a big homework project that's due tomorrow. Katie is knee deep in Barbie clothes and some big party for one of her Webkinz pets. And Claire is naked. Yes, she's wandering around the house naked. But somehow the next thing I know, we're all in the van heading downtown.

We got a call. It's my friend, who shall remain nameless lest she get busted at work for giving out client tickets to her friends, offering us 4 tickets to the Capitals game. Tonight. In 2 hours.

Of course we'll go, how can we pass this up?

We're 8 rows from the ice, right behind the Caps goal. We're sitting with the rich people! Now THIS is a hockey game! We're close enough to see the players' facial expressions, and Ovechkin's missing tooth. Close enough for Pop Pop to see us on tv, thanks in part to Ryan having an end seat and dancing in the aisle flapping his little wings the entire time. What can I say, the kid loves hockey.

We all are swept up in the excitement, and surrounded by red jerseys, so we detoured to buy shirts for everyone. Plus we figured what we saved on tickets we could spend on shirts and food right?

Hmmm, is that Katie I see wearing a RED shirt? What? Has the earth imploded? Is that the same girl that doesn't admit that the color red even exists? Who draws rainbows with pink instead of red? I cannot believe my eyes!

By the way, with her missing her front teeth, I was cracking up all night listening to her shout at the top of her lungs, "Let'th Go Capth!" It was like sitting with Daffy Duck.

For Claire we bought a large foamy finger. Which turned out to be a huge mistake, as anyone else would have had the foresight to realize. Claire needed a 10 foot radius to swing that thing freely. But like I said, we were swept away with excitement and everyone around us received many bonks to the head. We also found out that Claire is good for 2 periods of hockey. Honkey, actually. During the third period she announced, "I all done honkey," and started to climb all over the 4 of us in an attempt to tunnel her way back to the car. She was asleep as soon as we clicked her carseat.

And speaking of sleeping... going to bed at 11 on a school night was probably not the smartest thing to do! Waking this boy up for school in the morning is going to be a nightmare!! Especially since I will be waking him up a little early to finish that Fall project.

Mickey Mouse and Bitches

That's who we're going to see at Disney World... according to Claire.
I love her mispronunciations, listening to her talk is so much fun! (those would be princesses, by the way, that we are going to see at Disney World).

Another fun and slightly embarrassing mispronunciation is pumpkin. Thank goodness no one understood her or even flinched when she announced that she was going to the f***** patch.

Almost as funny as when Ryan was a baby and he had a similar mispronunciation for truck. Or dumptruck. We had so much fun getting him to repeatedly say dumptruck for our friends. Yes, we were so immature. Immature, but also very very funny.

The first time we went to Fuddruckers was also kinda funny, but anyone could make that mistake!

Katie never was difficult to understand. She had no mispronunciations to speak of. She went for the embarrassing moments in other ways, such as asking the Target cashier, "Are you a lady or a man?"

Dear Christopher Columbus,

I know you wouldn't have predicted when you started out your journey 517 years ago that your accidental "discovery" of a land that would one day be known as America would one day lead to celebrations of your achievement with grandiose sales on mattresses and cars and days off from work and school. You wouldn't have known that this celebration would come just at the exact time when people would need a 3 day weekend. And you couldn't have possibly known that one day there would be a sport called soccer and that sport would sometimes be played at 8am on a Saturday, and that during said celebration of your journey, soccer games would be cancelled. But over here in Ashburn, VA we are very, very, very thankful!

Steamy Fun!

Have you ever wondered if you can make your carpets even dirtier while cleaning them with a steam cleaner? Well I am here to tell you YES, you can!


It all starts with a tiny little gumball that your kids leave buried in the rug. The heat from the steam cleaner will dissolve that little gumball until it's just a mere blue smudge on your white rug. You will no doubt do a double take from the irony of suddenly seeing a stain where there wasn't one a moment ago. From a machine designed to remove stains there is suddenly a stain in its track. Hmmm, wasn't that fun?