Good Morning

Well, it's Tuesday morning. I'm still trying to feel "back to normal." At first I thought I was feeling this way because of our 4-day family vacation, but it shouldn't take a whole week to get back to normal after that. Especially since I unpacked us and washed all the dirty clothes from our trip as soon as we got home. I think part of the way I feel has to do with being locked inside the house to avoid the smoke from all those fires, but mostly I think it's because it's summer and we never settled into a new routine after Sweet Pea got out of school. We just pretty much hit the ground running, and now we're continuing to blunder from one thing to the next. Whenever we have a day with no plans, I try to keep working on keeping the house clean and making cleaning improvements before Sweet Pea's birthday party. Whee...

Here are some pictures from Asilomar, and then I'll chat about other things.


The first two days we were at Asilomar were quite warm so we enjoyed some time at the beach before dinner each night.

So we got there on a Friday, hiked a lot and narrowly avoided getting hit by lightning on Saturday, and on Sunday Sweet Pea was still completely exhausted from all the hiking she'd done on Saturday. She fell asleep at dinner.

I can't remember what I had told her "no" about, but The Bug was not happy. But I think it's a great picture. ha ha!

My family is very musical. My brother has played guitar since high school and every time we get together, if we can get our hands on a guitar (we borrowed this one from friends b/c my bro didn't want to take his guitar on an airplane from VA), he plays and we all sing. It's fun. Sweet Pea is exposed to a lot of music at school - one of her teachers plays guitar, they sing every day, and they have a dedicated music teacher come in on Thursdays. The Bug, however, upon hearing my brother start to play the guitar and sing, stood up, looking around wildly, and yelled, "IS THERE A TV IN HERE?!" I was a little mortified at that. Maybe I should learn to play a musical instrument. hee hee...

A lot of my thought these days is going toward preparing for BlogHer. I'm a total newbie, never been to a conference, my blog is (at this point, anyway - don't know whether or not I'll change it - I might get inspired) not about making money with ads or attracting zillions of readers, so I'm interested to see what I'll learn and come away from the conference with. But right now I'm just worrying about what to take to wear, how I get from BART to the Westin (it's a three block walk but I did the Google street view and I am rather certain that if I don't have a map I will get lost), and other little things like that.

I am very thankful that Megan at Velveteen Mind posted specifically to newbies about how we'll need cards to hand out - and she even procured a discount for us from MOO.com! Christina at A Mommy Story is going to put up a post soon, again for newbies, to tell us what to expect at the conference. YAY and thank you, ladies!

I still need to procure a nice sweater for the event, SF being what it is weather-wise and all, and I'd also like to buy a certain pair of shoes and if I can't find my license plate purses before the conference (they're still packed but I don't know where, argh) I may also purchase a small Basura Bag to use as a funky purse.

I'm still dreading leaving the kids for three nights. I know I am going to have a lot of fun and it will be really good for me to get away from home and do something for JUST ME. Furthermore, I know that Slipshod will take good care of the girls on the Friday of the conference and they'll have a lot of fun that night and all day Saturday with the added presence of their Grandma S and Boopa. But I've never left them like this before, so it's a big unknown and somewhat heart wrenching for me to think of leaving them for that long. Especially since I'm going to have to leave them after dinner on Thursday at the BART station. The Bug is really not going to like that. Sigh.

Oh well. I'm going to have a lot of fun and I'm very excited that Christina and I have already made a date to party hop together on Thursday night. Yay!

In the mean time, I am on a mission to prepare the house for Sweet Pea's birthday party as well as work out the details of food and helium for the balloons before I leave, so that when I come home I won't have to freak out and work like crazy that last week before the party.

Whee!

After the conference and the birthday party, I am hoping to FINALLY locate all of my soapmaking stuff in the garage, order what I need (the solid oils - palm & coconut), and get back into soapmaking, for fun, to get a jump on Christmas presents for the family, and possibly to teach as well - some members of my local chapter of the Holistic Moms Network have asked me to teach them how to make soap. Should be fun!