Tuesday, October 27, 2009

I Should Have Been A Marine Biologist....

We had maybe 2-3 days in between the girls having pneumonia when they were both feeling fine. My Mom wanted to take us on a whale watch. When I was younger my parents took us on a whale watch and I got the most amazing photos. The whales were literally jumping out of the water for us all day. It was very memorable. This trip proved to be memorable also, but for other reasons.

We set out from Plymouth, MA and it was a beautiful day...just the girls. This is a photo of my Mom with the girls...



Here is a rare photo of me and my girls, although this was actually taken at the end of the day, as you can see our hair has that lovely wind-blown look that is so appealing...




We had great seating on the lower level and there was almost no one else down there... except this nice woman (she had a really cool camera), her son (Bethany hung out with him) and I'm guessing her Mom. Then Jamie noticed this right near where we were sitting:



This could explain why the trip became memorable; that and the fact that we were at the back of the boat - right where the exhaust fumes were...anyway here are some cool photos from the day...



This is one of my favorites...






You can see they got pretty close...


Now I know you probably can't tell what this next picture is...but it's the whale going under our boat...cool, but a little frightening because even though you get lulled into their gracefulness and excited to see them so close, when they go under the boat you remember that all they have to do is nudge our boat and we will capsize...


For some reason though, this never happens; it's almost like they know there are marine biologists on all of these boats who's main goal in life is to protect them and make life better for them...imagine whale watching for your job!

Now it takes a good hour to get out to where the boat actually stops and does the whale watching. We, however, ended up meeting up with some whales on our way out to the watching area...so we had kind of a pit stop on the way. While me and the girls were excitedly running from one side of the boat to the other, snapping away in awe, I suddenly realized my Mom was sitting down, not really looking at the whales..actually she wasn't moving her head at all. Then I noticed she was a little pale...oh no! I realized she must be seasick...this is not good. We were only about 40 minutes into a 4 hour trip! And there is no way off the boat and nothing you can do about it...I never felt so bad for my Mom...she said she took some motion sickness stuff before she left home, but later realized she had mistakenly taken the stuff to calm her down before she goes on an airplane...so she was sick, but calm - ok very sick, but very calm...she kept telling me to go and enjoy myself, but I felt awful...then she leaned over the railing and got sick...I know she is going to kill me for blogging about this, but while it was happening I wanted to laugh so bad because it happened right when there were whales almost right in front of where she was...so everyone was on that side of the boat...watching....my poor Mom. After that she sat down and closed her eyes and stayed that way until the boat started the motors and headed for home. She wasn't the only casualty - there was a little boy who apparently was brought on the whale watch for his birthday because he got seasick and all he kept crying was "This is the worst birthday EVER"...then he got sick and was perfectly fine after that.

Here are a few more photos...enjoy!


This is another favorite:

Monday, October 26, 2009

Just Ride Lugia To School...





File this under, "Huh?"

This is the conversation I had this morning while I was driving my little genius to school:

Bethany: "If I didn't go to daycare in the morning, would you not have to pay for it?"

Me: "Do you mean if you stopped going altogether (she goes every morning so I can drop her off at 8am instead of 830am)?

Bethany: "Yes"

Me: "I would not have to pay for it if you didn't go anymore" not sure I wanted to know the answer..."Why?"

Bethany: "When we were camping me and Jamie found these ball things in the woods and we pretended they were Pokemon eggs. We covered them with pine needles and leaves to keep them warm until we left, then we brought them home with us. I had a dream that when we brought them home, one of them hatched and it was Lugia (a Pokemon character).

Me: (blink, blink)"Umm, what does this have to do with not going to daycare?"

Bethany: "Oh, well if I had Lugia I wouldn't need to go to daycare because I could just stay with Lugia when you went to work and then Lugia could fly me to school."

Me: (blank stare)"Oh"....I was too afraid to ask if she knew Lugia wasn't real.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

It's Good To Be Back At The Dexter Lake Club...


Wow! What a vacation! Two months in the Carribean, living in a luxury suite only steps from the beach....oh wait, that's the "happy place" I've had to turn to during all the crap we've gone through over the last two months! (By the way, the title of this post is a reference to the movie "Animal House" in case you were wondering...or maybe you're just so used to my zany comments you didn't give it a second thought)

It will take me a few posts to get everyone caught up...I'm really amazed at how much can happen in two months! Let me first apologize for leaving you, my loyal readers, hanging for all this time, I'm sure you were going through withdrawels (as the reader says, "Hmph, didn't realize she hadn't posted for that long..) Secondly, you can blame my hubby for everything...he's going to love that!

It all started back in August when my husband decided to download some virus protection program from the web (I heard a bunch of you just exclaim "idiot!"). Now, let me preface this by saying the poor guy gets sucked in quite easily...all you have to do in dangle any shiny new gadget in front of him and he's sold. Also let me say that we pay for virus protection through our internet service provider and one other service, so there was no need for anything additional. He still cannot explain why he did it....but he did. Slowly we noticed things changing on our computer, but we kept thinking the other one was changing stuff. Things like color schemes or fonts...small stuff. Then we started getting this flashing pop-up with an alarm saying crippling viruses were detected and we needed to click here now to get rid of them and this window had the Windows symbol in the corner, but it was slightly different - enough for me to realize it was a scam. Within a few weeks our computer was completely shutting down for no reason, when we were in the middle of stuff. Eventually, we were not able to get in at all. It has taken several attempts and different plans of attack, but we finally (and just this morning!) have our computer back in working order....thank you, Ken, for all your hard work in helping us...and when I say "us" I mean me, because it will take a while for me to let hubby use the computer again without supervision.

Now also during this time, My oldest daughter had pneumonia for 2 1/2 weeks, followed by my youngest having it for 2 weeks and missing the first week of school. While my oldest was sick, she had another, unrelated yet more serious medical situation that we had to deal with and still are. It was probably a good thing that our computer crashed during this time, I had about all I could handle dealing with many other situations - I honestly don't think I could have blogged...it would have sounded forced...you know the ones...sometimes I get lazy, what can I say? So we also were dealing with a financial crisis, unexpected (and unwanted in my opinion) relatives coming for a few days which has turned into 1 1/2 months (so far) - can you say super stressful? I know there was a bunch of other stuff in there, but suffice it to say I retreated to my "happy place" so much, I really thought I was living there! I'm thinking "New Year, Fresh Start"...who's with me!