Monday, Monday...

We got a public service announcement last night telling us that our power would go out after the Super Bowl. Our electric company was trying to get the town north of us back up and working and had to shut off ALL of the power to make that happen. I thought it was funny that they were waiting until the game was over to attempt to do this, but the more I thought about it, the worse I felt about the poor people in Marlow, shivering through more freezing sleet for a few more hours so that our television viewing would go uninterrupted. Enjoy the snow, Marlow -- we're watching the Super Bowl!!! Really classy, right?

We spent the last part of the game searching for candles so that we wouldn't be completely in the dark. The PSA assured us that the outage would be for only an hour at the most, but we knew once the power was gone, it could be gone for longer than expected, so we put extra blankets on the sleeping girls and cranked up the heat. And waited. And waited. The power didn't go off until some point in the middle of the night when I woke up from a nightmare in which Ana was trying to kill me. I stayed up until the power came back on, honestly fearful that she would wander into our room in the complete dark and totally freak me out.

So, the point of this story is that it was a long night, but we're hopeful that EVERYONE now has power. Wes has been making breakfast and lunch for the chainsaw crews who are coming through to take care of the damage leftover from the storm, so he was up and gone by 5am again this morning. I'm not sure how much longer the crews are going to be working, but I hope that the power coming back home speeds along the entire area's recovery, if for no other reason than selfishly wanting Wes to get a little more rest. Ana woke me up this morning with, "Where is my Papi?!" After I confirmed that she had no weapons to use on me (seriously, SCARY dream, y'all), I told her that he would be back... at some point in the day. I hope!

Speaking of my hopes and dreams, those that involved quick potty training for Emma have been flushed down the empty potty. (Pun intended.) She has success, but there's a marked difference between days where I initiate potty visits and days where I leave it up to her. We could have days with no accidents, but since that would totally be my doing with my constant reminders to her, I don't consider it any closer to being potty trained than she was when she was wearing diapers and occasionally using the potty. Leaving it up to her involves lots of accidents, but she's always aware of when it happens and at least attempts to make it to the bathroom in time. It just may be a LONG road from this to completely potty trained. I have her in training pants, which means there's a lot of laundry. But it's almost fitting, since I began my diapering days with cloth diapers which work pretty much the same. I began with a lot of laundry, and I shall end with a lot of laundry. Sigh. (Little known fact on the subject -- Ana spent her first year of life in FuzziBunz, which are the cutest little cloth diapers. I was going to be a Mother Earth type of mommy with nursing on demand, wearing her constantly in a sling, and putting only cloth on her little tiny tushie. Well, one of out three ended up actually happening -- ha! -- right up until Emma was born. Then, we switched to disposables because I was, very frankly, tired and was beginning to feel that life was about nothing more than baby poo. The switch to diapers I could throw away instead of swishing around the toilet, pre-washing, washing, drying, re-stuffing, then folding... well, made the volume of poo less overwhelming.)

Anyway, training pants. We skipped this step with Ana, but it looks like we'll be camped out here for a while with Emma. And that's okay. I'd rather do this than switch her back to diapers and confuse/discourage her. And she's making progress this way, even if it's not as fast as I would like. Which would have been her saying, the first day, "Don't worry, Mom, I've got this totally and completely figured out, and not ONLY have I potty trained myself in one day, but I've also learned to read, write, and do calculus." Oh, well. This way will work, too. Eventually.

It's a regular Monday around here. Laundry, laundry, and more laundry. Exciting stuff! The girls worked on a very special Valentine this morning, and ever since, Ana has been asking, "Is today Balentine's Day? Where's my chocolate?" Hear that, Papi? The girl expects her chocolate on Sunday!

I've been considering something and would like some input on it. I have all of my journals and emails from my two years in Namibia and would LOVE to put it all into a book about my experience as a Journeyman. I'm fairly certain that there isn't a publishing company out there who would publish it, so I've thought spending the money to self-publish it, with any and all profits from the sale of copies going to the International Mission Board. My question, before I take this project on, though, is this -- would anyone out there buy a book? Self-publishing isn't cheap, but if I knew that the whole project would generate enough to cover the cost then possibly more for missions, then I would totally do it. What do you think?

Well, the laundry is calling my name, along with Ana, who is doing a wild dance on the living room floor. I'm just glad she's not coming at me with a chainsaw, like she was during one portion of my horrific nightmare...

Odds and Ends

Let me first say this -- we really didn't get much damage from the ice storm. We got a call from a church member while we were still out of town, though, about the tree we had lost. She told us it had come down with the ice, and we were ECSTATIC. We just knew it was the cottonwood tree, which is messy, a bit of a fire hazard, and just plain unattractive. We've been talking about getting rid of it ourselves as soon as the weather warms up. When we got home, we discovered that it was indeed the cottonwood tree... but that it was still standing. In fact, it's probably healthier now than it was, thanks to the pruning it received thanks to the storm. It is, regrettably, a sturdy little tree. I have my doubts that a crew of chainsaws could tear it down. (And as you can see from the picture, the ice has melted. Woo!)

Anyway.

Clean up efforts continue around town and in the smaller communities nearby. While most of Duncan has power, our neighbors are still doing without. Wes is still working at the shelter in town and left at 5am this morning to go and help make breakfast for those who are there. He told me he had been designated the "Egg Man," so I'm sure that right about now, he's sick of the sight of scrambled eggs.

Today is Day Two of Emma's Torture. I mean, Emma's Potty Training. Honestly, I think she's doing just as well (if not, dare I say, just a little bit better) than Ana was doing at this point in hers. But they're different in their approach to it, which makes me wonder if Emma will actually end up taking longer than Ana did. Ana was terrified of the potty, but Emma has been using it regularly for the past few months. Once Ana got over her fear, she potty trained herself within a few days. Emma already knows what to do, but getting her to do it on her own initiative is like herding cats. Nearly impossible. Oh, well. I'm not as discouraged as I was with Ana, and I keep reminding myself that Em is YOUNGER than Ana was when she potty trained. So any progress right now (and she IS making progress) is great, and lack of progress is nothing to stress out over.

See? I have a great attitude about this! (It IS only Day Two, though. We'll see what I'm saying a week from now.) I'll try to refrain from constant potty posting. I promise!

In other news, Wes and I are anticipating better weather next week so that we can start running again. We seem to give it up during the colder months, but I'm starting to realize that wintertime is the worst time to stop. I gained five pounds over the holidays, lost them all before Disney World, and -- you guessed it! -- gained all five back on vacation. I know, five pounds isn't much and there's nothing more annoying than someone who really doesn't have to lose weight talking about losing weight, but I know if I let five pounds hang around, I'm only a small step away from adding on more and more and more until I'm on The Biggest Loser and Jillian is yelling at me and making me cry. And, y'all, I have no deep, tragic issues from my past, so she would be on me all season long until I would finally have to make up something about how my parents never loved me (they did and do, actually) so that she would get off my back. It's much easier to deal with five small pounds now than to go through all of that. If you've never seen The Biggest Loser, just trust me on that one.

Well, I better get going, as it's time to start asking Emma (again) if she needs to go potty. She's more than willing to go if I suggest it... but not so much if I don't. I should probably draft plans now to spend the rest of my life by her side so that I can constantly ask her, "Do you need to go now? How about now?" Because I'm sure she'll love that when she's fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five, forty-five...

Hope you have a great weekend!

Longest Vacation Ever!

I'm finally back home, y'all. This great state of Oklahoma can literally feel our presence coming and going over the Red River and seems to (recently, at least) experience natural disasters when we're out of town. Convenient for me, I tell you, but not so convenient for the forty percent of our town still without power.

But I'll get into all of that in a bit.

We left nearly two weeks ago (wow!) for a night in Texas. It was like a cruel joke on Ana, who emerged from the car late Wednesday night expecting to see Cinderella's castle, only to find that we weren't in Florida. After a cab to the airport, a plane ride, a tram ride at the airport, a bus ride to the resort, and then another bus ride to the Magic Kingdom, she could barely bring herself to look up, hardly believing that we were actually right at Cinderella's castle. We arrived just in time for a parade, though, so the reality of where we were sunk in quickly (hello, dancing Mickey Mouse and princesses!) and covered over all of the delays it took to get there.

We spent an afternoon at the Magic Kingdom, a full day at Hollywood Studios, a morning at the Animal Kingdom, an afternoon at Epcot... and then did a whole bunch of other days in all four parks. I would give you more details, but I would seriously have to look back at my journal to figure out where we went on what days, how much time we spent there, how many hundreds of thousands of millions of miles that I walked, etc. Suffice it to say, we saw ALL of Walt Disney World. Ana and Emma rode It's A Small World no less than five times (eeeeeeekkkk!), and I ate pizza no less than fourteen times. Awesome. (Especially since I had the worst heartburn known to man the day before we left for Florida. The only other time I've ever had heartburn has been during the last trimester of my pregnancies, prompting Wes to ask, "Are you pregnant?" Thus prompting me to practically shout, while clutching my burning chest, "Do I LOOK like I'm nine months pregnant?!" Kudos to Wes for locating some Zantac shortly after this conversation and enabling my pizza overload. I'm back to normal now and am fairly certain that I'm not, in fact, having a series of heart attacks at the age of thirty-one. Which is welcome news, obviously.)

Anyhoo, we had a great time. Wes and I had arranged to go on a Keys to the Kingdom tour one morning while we were there, and it was totally worth the time and money. I learned some significant little secrets on this tour, some of which, of course, I'll share with you here. For free!

- Goofy's Barnstormer (the kiddie coaster) is actually faster than Space Mountain. Knowing this doesn't make Space Mountain any less terrifying to me... but then again, I'm also scared of Goofy's Barnstormer. I wouldn't have been able to do it had Emmy not been holding my hand!

- That beautiful, acrobatic, flying Tinkerbell who jumps off the castle at the beginning of the Wishes fireworks show might actually be a TinkerBILL, if you catch my drift. I'm not sure what's more alarming about this -- that someone has to push the cast member off that precarious landing to make it look just right or that the cast member may be a man in drag. Hmm...

- The animals you see on the Jungle Cruise are not real. Gasp! Even more shocking, they're not even whole fake animals. The hippos have no bottom sides, and they keep the water colored so that you can't see that your hippo ends at the neck.

- Main Street Bakery actually vents the cookie-scented air from their shop out onto the sidewalks. Because they're not above bringing in business with tasty aromas.

We flew back to Texas on Friday, where my dad met us at the airport with news that whole portions of Oklahoma were without power. This was news to us, obviously, and after a few phone calls, Wes was able to confirm that Duncan was indeed in the dark. We stayed overnight at my parents' house, and after Wes spent the morning on the phone calling every church member to see what supplies he could bring up, he got on the road to come and help out. He and a church member broke into our house (no electricity means that the garage door won't work, you know), and five minutes later, our power came on. Ha! Since then, Wes has been working at the shelter, serving food and helping out, and the girls and I have been in Texas with my parents. We finally came back this afternoon, after picking up some groceries. The fish sticks that were in the freezer (along with the other food) perished in the power outage and never fully realized their dream of swimming downstream to tiny toddler tummies. Sigh.

Whew! See, I said I wouldn't be back until February, and as it turns out, that was true. Oh, natural disaster -- you proved me right!

Speaking of natural disasters, Em is determined to do this potty training thing now that we're home. I'm not sure she's determined to actually use the potty, but she's not letting me forget that we're back from WDW and "no more diapers, Mommy!" Ugh.

Hope you're enjoying your electricity and running water out there...

Almost on our way...

Is it just me, or is this week dragging by as slowly as possible? It seems like time stands still when there's something to look forward to and that it rushes by all too quickly the rest of the time. Sigh.

It's probably a good thing that time is standing still (or close to it) for now because I'm still packing our bags. Now, I won't name any names when it comes to who is holding up the process (cough, Wes, cough), but there's still one suitcase left to go. Since he's the only one who actually leaves the house during the day and goes to work, I guess he can't live like the rest of us (ie, in our pjs because all of our clothes are already packed). I plan to do one more load of laundry tonight, pack the bags, and send him off in swimming trunks tomorrow, since I'm pretty sure that's the only item of clothing not going with us. (It IS Florida, but it IS January.)

The girls and I have been cleaning the house today so that when we come back home with all those suitcases full of dirty clothes, we'll have a clean house to roll them into. Ahhh... Ana and Emma have been super helpful in this process by bringing all of their toys into the living room and plopping them right on the floor. I gave them the immense privilege of cleaning it all back up again and also sent them off to their rooms to dust their furniture. They were very excited about using the feather duster, but I'm still not sure if the furniture was even touched what with all the sister-dusting, floor-dusting, and, yes, dog-dusting that they were doing when they ran to their end of the house. Sometimes a good effort is really all that you can expect from toddlers, and they certainly gave it their best.

On a totally different topic, Ana was really distraught the other day. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, "I gonna marry a little boy one day, but I don't know his NAME!" (Y'all, I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.) I told her that it was okay and that she'd find it out when the time was right, prompting Emma to tell me that she's going to marry Papi. Which I said was a fabulous idea since he's quite the catch. On the continuing theme of futures/names, Ana told me last night, "I love babies." I asked her how many babies she's going to have one day, and she said, "Three. I name them Ethan, Jonathan, and Hayley." There's an Ethan and a Jonathan both at our church, but we don't know where she came up with Hayley. Oh, to know the mind of a three year old! (She just told me, while I was typing this, that her baby doll is named Princess Cleotasha. Again... what?)

The weather is pleasant enough today that I've turned off the heater and opened the windows. Beautiful weather, will you please come on vacation with me? Because I love you!

Hope you have a great end to January, y'all... see you in February!