March madness, installment #1

Ahh, home sweet home. Complete with omnipresent piles of laundry, multiple baby gates, and cat hair that never quite comes out of the carpet. Humble as our little home is, it is comforting to know that the dirt that Noah is ingesting these days will be familiar dirt.

SO. Let me recap the whirlwind of the past month, before I sleep too many times and lose it forever. Because as hectic as it's been, it has been wonderful.


Weekend #1



Sunday, March 14: Three years ago, Scott's friend and fellow trooper Todd Holmes was killed in the line of duty. To commemorate his sacrifice, a highway overpass was named in his honor. So we packed up the fam and drove the three hours to east Texas to witness the naming. It was pretty neat, and a nice chance to visit with Todd's family again.


And then we drove three hours home. Sounds nice and smooth, doesn't it? It wasn't, although time has thankfully blurred my memory of the rougher bits of that little day-trip.

Weekend #1.5 - #2

March 15 - 22: We got home from our memorial overpass viewing around 9 p.m. Sunday night, and put the kids to bed. And then we got them back OUT of bed at 4 a.m. the next morning. Because why would you sleep when you could catch an early morning flight with two babies? My mind gets a little fuzzy when I try to recall our frantic preparations for that trip. I fretted and fussed for weeks on end, trying to research and choose the absolute best ways to keep our little passengers happy on the plane. Who in their right mind would choose to fly with two babies, you ask? Anybody who is faced with the unhappy alternative of driving FIFTEEN HOURS with those babies. However heinous a flight may be, it is blessedly brief in comparison.

It turned out not to be too bad. And we learned a few things:

• Only one lap baby is allowed per row. So twins on Mommy and Daddy's laps can't sit next to each other. Hopefully all the other passengers enjoyed our constant exchange of toys and Cheerios across the aisle.
• Pacifiers dropped between airline seats are extremely hard to recover.
• You MUST recover the pacifier you dropped (read: Lily THREW) between the seats.
• Having a baby on your lap is roughly equivalent to waving a neon sign that says, "I HAVE BUBONIC PLAGUE!" Because nobody, and I mean nobody at all, wants to sit next to a baby. Not even really cute ones who scream and throw pacifiers.

The week with my family went well. In typical Lisa fashion, I didn't take nearly enough pictures. But here are a few:

Weekend #3

March 25 - 29: My darling college roommate Laura came down to visit from Illinois a few days after we got home from Kentucky. I wish I could say she came to visit me, but she mostly came to visit her sister Shawna's family--they live near Dallas, about an hour from here. I got to see her, her husband David, and their girls Bethany and Elena, as well as Shawna, her husband Bobby, and their little girl Jenna. It was lovely to see them all, although the visit did kill any possibility of reliving any college memories. Such as watching the six-hour version of Pride and Prejudice. Or, say, having ANY conversation that uses more than half my brain and lasts more than five minutes. Because small children rule the world with tiny iron fists. Seriously. At one point there were five adults and five kids under three running (and crawling) around my house and I was trying to feed them all lunch. It was absolute madness. To the two or three people I'm positive got skipped completely in the feeding frenzy, I'm very sorry. Come by sometime and I'll make you a sandwich.

One fun thing we did was go to the zoo. Again, I managed to be very bad at taking pictures. But Shawna snapped a few good ones of the babies:

Wow, so... that took me all evening and I still have two weekends to go! I'll wrap it up another day. Until then, please adore my children: