HURRICANE LINDSAY

I know, it's Hurricane Isaac that went through today, but 3 out of 4 of us Lindsays were in SUCH a mood today that it felt like we had our own personal indoor hurricane occurring simultaneously...

School was closed yesterday (even though it didn't start raining until 3:00pm, when school would have already been dismissed for the day). And today (though work wasn't). And will be closed tomorrow (Why? I have no idea). And while we paid for a babysitter yesterday (because I REALLY needed to get some work done), we can't afford to do that all week. So I went in early, and Jay dropped the kids off an hour later to spend the rest of the day with me (he's in training this week, so they can't hang in his office). The first 30 minutes of the day were fine, as the kids entertained themselves with all my biology books, their toys, my office supplies, and Spiderman episodes...

...but before it was even 8:30am, they were so stir crazy that I had to take them for a walk around the building. They were pretty interested in checking out Isaac:

Within the next 2 hours, I took them for another walk, and 2 of my coworkers came by to take them on walks (I assume they could hear me scolding the kids through my closed door, down the hall - awesome), and then I fed them and fed them and fed them. Crackers, suckers, Pirate Booty. Feeding them kept them occupied for about 17 minutes.

I was SO GLAD when Jay showed up early for lunch. We went down to the breakroom to eat (since we'd packed lunches, as we'd PLANNED to be there until 3:30pm), and of course the kids weren't hungry (because they'd just eaten their weight in snacks). They were grumpy, I was grumpy, they are sick, I am sick, they were bored, I was frustrated and stressed out, and I can't get around very well in The Boot (which just annoys me). This all made for a bailout at noon a necessity.

Once we got home, it took me an hour to get them to nap, at which point I took another dose of meds, curled up on the couch, and slept off some of my frustration. But after nap was more and MORE of the same grumpiness (from the kids AND from me), and I was honestly counting the minutes until bedtime. An EARLY bedtime. And yet nap started and ended late, so I knew that wasn't really going to work. I decided I needed to watch some Bowie in tights to make me feel better (Labyrinth is my all-time favorite movie), and figured we'd let James and Cora stay up and watch it (for the first time). I had no idea whether it was appropriate for a 2- and 3-year-old, but honestly, at that point I didn't care. And you know what? Neither kid was scared of anything. Cora watched over an hour of the show, sitting in her daddy's lap and paying very close attention, before she passed out. I'm pretty sure that's 60 minutes longer than she's ever cared about a movie before! Only bummer is that she learned the phrase "That's NOT FAIR!" from Jennifer Connelly... Hope I don't start hearing that too often! James watched the whole thing and had lots of questions. I think he liked Bowie and the dancing goblins best, but the Bog of Eternal Stench and the rolling boulders intrigued him as well. How much you wanna bet I have to watch it again tomorrow? At least twice. (James goes in phases with movies - once he finds something new he likes, that is ALL we watch for the next few days, weeks, or months.) 

Anyway, we fared well (physically) through the storm. We'd fueled the cars over the weekend, hit the grocery store for non-perishables, had only two short power outages (a few hours each - one overnight last night, and one while we were at work today), lots of branches in the yard but no trees down (thank goodness!), and we'd kept up with laundry and dishes (just in case we lost power or water for a long stretch). Not our first hurricane, and it won't be our last. Hopefully the emotional hurricane will have passed by tomorrow as well...