TubaDad was in Boston yesterday and our air conditioner was on the fritz. In sweltering 94-degree heat, no less. So the girls and I amused ourselves with cool water while we waited for the saintly A/C repair dude.

After the blessed A/C system was repaired and beginning to chug away again (the inside of our house was 89 degrees at that point), we decided to beat the heat by going to the movies. Might sound pretty tame, but it was a really really big deal for Ro and Ree. See, they’ve never been to the movies before. They just never had any interest, their attention spans were laughably non-existent (so we were chicken to take them), and most movies had something that scared the buhjeezus out of them. But they’ve gotten braver recently, plus it was really freaking hot in the house. I figured the worst thing that could happen was that we would take a nice cool drive in the van, they’d last 15 or 20 minutes in the theater, then we’d beat a hasty retreat and take another nice cool drive in the van. Only it didn’t happen. They munched happily on their snacks, didn’t make a peep during the movie, and sat through the entire one hundred and three minutes of Toy Story 3 (in 3D). Color me surprised!
When we returned home, the inside temperature was back to a nice, lovely 75 degrees. Ahhhhhh. We fooled around a little, cleaned up the house, then double locked all of the doors inside and out and went to sleep. (The place is closed up tighter than Fort Knox when TubaDad travels.) Normally the story would end here, but unfortunately this one didn’t… I hate to even admit this in public, and am only saying it outloud because I am wracked with guilt. Ugh… Ok, here it is: I screwed up the day of TubaDad’s return from his business trip. He came home in the middle of the night last night and couldn’t get in the house. !!!!!!! He called a bunch of times, but the phone doesn’t ring upstairs so I didn’t hear anything and just kept sleeping away. And he said he didn’t want to make a huge neighbor-alerting racket and start pounding on doors, so he went and slept in a hotel. !!!!!! A hotel. After “sleeping” on the redeye flight Sunday night, going straight into business meetings Monday morning, then hopping back on a plane and traveling half the day back home. Oh my word, the guilt. I feel horrible. And moronic. Horribly moronic. Ugh. So there it is. I’ll be spending the next month or more attempting to make it up to him in case you wonder why he’s golfing every weekend or eating Mexican food every night or getting breakfast in bed or whatever he wants.


Their very first day of preschool was Monday Nov 26, 2007. Ro and Ree were tiny little peeps, just over two years old. It seems like I’ve taken pictures of everything, but startlingly there’s no formal picture on that first day (I guess I was too frazzled to even think of it). Ro is in the white shirt with pink sleeves (holding Pink Nanni), and Ree is in the white shirt with green sleeves (holding Yellow Nanni). I stayed at the preschool with them for as many days as they needed me to, sometimes cramming my butt into a tiny blue chair in the back of the room and sometimes peeking in from the office:




















(TubaDad is the big blue blob you see all over the place)






