Making an impression

If you want to impress your neighbors you should host the late night portion of the neighborhood party.

If you really want to impress your neighbors you should realize about an hour into hosting that you have had too much to drink - and then slink off for a power nap on the couch.

If you really, really want to impress your neighbors you should wake up out of that nap, pour yourself a drink and rejoin the party.

It's hard being me - and by hard I mean horrifyingly embarrassing.

Nonetheless, this Saturday was our neighborhood deck crawl/golf outing. The golf outing consisted of six couples golfing through the neighborhood yards, bolstered by jell-o shots at each hole and the deck crawl ended with many neighbors imbibing in our backyard.

It was a highly entertaining night, but resulted in two pretty darn useless parents on Sunday. Luckily for us Addie was beyond content cuddling and watching movies - she zonked out about 4:45 and woke back up this morning at 6:45.

Yes, you read that right, that sweet child slept for 14 hours.

She must've known exactly what mommy and daddy needed.

This week is all about getting ready for some quality beach time.

I've been paying bills (Holy crap! How are our bills this big??), doing endless laundry (seriously for a family of three we create a lot of dirty clothes), cleaning (which never seems done, perhaps due to my helper) and organizing (which nothing seems to stay that way, perhaps due to my helper).

I have a list a mile long of things not to forget: Towels, sunscreen, beach toys. Dresses, hair bows, books, movies. Motrin, thermometer, cough medicine. Detangler spray, princess undies, bathing suits.
Yes, the mile long list is just for the three year old. Mine and Andy's list looks like this: Clothes. Sunscreen. Toiletries.

In an attempt to get ahead of the game, yesterday I packed up a bag of beach toys, sunscreen, beer cozies and aloe. I packed a second back of bubbles.
Yes, an entire reusable grocery bag of bubbles.

Today as I reviewed my list, and prepared to start packing up Addie's bag, she got to work unpacking the bags I had organized yesterday. I asked her to stop, which was totally futile. These days if I say no, she has more determination to do whatever she wishes.
Feeling resigned, I turned back to my list.

A minute or so of silence passed and then she walked over to me with a bottle of Coppertone shoved into Andy's UNC beer cozy and said "Here Mama, I got you a beer. Drink it". Being that it was 10:30 a.m. I was a little concerned by her 'peer pressure'. And also by the fact that she knew exactly what to with a beer cozy.

I was moderately mortified, until a second later she snatched my sunscreen beer from me, walked over to the cat and said "Here Mich, I got you Daddy's beer. Drink it".

Ha.

Garbage Day

As I predicted....bringing out the recycling was indeed HORRIFYING.

I wanted to post a sign on my curb that said "Don't Judge Me".

We are welcoming people into our neighborhood with an overflowing garbage can and two solid rows of empty pizza boxes, beer cans, beer bottles, wine and champagne bottles, and, for good measure, a few empty Gatorade bottles and diet 7up cans. CLASSY.

PS. I love the stop sign in the second picture...I think it's directly speaking to my liver. As in "If you keep this up, Jessica's liver, you are going to stop working".