Alabaster Mom

My niece recently went off to college. It's kind of a big deal in our extended family because Blondie was the first-born grandchild, niece, etc. She's currently a freshman at Penn State (more specifically, she's in the honors college - we're all very proud of that). My sister has three other kids at home to drive her insane take care of but I know she misses her college kid desperately. I cried right along with her when she had to leave her daughter in the dorms and turn around and head back home. Having my niece head off to college got me thinking . . . I only have six years before my kid leaves, too! I am pretty sure that she'll go to an in-state school (unless some college in New Hampshire throws a bajillion dollars at her or something), so she probably won't be more than a few hours away. But, still. I know she wants to study music but I may encourage her to choose a minor in something else. As talented as she is, the pool of talent is quite large and I d...

Our little clan recently returned from a week at the beach. It takes about 18 hours to get to my dad and stepmom's condo in Ocean City, but we had six glorious days of sun and sand before we had to turn around and head back. A co-worker let me borrow his toll thingie (that's the technical term) and let me just say that this was a game changer. I think it cut at least an hour off our trip. The mister and I didn't have to waste time fighting over where the toll ticket was, how many quarters we needed, etc. We just sailed right through. My co-worker will just let me know how much we owe him. Easy-squeezy. We've now ordered our own toll thingie. We can't believe we've lived without one for so long. We've been driving cross-country at least once a year for 22 years. We didn't drive straight through on this trip, of course. We left our house on Friday the 11th and stayed at a hotel that night. We finished the drive on Saturday the 11th. When it was my husban...

We made it back from our anniversary trip to Orlando. Pro tip: it's hot there.  It's so hot that I wore shorts every day. Normally, I would not subject the general public to my legs but apparently I am getting to the "let it all hang out" stage of my life. Our vacation technically started on Friday the 21st. P dropped the dogs off for boarding while I took our kid to the airport. She flew to DC to hang out with my middle sister and her family. Since the airport is a couple hours from home, we booked a hotel room. Our flight was scheduled for the next day. I didn't want to fly out the same day as our daughter - it just seemed too risky. If her flight had been delayed or canceled, we wouldn't have been able to catch our flight. (Can you imagine us catching our flight anyway and yelling, "Okay, good luck with everything!" as we headed to the gate?) Fortunately, everything went as planned. The kid caught her flight on Friday and we caught ours on...