Hellooooooooo Prince Philip. Yowza.

Um... you guys look great too!

The Prince Dude looks a lot like Sean. It was disconcerting.

I missed the rollergirls and lisah's band and new people due to my own stupidity. Glad y'all had fun. I'm cranky I missed it.

I think Aimee in mouse ears is as cute as her cutiehead daughter!

Raq, welcome back to the states! You are so freakin' remarkable and Mal is a littl trooper. I can only imagine the freakout I'd have had with a toddler in that situation.

I'm back after a weekend in Indiana. It's good to be home and connected to the umbilical cord of the internets again.

It looks like the Miracleborns had a great time at the Mouse House. I'm really going to miss you guys.

What ND said. You'll have to imagine me hugging and kissing you goodbye when you pull out of town on Tuesday. I'll wave as I go over the rapids.

Em looks beautiful with her little wee-girl bob. She of course looks beautiful anyway, but it just makes her painfully over-the-top adorable.

Also, I have decided that the Miracleborns are not in fact leaving California. It's true that on Tuesday they will be making a long drive to a vaguely Michigan-shaped location, but they will in fact be remaining right exactly here in California, just in an inconvenient, vaguely Michigan-shaped suburb of LA.

THEY WILL SO. DO NOT CONTRADICT ME.

I drove past the melty freeway this morning and again this afternoon -- as it happened, it was all very easy driving today as everyone was avoiding all the freeways like the plague. But it looks like it might possibly be a hair short of totally disastrous; the worst effect that I saw was that the first two exits on the detour route, usually pretty sedate roads (for localistas: Emeryville and Ashby), were choked with miserable cranky Oakland people looking to double back toward home. Also, there was something open on the connector from 80 West to 580/880/980 headed toward downtown Oakland and the airport, but everyone was squeezing through in single file and it was a parking lot.

The melted freeway section is clearly visible from the still-open parts of the interchange, and it's very surreal. Large and high and completely black, tons of concrete and steel folded and crumpled like so much construction paper. Your eyes see it and your brain registers it, but it's still fairly incomprehensible.

Also, Fay is stunningly beautiful and a peacock-feather tattoo, while it will undoubtedly be lovely, can never be more than one of her very lesser beauties.

THEY WILL SO. DO NOT CONTRADICT ME.

No contradiction here.

She was ADORABLE at DLand. She loved the rides and I thought that seeing the characters would go the way Santa did this year (not well. lots of screaming tears.) But she just ran up to Mickey and threw her arms around him and she crawled up next to Prince Philip just as sly as you please, flashing those big blues and smiling coyly. We could barely get her away from Jasmine and only did once she saw "Si-rella! Si-rella!" I was gonna buy her a princess dress, but at $60 a pop, I can make one.

We left fairly early as neither Em nor Baby A had had a meltdown yet and it was decided better to end the day on a positive note.

We might not actually leave until Wednesday now - some mishaps in shipping - and it turns out that for whatever reason, my uncle who is the executor of my grandparent's will who had previously said that it was ok with him if we moved in Gram's house as long as it was fine with the rest of the kids has since changed his mind. There might be a solution which entails my parents taking the house as their 25% of the estate and renting to us for a brief time, but we don't know yet. Still up in the air.

All very crazy making.

And also?

Switch has run away.

He clearly wants you to stay in LA.