I'm alive.

I haven't died. Or vanished. I wasn't washed away in the "big storm" (which was pretty small, really). I am here.

I took the boys to Albuquerque last Tuesday night. It was not a planned trip, but McKay ended up not having school on Thursday and Friday (plumbing problems or something like that) so we hopped in the car and drove to see people that I've been missing.

About an hour into the drive I started to think that maybe I was crazy to go with them on my own...the 12+ hours that were still ahead of us seemed so long and the dvd player stopped working about a quarter of the way through Transformers. But, the kids handled it very well and we had some great conversations. Then they slept and I drove and listened to music and ate junk food and had a good time.

I purposely didn't take my computer because I wanted to make the most of the short vacation and not be sitting in front of it the whole time. I took my camera, but didn't actually end up taking many pictures because the kids both got really sick the first day that we were there and we spent most of the time cooped up in Erin's apartment. In retrospect I probably should have taken the computer and left the camera home :)

On Friday morning Gentry had a fever so I gave him some ibprofen and less then 15 minutes later his eyes were swollen shut. It freaked me out because I was picturing his throat swelling up and I panicked a little. But after I gave him some benodryl and he slept for a few hours they were better. I still don't know what caused it but his Pediatrician thinks it may have been the dye in the medicine.

Then McKay spent that whole night throwing up! They pretty much ran through every symptom in the book...fevers, allergic reaction, vomiting, coughing, sore throat etc. Erin was probably not happy that we brought the death flu with us! Not surprisingly, all 3 of her kids were sick before we left.

But, actually as dreadful as that all sounds we had a pretty good time. I didn't watch the news once, never got on the internet, didn't watch any tv shows. It was kind of freeing! The kids got to spend time with Erin's kids (Leah, Carlos and Emma) and I got to see some old friends and all of my family that lives there. We had a mellow trip and watched High School Musical 2 eight zillion times but it was still pretty fun.

Now it's back to real life. I'm playing catch up with current events (I didn't know about the whole Marine murder thing till this morning) but I had a bunch of blogs to read last night when I got home which was fun.

We probably wouldn't have made it to NM until summertime so I'm glad that we got to take advantage of this spur of the moment trip.