It is 75 degrees in South Texas today and as I am typing this the kids are playing out back in the faux springtime weather. They are running around to the side of the house and waving their hands in the kitchen window and then laughing themselves into fits when I pop my head over the ledge to catch them. Some time in the last six months they have become excellent little playmates for one another and it has been a huge turning point in our lives. And by "our lives," I mean "The new part of our lives where Dan and I can sometimes sit still for ten minutes and speak entire sentences to one another." Not that we get to engage in this luxury all the time but it does occasionally happen that they keep one another occupied and we can converse. It is quite a novelty.

This weekend Dan bought me a new laptop and it is making me want to break my year-long writing drought and type and type just for the pure joy of how nicely my sleek new little laptop goes along. Our old laptop was developing the annoying habit of crashing during Skype conversations and thinking for an extremely long period about simple tasks like opening a document. So it's nice to have a handy little tool. I think there are a lot of reasons I haven't been writing for the last little while. None of them are bad -- there isn't any hidden drama behind that statement. There's just the fact that for a long time I wanted to write and didn't have time, then when I did find some time I didn't really have a lot to say. Not that I have anything profound to contribute to the Interent now, either. So moving on:

Like everyone else in the Western Hemisphere I have gotten sucked into Downton Abbey. I would be embarrassed to be watching what is clearly a soap opera if it weren't for the fancy clothes and British accents. But since those save my credibility, I am OK with admitting that I am addicted. I am currently putting off watching the season finale that is on my DVR for sheer grief that I will have to wait the rest of the YEAR for new episodes. It is too cruel. But so far I like the experience of watching Downton Abbey better than I liked watching LOST, the last show I got hopelessly sucked into. At least they tell you stuff on this show, and you don't have to invest four years of your life just to figure out what the basic premise of the show really is. I still want those years back.

I have now done the drive back to Mississippi on my own with the kids twice. It has gone pretty smoothly with the exception of one scene in a Cracker Barrell somewhere in Louisiana were Isaac decided he was done sitting in his high chair right about the time our food arrived and illustrated this point by arching his back, waving his hands and screaming "ALL DONE! ALL DONE!" until I let him get up and wander around the room. Obviously there is a pretty short clock on how long you can let an almost two-year-old child wander unassisted through a restaurant with a working fireplace before people begin to question your parenting skills, so in short order we were out in the retail display area test driving noisemakers and novelty candy containers that someone who is a marketing evil genius places right at the eye level of irritable small children who have been on long car rides. It took me about ten minutes to talk the kids away from that and back to the table, by which time our food was cold. I don't know why I even order food for the kids on these trips because they don't eat it. But I was starving, so I shoveled as much of my meal down as I could in five minutes while whipping my head around every three seconds to try to see what in the world the kids were doing when they weren't sitting in their seats. We barely made it through check out without another candy related scene and on the way out the door Isaac picked up a wooden duck toy that he clearly intended to take to the car with him had I not noticed it.

In our travels I have noticed that newer Target stores now have family restrooms located right near the exits, and this makes me want a write a love letter to Target. Family restrooms are so nice because you don't have to wrangle in and out of a stall with your kids and there are more places for them to stand without requiring you to say "Don't touch that! Do NOT touch that. Oh my heavenly gracious do not under ANY circumstances put your hands on that!" There is just such a new Target in Lafayette, Louisiana and we now stop there every time because we can do a bathroom break and then let the kids run up and down the aisles for a while and burn off steam. On this last trip the kids and I stopped there during an absolutely pounding rainstorm and it was a huge relief to be out of the car for just a few minutes before taking on the Atchafalaya Basin bridge. I don't know how big the basin is, but the bridge is miles and miles long extending over swampland with no place to stop. So far we've never needed to stop, but I'm just waiting for the day when one of the kids pulls the "I have to go potty" trump card while we're on the bridge. It's not going to be pretty.