It's all so confusing.

This house is insanely quite at the moment. All 3 kids had a sleepover with my folks and their cousins. This isn't a rare occurence, but Sophy usually will not participate in anything that involves dark + her being away from mommy. Much to my surprise, she volunteered whole heartedly to her cousins invitation to stay. It was so surprising, in fact, that Mr. Pinkie and I sort of just stared at each other and muttered incoherently for several hours as we attempted a plan for our new found freedom.
I kept asking him, 'Now what is that we always say "If we ever have a free evening, let's......" To which Mr. Pinkie would respond, "Go to the movies? Out to dinner?" Those aren't the things. We've seen 2 movies and been out to eat 4 times in the last 2 weeks. The kids come along for such events. At this point I would become impatient and flail my arms about and make noises that were unintelligable. Mr. Pinkie continued to stare. "C'mon. THINK! We're using up our free hours!", I would say. I even had the ingenius idea that if we turned on SpongeBob, tossed some Lincoln Logs out in the hallway, cranked up the Princess CD player, etc. maybe we would remember what it was that we longed to do. Of course, we never mustered up the courage to do such things. However; as you'll recall, we were staring and muttering incoherently...for the most part. In the end, we couldn't think of whatever it was that we always wanted to do if we had the chance. Sadness. Truly.

Like all good people who can't think straight when their children aren't around, we did come up with an alternate plan, albeit not the one that we kept forgetting to remember that we wanted to do in the first place. I ran a tub of scalding hot water, grabbed a snack and read a romance novel while Mr. Pinkie watched the evening news. We used our new skillet that Mr. Pinkie's dad gave us for Christmas that is for the grill to make some AMAZING, grilled red fish with grilled asparagus. I made Garlic-Cheese biscuits and loaded, baked potatoes. I guess we could've eaten in the dining room..you know, ambiance and all. Instead, we chose to lounge in the living room and watch The Hostage (Bruce Willis--wow, good show.) Somewhere during all of this we ate a slice of coconut cake and endured, Talladega Nights-The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. What a retarded show! Did I laugh? Uh. Yeah. Will I watch it again. NEVER!

As we made the nightly rounds of shutting of lights and locking doors, Mr. Pinkie commented that our house is "creepy" when the kids aren't home. Switching of our bedside lamps, we got under the covers and listened. If the kids were there, they surely would've been asleep. The house is ALWAYS silent when we go to bed. What, then, was the loud, screaming silence we were hearing? "I don't like this", I said. "Can we turn a light on somewhere?" Mr. Pinkie said, "I'm not getting up. It's spooky out there. You go turn on the kitchen light." ME? ME! Uh. No. Then the house creaked. The cat ran down the hall. Somewhere in the distance it started to thunder (not really.) We learned something very important last night. When our kids leave home, we're going with them.