Irene: Not Just a Whiny Girl on Real World Seattle

So I was slowly coming down off the birthday party high last week when Irene rolled into town. A hurricane. In Philadelphia. Yeah, we're not used to that sort of thing. So Gabe & I headed to Target to pick up some water bottles and bagels (obvs. necessities) along with the rest of the world, then hunkered down for the stormy weekend. Hunkered to me meant that I put my pajamas on in the afternoon, make homemade pizza and joined my lil fam in the living room for tv watching. It was kind of nice to have an excuse to relax.

Every once in awhile, we'd flip over to the news to get the latest. We kept hearing that the worst of it for us was expected Sunday 4am. So I went right on relaxing, occasionally peeking outside to see just how hard it was raining. I kept my cool until Saturday night at 10. All of a sudden, the news anchor starts telling me that there were two tornado warnings, right down the street from us. Well shit. We don't know what to do in tornados either. So I made the executive decision to retrieve the sleeping (not for long!) baby and make John take cover in our gross, cold, cement basement. At that point, our power went out.  We waited awhile and decided to head back upstairs to bed. Being crazy, I decided that I didn't want Gabe sleeping in his room in case one of the 12 giant trees we have decided to come down. Therefore, the three of us headed to bed, no A/C, no fans, windows closed. Gross. I expected to be up all night but magically, when we woke, it was 7am, the power was on and there was no storm damage. Pretty uneventful...just how I like my hurricanes.

So anyway, we obviously didn't do anything fun this weekend so I don't have much to share. So I went lookin and realized I never shared some random pics I took last month when we visited John's sister at her mountain house. Can you (locals) believe it was my first time to the Poconos? I couldn't. But it was awesome. They live in a lakehouse community so it's got little beaches and community pools. And they've also apparently got a lot of Russians. Every now and then, my sister-in-law would lean over and whisper, "Russians" and shake her head.. Hahaha. I was dying.  It would seem these Russians come down from New York, speak only in their native tongue, pick blueberries on the side of the road and wear questionable clothing.  Pocono DRAMA at it's best.

Mountain house appropriate reading material...or in Gabe's case, tearing up material.

Just swimmin and teethin...

Great, now it's the both of them. Just what I need.

Gabe and his cousins at the carnival. At this point, John's sister kept remarking on the "quality" of the carnival workers this year.  Apparently in years past, there have been sketchy characters...typical carnies I would think. The community was happy with this year's carnie uniform of a blue polo shirt.  As soon as everyone's wearing blue polo shirts, they look more like Best Buy employees and less like trailer-livin', teethless travelin' folk.

I pretty much just nod and smile. Nod and smile.

Right here.

FYI carnivals aren't much fun for babes.

That's bout all that's fit to print. Hope you had a good weekend and that Irene didn't treat you too badly.