Okay, so, hi. This morning I discovered that if I have to, I can go from being in bed to being ready to go to work in ten minutes. Heh. Sorry for the lack of blog; I had yesterday off to celebrate the life of Christopher Columbus. Actually I took it off to go to a theme park. We did make it to Six Flags yesterday, and it was fun and scary in a good way. But I had a rough weekend overall.

Saturday morning the basement flooded, which made me freak out. I've never had to deal with such a thing, and our basement hasn't flooded in the 2-plus years we've lived here. I bought a pump and sucked most of the water out - it was only about an inch and a half deep. But a couple of hours later it was back.

That afternoon we drove two hours to visit with P for dinner and to see his show. He's been on tour for a few days and comes back Oct. 21. I was exhausted by dealing with the flood and taking the kids to the mall and I basically broke down once we finished dinner. I hid out in the car after P was done playing (A and T were watching the headliner perform) and P came out and talked to me. I just felt like I could not do it, could not be a single mom, could not take care of everything without him. I tried to remember that I WAS doing it, and today was just a miserable day, but I was so tired I couldn't get a grip. Eventually I felt okay enough to drive us home.

Sunday my dad showed up around noon with a van full of furniture for the kids. First he looked at the basement situation; the water level was down to mere puddles, but he couldn't figure out why the sump pump was working since we couldn't find where the water was ending up. I made pesto while he cleaned up the puddles with a sponge mop, without making a big deal out of it (just "where's the mop?"), which made me very grateful. The rest of the day was spent moving furniture around. My Ikea shelving unit from high school has been reborn. Thea went to acting class, and when I picked her up two hours later, she told me class had actually been cancelled due to Columbus Day (whatever) but the young, geeky, too-earnest theater guy made him stay and help scrape windows with him. T finds him creepy and having met him I understand why. Afterwards Dad took us out to eat at Pizzeria Paradiso and then it was time for bed.

Sunday was Big Fun Secret Surprise Day. I made everyone dress warmly and we drove down to Six Flags. Ana caught on to where we were going pretty quickly, though she didn't let on until we got there, but Thea seemed to not know until we were in sight of the roller coasters. Dad came too, in his own car so he could leave early and drive home to NJ. On the ticket line the people in front of us told us that if we showed the ticket seller a piece of paper with "105.9" written on it, our tickets would only be $10 each, due to some crazy radio promotion. With our coupons we were going to be spending $30 a ticket so this seemed much too good to be true. But after the guy in front got to the window and turned around to tell us gleefully, "it worked!" I said to his son "Gimme that pen, kid!" and scribbled 105.9 on the 10-bucks-off coupon I was holding. And it worked! Amazing. Instead of $120 we spent $40.

A and T and Dad went on all of the huge roller coasters. I stood on line with them and always took the chicken exit near the loading station. I did go on the Thunderbolt, a Cyclone-sized wooden coaster, and it was fun though a little jerky. Dad left around 5:00, having hit all of the rides he wanted (all of the big ones). We wandered around and paid to do one of the indoor haunted houses, which was just walking through a twisty corridor with day-glo paintings of scary clowns, and once in a while some teenager dressed as a scary clown would jump out at you. It was over in less than five minutes. Once it got dark we went on the Trail of Terror, for which we had to stand on the Long Queue of Coldness, as it was even colder out once the sun went down. It was worth it, though. The trail went way into the woods and through different tableaus, like a toxic dump, an axe-murderer's camp, and an abandoned bus, and the actors here were very good at suprising you and acting genuinely deranged and dangerous. Unlike in the haunted house, I got seriously frightened a couple of times by scary people leaping out at me. The three of us huddled together and screamed in unison any time anything happened. It was so much fun. On our way out I bought us some hot, fresh kettle corn we watched being made. We crunched on warm yummy kernels all the way home.