I'm back -- no, really!

Why haven't I been blogging?

I'm happy to say it's because I've been so busy!

The last 3 weekends we've traveled a bit, here and there.  Over Labor Day the kids and I took off for Monterey and spent an overnighter with my old school/high school best friends.  We love mixing it up and trying a new hotel whenever we're there, so this trip we hit the Hotel Pacific.  Everything about it turned out great except for the fact that the floors in the rooms are mostly wood.  This means the people below you can hear waaay too many things, including happy delighted children running around.  We weren't being outlandishly loud when we got "the call."  You know the one -- they're really nice about it, but truly they're trying to convey one thing only: please shut up!  After that we made the kids practically tiptoe, which saved us any further humiliation.

Beyond that, it was a fantastic hotel with spacious rooms, flat screen tv's, cozy beds and a fireplace.  I give it two thumbs up.  *insert cheesy picture of me giving two thumbs up here*

Last weekend we traveled to my parents' place in the mountains to celebrate Miss Noelle's upcoming 7th birthday.  She cleaned up in the gift department with Gramma and Grampa, but did make one unfortunate choice: Chevy's for her birthday dinner.  Noelle is still in the difficult about food stage, and if it's not nuggets or corn dogs, she's not particularly open to it.  Usually she loves tacos, but her version of a taco is shell, meat and cheese.  At Chevy's they attempt to make their tacos more interesting than Taco Bell (go figure) and that means additional things added into their meat mixture.  She took one look at that and was turned off, despite the flavor.  Because we all know it's about what food looks like -- not the taste.  *insert eye rolling picture here*

She survived while we all enjoyed the heck out of our meals.  Charlie impressed me with his order of tamale and enchilada, and I tried their Chipotle Chicken enchiladas.  Uh-May-Zing.  If you haven't tried them, please do and thank me later.  Noelle enjoyed the singing and depositing of a hat on her head at the end of the evening, and slept heavily on the drive home.  Next weekend is her actual birthday and we'll be having a little sleepover with a puppy theme -- today I actually bought a puppy pinata that I'm sorry to say we'll be beating the crap out of with a bat on Saturday.  Poor thing.

I'm excited that the fall season of television is upon us this week -- I enjoy trying out new shows to see what actually interests me and will be lucky enough to make it into my small circle of shows.  I have hope for Molly and Mike, but mostly I can't wait to see the return of Modern Family and The Middle.  (Middle.)  <-- If you watch it, you know what I just did.

And now on to your regularly scheduled week.  Good luck to us all!!