Hello Lake House. We're Home.

When we were little kids, this was our backyard.



This was dinnertime.



And this was how our dad drove to work.



Then when we were a little older, we moved to suburbia, where it's required that your garage is the largest, most protruding feature of your house.

We didn't mind because we liked our Nintendo and our Rollerblades (sidewalks at last!) our new accessibility to McDonald's (fast food at last!) and of course... (cable at last!) our MTV

But our dad... well, he was especially attached to that house on the water, and was never quite the same.



Mom and Dad did things to cope. Like build this pond with working waterfall in the backyard. But no bass to catch in there. Just giant goldfish. I mean, it did come in handy though...



... as a backdrop for Kathleen's risqué homemade (i.e., mom-made) Little Mermaid costume.

On a sidenote, Kathleen wore that costume constantly. However the day she did wear it to school for Halloween she shivered and waddled (no side-slits mom) all the way to the bus-stop. It was a chilly October day but she refused to wear a jacket over her costume. Anyone surprised? Didn't think so.



So flash forward twenty-some years and our parents have just moved into their new lake house. It's still in a suburb of sorts, in a neighborhood in the city closer to us kids. This has been a really big deal, because our parents house is basically the epicenter of all our weekends. That's Kathleen's car on left, mine on right.

Mom and Dad basically bought the place in one afternoon after looking at only one other house. They really weren't even in the market, but Jeremy saw the place on Zillow, my parents got Kathleen and Jeremy's realtor to take them by, my Dad conveniently had his fishing rod (yeah, how convenient) in the back of their tiny Honda Fit, dropped the line into the little lake out back, caught a fish, and yelled out (like screamed really 'cause mom and I were checking out the garden tub in the upstairs bathroom at the time and could hear him)... "SOLD!"

Simon the realtor said it was his easiest sell ever. We told him he should take a fishing rod with him on all his showings.



So hello new backyard, new weekends of hanging out on the back porch, in the hammock, on the water.

And all that's just the normal stuff. Ah.. new neighbors, what you don't know about the clan that just moved in next door could fill a book. Wait 'til we unpack the Halloween decorations (maybe that Little Mermaid costume is still in the bottom of a trunk somewhere, I'm sure Kathleen would love to squeeze back into it.) Wait 'til Donny's burlesque/vaudville troup comes through on tour, resting their road-weary trailer in my parents' drive at Thanksgiving. Wait 'til our entire family is trying to slide around on the frozen lake in our tennis shoes at Christmas, which my husband can't wait to try. They probably won't even realize that only our parents live there.

Hello new views, new nooks, new crannies, new piano room. Our history fits nicely here.

And of course...





Hello new place of honor for the Havalina. We think you'll like it here.



Dad sure does. Of course, he's only been waiting twenty-three years to come home.

Sleep Leaping. I'm Inventing It.

I intended to do a post this week about our parents' recent and monumental move. However, my completely as-crazy-as-United States of Tara moment completely overrides that as the event of the week.

Right now I have the most hideous bruise on my arm. It's from a new form of sleepwalking (it's hereditary in our family) that I apparently evolved to a new form this week. I'm calling it sleep"leaping."

Now, to be truthful I actually have in fact "leapt" from my bed (while sleeping) on occasion in the past. Like to run from something that is chasing me into the bathroom, or to check on some pressing and timely matter that apparently needs my attention in the hall.

But this time, ahhhhh.... words can barely describe how ridiculous I feel every time I think of this, but then I just can't help laughing.

Okay, this time I decided to jump straight up onto my pillow. Like, standing on my pillow

Because there was this trail of colors on the ceiling that were going to drift right into the recessed light-can above our bed... think like something trailing down a drain... but on the ceiling... oh, and on the ceiling conveniently above my husband's side of the bed.

So of course I had to leap to catch them. Right? (Note, there were no substances of any kind involved in this incident. Just good old fashioned Thomas stress transformed into a nocturnal biological ritual of obsessive compulsiveness.)

The leap ended badly.

Basically I think I probably tripped on my husband's pillow (or head) which caused me to spectacularly crash into the bedside table. Ridiculous as it is to imagine, the bedside table on his side of the bed.

Now all of this happened in no more than three seconds from the first leap-up to the last crashing item hitting the floor. And let me tell you, everything crashed to the floor.

But because I also have eerily quick self-preservation sleep reflexes, I had already sprung back to my side of the bed (heart pounding and arm, and hip, and knee already hurthing) by the time my husband could slurrily exclaim "what the hell!?" as he (only half-awake) picked up his iPad and the Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff Target lamp that bruise-scratched the heck out of my arm.

I just breathily and quickly dismissed it with an "oops, sorry, nothing." And then he just went back to sleep.

The next morning he just thought I had knocked everything over reaching across him to turn off the light or something. No idea I had been practicing Mr. And Mrs. Smith caliber stunts across the headboard to create such a mess.

I'm that good at sleep leaping.

I had insomnia for the rest of that night to say the least. That's okay. I had to catch up on my episodes of United States of Tara. Which made me feel sane. I mean, compared to multiple personalities...

what's the harm in a good leap every now and then?

Paper Plate To-Do Lists

This is what a to-do list looks like in the Thomas family. No, we don't just use paper plates to create our own post apocalyptic "bust-the-deal-face-the-wheel" tools of judgement. We also use them to remind us to get: "tickseed, tartar sauce, vice grips and squirrel food."

Our mom is really the one who invented this paper-plate planner system which is sure to be trendily re-designed for the masses and distributed in a cute Target office/day-planning/stationery aisle near you any day now, I'm sure.

But over the past week the paper plates have been multiplying at a frantic pace. Why? Well, because our parents have sold the house we've lived in for the past twenty years and are in the throes of getting the new house up to Thomas family standards. Pretty big deal. Lots of details. Many, many paper plates.

A perfect paper-plate example would be measurements for new curtains. Our mom is like a vampire, she cannot stand window glare, which is why Kathleen and I sang Cry Little Sister from Lost Boys to her all weekend. Plus, no one is cooking in all this chaos, so our dad is practically living off of Long John Silvers at this point (which is down the street in their new hood) and thus... extra tartar sauce is frankly, a must-have.

More to come on our clan's big move. Which involves mounting the boar's head, giving the dragons the perfect look-out point and trying to not freak out the neighborhood welcome committee.