Swim meet today...
This mornings endeavors took a lot of planning and preparation. Adam and I got up at 0515, got ready, threw our bags in the car, snatched kids out of beds in pj's and into the car. Breakfast on the road...mmm...thank goodness we live in the Dunkin Donuts capital of the world, one on every corner, and we were off. Dropped Emma off at her meet for warm ups at 0700, then to the airport where we dropped Adam off for his 2 week trip to Japan. We are all quite jealous, to say the least. Then back to the meet for the next 5 1/2 hours for me and the kids. I was actually surprised at how well the kids did, considering our portable dvd player is broken, and the laptop is broken, and Sarah and Emma BOTH can't find their cords to charge their Gameboys, and when we arrived, we discovered Isaac's Leapster had dead batteries. Not off the the greatest start, but I had brought a lot of snacks, and the boys got to play with some good old fashioned legos and matchbox cars! Although about a couple of hours into it, they started conviently making friends with other kids w/the dvd players. Emma swam 5 events: 100 IM, 100 backstroke, 100 breaststroke, 200 Freestyle (she was NOT happy that I'd signed her up for that one), and 50 Free. Being the awsome Mom that I am, I only missed 2 of her 5 events. I was disappointed, but I figure for juggling 4 other kids by myself, I guess that's not too bad. The first one we miss because we were in the bathroom, we had thought they were starting on the events that they had actually done last night. Oops. And then the last one we missed because Luke was in DESPARATE need of a nap, and I was scrambling to find something to put in his bottle, best I found was a hot chocolate packet for $1.00! But, by the time I got him squared away, we walked in just in time to see her pull herself out of the water. But, through all that, I did get a few pictures with my telephoto lense.

Long story short....the past week Adam and I have noticed our snot being black. Kept hoping it was nothing, hoping it would go away, but yesterday I finally figured out the problem. After cleaning the kitchen and realizing that all of the white cupboards were covered in a thin layer of black soot, I discovered the door going down to the basement off of the kitchen looked like this!

I immediately called our oil company and a repairman came out by last night. I was worried all day that it was going to cost us thousands, but it ended up costing nothing...just replaced a nob on the boiler and a cap on the chimney flew. Yeah!! It's going to take me weeks I'm sure to catch up on all the soot, but at least the problem is solved.

Hopefully that wasn't a sign of what I having coming the next 2 weeks flying solo.