#IceBucketChallenge

If you have no idea what the #IceBucketChallenge is, you need to leave this blog right now and catch up with the rest of the world. Also, where have you been for the past month or so?

The basic gist is this: You are challenged by someone you know to either douse yourself with ice water or make a donation to the ALS charity of your choice. Personally, I like the ALS Organization. Ideally, you should do both. And then you challenge whomever you want.

I encourage you, however, to not just douse yourself with ice and make a donation, but to find out about ALS. It's commonly known as Lou Gehrig's Disease and 5,600 people in the U.S. are annually diagnosed with ALS. At any given time, 30,000 people are living with the disease. Those are devastating statistics.

My cousin Courtney, of StopLightGoLight.com fame--I've written about her a lot--challenged me to the #IceBucketChallenge. This is laughable on so many levels. Courtney is rarely on Facebook and all of a sudden, she's posting video and tagging me. Lookie who turned out to be a social media aficionado after all? When I groaned, because I hate cold, The Daughters were all about dumping ice on me and themselves.

So, we decided, as a family, that we'd do the #IceBucketChallenge. Brian was in charge of getting the ice and filming. Lucky dog.

Daughter 1 went first. She'd been challenged by another friend as well. She challenged "everyone below" since she's going to post it on her Instagram. But, basically, she challenged Carinna, Daisha, and her Aunt Lulu and Uncle Jared.

Daughter 2 went next. She decided that Cousin Courtney must have challenged her as well. She challenged some of our Texas cousins, LJ, Brecken and Gavin, her Rebelz teammates and her Rebelz coaches.

I went last and challenged all of my co-workers at Central Middle School and all of the lovely ladies at Oklahoma Women Bloggers. Trust me. I know what I'm doing.

Enjoy!

A Whole Bunch Of Nothing

My diamond on my engagement ring keeps snagging on things, and I'm afraid of losing it. I lost my original diamond when I was five months pregnant with Daughter 1. It killed me because I just knew that people would think I was some knocked-up, unwed teenage mother--never mind that I was thirty-years-old. So, I'm currently wearing my anniversary band, which I love, but it makes me feel like I'm being unfaithful to Brian. Like I'm advertising I'm not married, but I do celebrate anniversaries or something like that. Who knows why my brain operates the way it does.

I know! I know! My brain operates the way it does because I don't get enough sleep. I just don't. For reasons I'd rather not disclose and unfortunately have nothing to do with covert activities or state secrets, I'm waking up every night/morning at three and staying up for about a half hour. Then it takes me another half hour to go back to sleep. Then I wake up two hours later. I wish I could be a glamorous spy like Jammie Lee Curtis in True Lies. I already know how to do a strip tease. C'mon, CIA, gimme a chance!

I had lunch last week with two of my favorite bloggers, Stephanie of Hugs, Kisses and Snot and Sabine of Sabine of Suburbia. If y'all aren't reading them, you should be. They were both in the cast of Listen To Your Mother | Oklahoma City. You'll love their stories--and those stories go live tomorrow on YouTube! I've had a post-lunch, thank you message started to them but every time I get on Facebook to finish it and send it, someone else bongs a message to me and I get distracted. Y'all owe Stephanie and Sabine an apology for my tardiness.

This week, I dropped Daughter 1 off at another Summer STEM Academy. She's already having so much fun. It's just weird leaving your child in a college dorm. Just. Weird. There's no possible way that the baby who crawled out of her baby bed at eleven months is old enough to be left on a college campus. But, that's exactly where she is ... learning about food. Having a great time.  Instagramming pictures of her "second ever dorm room." Whatever, kid. Your room will always be in my house, you got it??!?

And finally, my cousins are coming today! Our moms are sisters. We grew up doing a lot of stuff together--trips to St. Louis, heckling our moms when they had a car wreck, you know stuff like that. I have a big chunk of my book Crazy On Board devoted to our antics. In fact, my own momma is currently reading the book and laughing as we speak. (It makes me feel weird when people read my book while I'm around.) I can only imagine that my mom is reading about the time my cousin Whitney and I busted a mob ring in St. Louis. We went to KFC afterwards. It was a big party. In honor of Courtney and Whitney being here, we're eating fried chicken. You only wish your cousins were as cool as mine are.

I'm hoping they let me dress them alike this week.