This day did not start off well.

Amanda has been trying to run from a cold, but it caught up to her last night and she hardly slept at all.  I slept, but not well, since she was moving around, getting out of bed and the like.  Then at 6:00 she asked me if I’d go to the store up the road to get some throat lozenges.  She said she’d looked everywhere she could think to look throughout the night, but we didn’t have any anywhere.  Being the dutiful husband that I am, I complied.  When I got back and gave her one, she said it was already helping.  I slept off andon until 8:00 and Amanda slept, or at least stayed in bed, until 10 or so I think.

I got up at 8 because Milly was knocking on her door.  I reminded her that she could open it, so out she came, kicking off her dry pullup.  That was a good thing.

I did my workout and got through that.  It’s technically the end of my second full week of P90X, but I’ve taken weekends off and missed Monday, so I’m not fully on schedule.  I can tell that the Ab Ripper X workout, which I think it done every other day, is having an effect. It’s not because my abs are starting to show, but because I have a good soreness throughout my core.

Shortly after I finished that I got an email about a semi-large problem one of my clients was having, which I knew was going to be difficult to fix, and while I was checking that out the server went down for a few hours.  There was other stuff I was able to work on, but the majority of the things I wanted to get done today were dependent on being able to access my own server.  Basically what happened was that a routine maintenance didn’t go as planned and had to be done manually, which took much longer than expected.  (I had no hand in any of it.)

So that sucked and was stressful.

There’s a site I’ve been trying to finish up that I had to do some very specific things for, and I wasn’t able to get that done.

Since Milly hadn’t wet her pullup she got to put the tenth sticker on her Baby Ariel Progress chart, meaning she’d filled it up and could get this Baby Ariel doll she saw a while back at Target.  We went to Target, but they only had a Tiana in the style she wanted.  She said she wanted to get the Tiana, but Amanda asked her if she really wanted it or if she only wanted it because they didn’t have the Arial, to which Milly answered that it was, indeed, the latter.  We didn’t get it, but we told her we’d take her to Toys R Us tomorrow to see if it was there.  We didn’t have time to go that far today.

When we got back we got Milly ready for Halloween and dressed her up in her Belle costume, put her hair up, gave her a crown and Amanda put a little eye shadow on her.  She was very excited.  Amanda bought her some extra stuff to put under the clothes yesterday, including some long john pajamas, a long-sleeved Belle shirt and some Belle socks.  Amanda rightly guessed that Milly didn’t want to wear any additional stuff with her dress, but that she’d change her mind if it all had Belle on it.

We were going to go with the Griffins, but Maddox had some issues at school and they got home later than they expected.  We drove ourselves to the Frazelle house and the Johnsons met us there.  Karen was there when we got there and Anna and Barry showed up soon after with pizza.  The Johnsons arrived a few minutes later.  Milly was very excited to see Jacob, who had a dinosaur outfit.  Emma Love was a bug or fairy of some sort.

We all ate then drove over to Harbor Island, which is where we’ve taken Milly to go trick-or-treating every year that she’s done it.  The Griffins were there and had waited for us for a few minutes.  Maddox was dressed as Thor and Gavin was Chucky, though the mask was kind of creepy and he didn’t want to scare any kids, so he walked around in overalls. I was a Duke fan, I guess (I was wearing a Duke sweatshirt), though I walked around part of the night with a Batman mask Karen bought for me on Monday.

Barry had the best costume of the night though.  He was DJ Lance.  One group of kids saw him and started singing “There’s a Party in My Tummy”.  You could hear a lot of murmurs about DJ Lance and a few kids walked up to him and said hi to him.

Milly spent most of the night holding Maddox’s hand.  Jacob was very excited and kept trying to get ahead of everyone.  Emma Love spent the night in the stroller, though I discovered a tickle spot on her leg that made her laugh a lot.  I told her I wasn’t going to forget that.

We were the last to leave and got home just a little after 8:00.  I took Milly to go see Bonnie for a minute, figuring our neighbor would like to see her.  I helped her get ready for bed when we got inside then Amanda and I watched the first season finale of Revenge.  They seemingly killed Victoria, which was a pretty big surprise to me.

Anyway, this day started off rough and was pretty stressful throughout a chunk of it, but seeing Milly dressed up and seeing how excited she was helped make up for it.

Zach Dotsey