There are Bats in our Belfry CH1

So I have kind of thought about this whole blogging thing, and have had so many people tell me I need to write a book, so since they are all probably right I think I will snoop out interest right here on my blog.  I have also reevaluated how my blog should go, and here are my thoughts.  Number one, my house is a belfry, and since there are so many bats in it, I should go ahead and just post random happenings in my home.  And number two, I think these short stories should be a lot more interesting.  So here goes, Chapter one of my bats.

Such random things happen in my home that if I could record each and every one of them and had a nickle for each of them I would be a millionaire.  But just the other morning I bought catnip for our 2 cats to play in, kitty crack I call it, and boy did they play.  They were running around the house all day long hitting each other and wrestling and making so much noise you would have thought my kids were playing in the nip!  After a tiny bit of time, my boys got interested in the cat boondoggle and started filling up socks with kitty crack.  They were running up and down the stairs with loaded socks and the cats were chasing them as fast as they could.  The site of all of this was amazingly funny, because lots of things my kids do are not that funny, just annoying.  But this was an all time kitty crack high.  When I finally got the kids and the cats to slow down and just relax,  the cats started up again just play fighting.  Finally it was time for bed, so we sent all of the kitty crackheads upstairs, and the cats stayed with us downstairs.

I went into my bedroom and closed the door behind me, but the cats insisted on trying to come in by crying at the door, and jumping at the handle, so I finally let them into the room.  My husband and I were trying to go to sleep when all of a sudden both of the cats ran on top of our bed and started fighting, rolling all over the bed, and making only the kind of noise a cat can make.   I finally got up and shoed them both out of the room and closed the door behind me.  My hubby finally fell asleep, it wasn't a few minutes later that they were back at it trying to open the door with their paws.   Fortunately my hubby doesn't hear well in his left ear,  that was the up ear, so I felt like I could live with the noise until they got tired enough to just go away.  But go away they did NOT!  Stay they did! Jumping and trying to grab the door handle, until you would not believe it they opened the darn door!  They both looked stunned at their accomplishment, but the stunning show didn't last long at all, they pranced right in the room like two prissy divas and jumped right up on my bed again and started to wrestle!

I finally grabbed them both, ran their two little butts upstairs and shoved them into an unused room, since my kids have decided it's much lazier to sleep on the sofa so they don't have to fix their bed in the morning.  There they stayed the rest of the night, by morning the room was a mess from them running all over the place wrestling and just acting up, but we all had a good nights sleep.  They on the other hand had a good days sleep, since they had been up all night causing mayhem.  My day was later spent waking them up every 15 minutes or so just to ruin their dream of a day.  Lazy messed up cats that they are we all still love them, but on occasion I would love to put an ad out for sale "two rambunctious, catnip loving, door opening, noisy brothers, free to crazy home."

I'm finally back....................

After loads of time, I'm back with my blogging!  Life has gotten busier for me and my family, my husband and I have started a foundation called "Trumpets NOT Guns" with our amazing celebrity face, Mr. Glen David Andrews.  We are both humbled that he has come on board with us and made this happen.  We are now hosting an event at Tipitina's Uptown with several local celebrities and restaurantuers.  April 16th is the date, and we hope that it is a very successful event.  We will be donating instruments to children in our city, in hopes that picking up a horn is better than picking up a gun.

Life post Katrina is no longer post K, we are back and we are better than ever.  This City is rocking and rolling to a great new New Orleans.  There are lots of great things happening, and yes we are back to at least 2 festivals a weekend!  I had to laugh when someone from Austin, TX told me that they had a huge event in their city and it brought in around 100,000 people, oh my, that's how many people just walk in the French Quarter on any given beautiful day in NOLA, and there are plenty of those!

Well I am back, and will be posting regularly, this is just my intro to say "HI" again, and hope that someone out there is interested in what I have to say! 

Houston Here We Are!!!

It's not like Houston, Texas could even prepare for what they were about to end up with.  A bunch of lost souls from New Orleans and the surrounding areas, with no homes, no clothes, children and pets in tow and no where to go!!  So here we are Houston, prepare yourselves for a bunch of crawfish eating, beer drinking, partying people like the NOLA crowd.

All of us Katrina sorts clammered for an open computer, which were few and far between, just to see if we could get a small glimpse of what was going on in our hometown.  The news was ok, but not enough!  We all needed more.  We needed to see pictures, faces, anything that was familiar.  The internet provided at the time more information than the news.

There were a bunch of us at the hotel, so we all met in the lobby instead of watching the tv in our rooms, we all watched together in the hall of the hotel.  None of us knew each other, but it didn't matter, we all started talking, finding out each knew someone the other knew, not unusual in New Orleans!  We were actually making coffee for the entire place because Houston has that sort of brown water type coffee, and we're from New Orleans, we drink what is better known at Antoinnes Restaurant as "3 Day Coffee", that is if you drink this stuff you'll be up for 3 days, it's dark roasted, with chicory, it looks more like sludge than coffee!  But that's what we were all brought up on and that's what we all wanted.  Fortunantly, myself and 2 or 3 other ladies thought ahead, instead of bringing enough clothes for a week or two, we brought enough coffee to feed an entire hotel full of NOLA people.  That's how we think in New Orleans, food, drink, drink, drink, then clothing and essentials!  We are more about the spirit than the material needs :)!

We sat for days watching the TV, googling new,  feeling like we were  living in a surreal world.  Our homes under water, our city blown apart, our lives on complete hold for a time.  I just could not believe what I saw and how devastated our lives had become in just a couple of hours.  But life goes on, and we did!  That's the good news!

My lifted "Hand that rocks the Cradle" by Cathy Driscoll

I have actually borrowed this, but thought it very appropriate for my beliefs. Please read on and enjoy:

'The Hand That Rocks the Cradle'

By Cathy Driscoll

To The Editor: “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world” wrote William Ross Wallace back in 1865. When committed, loving parents rock the cradle, freedom flourishes. When the state is allowed to rock that cradle, evil follows. Tyrants need thugs and wimps. This “ideal” population is produced by controlling the rearing of children. George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” illustrates the brutal way the sheep dog is robbed of her puppies. Once confiscated, the puppies become trained bullies and useful enforcers. Hitler saw children as “clean slates” on which barbarism could be written, but only if they are removed from the influences of their parents. Kitty Werthmann, a living witness to life under the Nazi boot, describes how pre-Hitler Austria abounded with compassionate and respectful youth. Post Hitler brought hideous changes. Public school teachers encouraged the children to disregard their parents' “fuddy-duddy” ways. Mandatory Youth Day was designated on Sundays at the time of Catholic Mass. Parents who took their children to church instead of youth day faced capital punishment. By firmly holding the children in their hands, Nazis successfully paved the road to the Holocaust. What has happened here in the last several decades? Parents are afraid to discipline their children in public. Records are withheld from parents because of “privacy rights.” My husband was at the doctor recently and he was not allowed to be in the examination room with our own child without a doctor or nurse present. We were at a swim meet back in November and parents were actually barred from going to the changing rooms with their own children. My husband and I questioned those in charge of the meet on this policy. These officials reasoned that children needed to learn to be on their own. These adults took it upon themselves to disregard the authority of the parents. Step by step our government has morphed from respecting parents’ rights to dismantling them. Do you want this to continue turning from a snowball into an avalanche? Let’s say that you think that you won’t be affected by this trend. You don’t plan to ever have children or you have raised your children and are done with this job. First of all, are you so bereft of compassion that you can stand by and allow your fellow citizens to face forced loss of their children? Secondly, if society is full of parentless thugs, who do we think will come to our rescue when we are old and helpless? The Parental Rights Amendment, if ratified, will seal protections for parents. It states the following: Section 1: The liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children is a fundamental right. Section 2: Neither the United States nor any state shall infringe upon this right without demonstrating that its governmental interest as applied to the person is of the highest order and not otherwise served. Section 3: No treaty may be adopted nor shall any source of international law be employed to supersede, modify, interpret, or apply to the rights guaranteed by this article. Visit http:www.parentalrights.org. Once armed with the proper knowledge – take this case to our congressmen, senators and even your governor, mayor and local and state legislators. CATHY DRISCOLL Villas

Our Katrina Story

I meant to start my blog out with our Katrina Story, but the Superbowl was far more important to our city!

So here's the ultimate story of survival:
On August 29th, 2005 we woke up to a storm of enormous proportions. We were awakened by a phone call at 4:30am by my cousin, our original intentions were to just board up the house and wait it out, we had plenty food, water and a generator so we were ready. But our plans were altered but the shear size of the storm. This was the "big one" , the mother of all storms, our worst fear living on the Gulf Coast. And it proved to be just that.

We packed up 7 kids, 2 dogs, 1 ferret, 1 cat and 3 adults and we were ready to go. We had been given reservations at a hotel in Houston that took animals, so that's where we were headed for the classic three day storm vacation. Once on the road, but not very far out we decided to take the cat and the ferret back to the house and put them upstairs, they would have plenty of water and food and of course the company of each other. They weren't the best of friends, but they weren't the worst either. So off we went, 3 cars and everything else we could possibly fit, bye, bye New Orleans.

Once on the road, we realized that this was going to be the longest trip of our lives. We stopped as little as possible, sang, laughed, listened to the radio as much as possible and laughed at the radio announcers as they chronicled each and every minute as the storm started to bear down on New Orleans. The analogies they used were getting to be a form of entertainment for us. "Storm of biblical proportions", "on the razors edge", "catastrophic event" and the list goes on and on. I know that doesn't seem funny right now, but while driving with 7 kids, 2 dogs, 3 adults, and 3 cars for 18 hours it was hilarious. We laughed so hard at times we could hardly breathe. But on we went, for miles and miles and miles at the break neck speed of 15 mph on the highway. At one point I had to go to the bathroom, so I told my cousin to drive and I jumped out of the car, ran to the mini-mart alongside the road, went to the bathroom and ran back to the car, and they had only passed up the store by about 20 or 30 feet. Since that seemed to work, that was how we all went to the bathroom, because we didn't want to loose our place in the car line.

We finally arrived in Houston at 5 am on the morning of the 30th, checked into our rooms and immediately started to watch the television to see what was happening to our city. Wow it was beyond imagination, the wind and rain were terrible, but most of all the people that had stayed were in great danger. We felt very blessed at that moment to have had the greater sense to leave.

We tried to make this a vacation for our kids and not let them know how very worried we were, so we started to look around to see what there was to do, and we found tons of stuff.

But in the meantime, we figured out our sleeping arrangements. Since there were so many of us they put us in 2 separate rooms, but also on 2 separate floors! John and I and some of the younger kids were on the 3rd floor and the older boys were on the 2nd floor. Ouch, I knew this was going to be trouble. On the first night I got a phone call at around 2am from my oldest son, one of his brothers threw up on him, I ran down the stairs, the dog following, and tried to clean up the mess. I called down to room service, and they pretty much laughed at me, extra sheets? clean up? What? There were so many people in the hotel there were no extra sheets, so being a mom of 7 at the time, that was no problem, we made a new bed out of the bedspreads. This is an easy task for a busy mom, I have to do this all of the time at home, sheets are not washed and an accident occurs, mom has to get creative and make a new bed. So that just what we did, made a new bed. After the major clean up, I had to take the dog downstairs to the bathroom, why not right? We finished the dog potty time and went back up the stairs to the third floor and tried to go back to sleep. TV on all of the time, trying to figure out what was going on.

As I laid in bed and started to drift back off to sleep, another dreaded phone call, another throw up!!! ARGH! So I went prepared, I took our bedspreads, and anything else I could find to make yet another bed. Ran down the stairs again, dog followed again, cleaned up the mess, made a new bed, the hallway looked like a dump in the inner city, but I just could not run around the hotel with the dog and sheets full of vomit. So I left them in the hall for the cleaning service, why should I have all the fun! This I believe was the last throw up session, but the dog had to go out again, so down we ran, made doggy poop, ran back up the stairs and this time got to sleep, for about 2 hours before it was time to get up and try to eat some breakfast.

This is how we got started on our very long journey home post-Katrina.
I will post our story day by day, it's entertaining, but a very long story!

Busy Mom of 8

Well here we go! Yes this is my first NOLA mommy blog, and being from New Orleans right now is the most amazing thing that anyone can imagine! We suffered Katrina, we came back, we opened our city via national news with the Saints and the Superdome, and now, yes now, WE HAVE WON THE SUPERBOWL!!! wow, wow, wow! I have always been a proud NOLA mom, born in New Orleans, grew up in New Orleans, went to school, got married, started our married life, our business', and our huge family, yes all in the great city of New Orleans! Do I sound proud? You had better believe I am proud! We have always been known as the city of last, by others of course, but not by us, we are the city of greatness, we are "The Big Easy".

It's very hard to find someone around here that is not totally in love with this city. And right now especially, we are the "Who Dat's", our city is the nation to us. Also, better known as the "Who Dat Nation".

I am now blogging to let the world know how proud we are, but most of all, to help all of those mommies out there that are at their wits end with one or more children.

More to come, but these are my thoughts today, I will tell you more about our lives and how we survived Katrina.