Blackout Night Returns

With all of the mess going on around here (hurricanes, Dear Husband gone, school starting up, etc.), Blackout Night has kind of slipped into oblivion for the last few weeks. Oh, we've had a couple hours here and there with the lights off, but not a real Blackout Night.
I do not intend to let that happen often.
We are going to try out Wednesdays as our new night, since our schedule has definitely changed with the start of the school year and new activities all 'round. So, last night, just as we were getting ready to turn off all the lights, I heard the shattering noise of glass falling onto my bedroom's cement floor. Ohdearme. It could have been worse, I must say. It was only a bottle of fragrance oil that I use for making lotions and stuff.
But it was a big one.
It was the Emma's Garden oil and it had probably 12 ounces of concentrated fragrance oil in it, which was now all over my painted floor, floating tiny shards of brown glass in it. So, it was going to be a strong-smelling Blackout Night, which required the lights to be on a bit longer while we tried to get it all cleaned up before the oil took the paint up off my floor.
Some things are just going to be difficult in life, aren't they? I'd had a whole day of getting almost-somewhere and then not quite making it.
Anyway, I stuck my husband on Cleanup Detail while I put together our dinner - salad with raspberries, sunflower seeds and goat cheese with raspberry vinaigrette. I know. My kids eat and actually like weird stuff. I absolutely love that they proclaimed things in the gray-ish, fading light like, "Wow, Mom! This is a really good, creamy goat cheese! You picked a good one this time!" as they shoveled fork-fulls of salad to their mouths.
It makes up for the other weird stuff kids do.
Once fragrance oils and dinner were cleaned up, we gathered back in the living room for a game of Scattergories, which is becoming a family favorite as the kids are more and more able to think of words to fill out their lists.
And here's my observation about last night - Blackout night is usually this quiet, peaceful time of being unplugged, but I think a couple of weeks without doing it has really thrown us out of practice. It was really hard this time not to turn on the TV and not to check my email. Maybe it's because I was pretty tired and just wanted to zone out. I don't know. But this time around, we had lots of loud laughing and shouting and forcing each other to look up words that were on our lists because some of us make up words (not me this time!) and are quite sure they're real.
This time, it was anything but quiet and peaceful.
But it was still just as refreshing and deeply connecting and it still narrowed our focus down to just each other. Which is the whole point.
And once the kids were in bed, I went to my sanctuary, my bathroom, which was already lit with candles and drew myself a quiet, peaceful bath.
A bath without any Emma's Garden fragrance oil in it at all. Because, thanks to the oil spill, the whole house already smelled like peonies, raspberries and lilacs.

DAILY BLISS: Chatting in the car with Andrew - I love the time between carlines, when it's just Drew and me in the car. I know he won't "talk" to me forever, so I'm eating it up while I can.