Blackout Night: Interrupted

I spent most of my afternoon yesterday composing a post in my head titled, "Blackout Night: Routine." And that's what it was going to be. Remember last week? I thought we'd hit on something of a magic formula of walk, salad, read. And I was really looking forward to that routine.
We hit all of our afternoon errands on time and stopped to grab some salad ingredients. We got home and practiced all instruments and did homework. I was getting the kids into some walkin' clothes when Chris called me. He'd received some gift cards for Chili's and wondered if we'd mind eating out. Heh. Mind? We could just walk after we eat out and still read and still call it Blackout Night, right? So, yeah. We ate out. We'll eat our salad tonight to make up for it.
But while we were at the restaurant, Andrew said he wasn't feeling well. I guess some kind of virus has been ravaging his school. Tons of kids are missing school. He actually did have a fever, so we decided to skip the walk. We could still read by candle light, right?
Well, we ended up sending Drew to bed when we got home and Emma and I worked on her class valentine goodies by candle light instead. Which was peaceful and sweet and calming, if not exactly what I'd had in mind.
But we hadn't worked for 20 minutes or so when we were interrupted.
My sister-in-law Mindy came over with her new baby.

Wait.
No.

Somebody get my mom a paper bag.
Mom? Just breathe slowly, OK?

Her new camera baby. She's been waiting and waiting for a real, grown-up DSLR for a long time and they got a great deal at Circuit City, since the company's closing up shop and everything's on sale. She got the 40D (I'm not sure which lens, but she got a lens too). I am so jealous! So, obviously, we couldn't play around with it in the dark. We turned on the lights and we both squealed a lot and talked about things like aperture priority, ISO and shutter speed and we took lots of funny pictures of Joe, my brother. Cause, you know, he's funny like that.
But the time came for them to leave and they had to take Canon with them, so we turned the lights back out and just sat in the quiet. We sent the kids on to their rooms and continued to sit in the quiet.
And the strangest thing happened.

I fell asleep on the sofa.

At, like, 8:30.


DAILY BLISS: my mom took me out for lunch! yay!