worrying, pee + a name and a blessing

We sent gunny away this morning with my parents for a week-long beach trip. Shane and I stayed up until 2 am talking about whether or not we should let him go and imagining every awful consequence of him being without me for a week.

Kidnapping, drowning, molestation and DID YOU EVEN REALIZE HOW AWFUL A WORLD WE LIVE IN? And everyone has a story about someone they know and creepy people and its all enough to make a mom of three lose a lot of sleep.

Before we went to bed we made the decision. We weren't going to let him go. And I busied my mind with trying to come up with activities we could do together this week to help him forget about the beach trip, the one that he had been mentally packing his bags for since the second week of June ("mom, don't let me forget my spiderman books...and shouldn't I just pack my bags tonight?" he said three weeks ago).

I swiftly changed my mind at 6am when my parents came to pick him up. For starters, it was no longer dark outside, which makes my imagination much easier to work with. And a few hours of nursing-interrupted sleep does a lot for the Law and Order SVU jitters.

I kissed him goodbye and off he went - our four year old's first trip without us. Without his mom!

And in other news, I tried (without success) to pottytrain Clara today. Day one. All-knowing pinterest says it takes three days. And I'll have you know I bought that Chips Ahoy package for the sole purpose of rewarding good potty behavior (just like pinterest says) and it was a good thing they were around, because before I knew it I had stress eaten at least 5, but this is the internet so you can go ahead and double that number.

And in OTHER news, Emmy was blessed yesterday.

Oh, Emmy. Emma. Drew. What's her name?

That's been the discussion since May 4th (d-day) and we just can't seem to agree or feel right about any option. At first we were enamored with the name Drew for a girl - after all, Shane felt SO RIGHT about naming her that in the hospital to honor his brother who passed away last year.

Then it just didn't seem right calling her Drew. And I had wanted to name a girl Emmy since Phantom of the Opera and Emmy Rossum.

So we thought we'd name her Emma Drew (instead of Drew Emma) and call her Emmy. But why not just name her Emmy if we're going to call her Emmy? I mean! Right?

That's what we decided and Shane filled out all the church paperwork as Emmy Drew but when he gave the blessing, he named her Emma Drew. Um...what?!?

Later he told me that he meant to say Emmy but it just came out Emma and that it must be a sign that her name should be Emma, but I'm all, okay. So whatever. We haven't made a decision and this blog post is getting rather long and if you're still reading then you should have a right to comment below on what this poor girl's name should be (but remember I'm still in love with the name Emmy, no matter how silly my mother-in-law says it sounds).

Pictures!