Hello, everyone – this is Em, temporarily hacking into Patrick’s blog. Last week was very exciting for us. My beautiful, amazing sister, Rosada came to visit with her daughter, Ryann and Ryann’s two adorable daughters, Eleanor and Naomi. Finn and Eleanor were very excited to see each other – especially during the two days that we got to spend at Disneyland – hooray! As an extra bonus, my nephew Christopher and his wife Joyce were able to join us at Disneyland one of the days and we arranged for a babysitter through the Disneyland hotel that night so that we could go on some of the grown up rides – whee! The flying ride at California Adventure was truly amazing, but in my opinion, nothing can compare to Space Mountain. Bell and I laughed so hard on that ride; our jaws were actually hurting afterwards.

In addition to our fabulous Disneyland trip, my aunt Holly also came up from San Diego one night for a wonderful Thai dinner that almost made us forget the truly wretched dinner we had the night before at Hank’s. Boo! Usually, Hank’s is pretty reliable (and I have to say, my salmon was still great) but this time it took them almost two hours to bring our dinner and when it finally came, they forgot both Bell and Zod’s orders. Of course, it wouldn’t be a proper Monahan reunion without at least one good fiasco for all of us to laugh over, so there you go.

Unfortunately, I had to leave half way through Zod and Ryann’s visit to fly to Austin with Adrienne for the Austin Film Festival. I was sad to leave my family, but Adrienne and I were very excited that our script, Relativity was a finalist at the festival. Our script did not win in our category, but we had a great time meeting lots of amazing writers and we were also happy to run into our friend, Toby Wilkins, whose film, Splinter was debuting at the festival. Splinter is a scary low-budget horror movie about these weird little tentacle-type things (inspired by sea urchins) that stick into human skin – either alive or dead – and then take control of it. I think Toby may have regretted inviting me to his screening, since I was practically sitting in his lap by the end of it, but I had a great time getting the bejeezus scared out of me. Admittedly, I’m not the biggest horror movie aficionado, so it probably doesn’t take all that much to scare me, but I was really impressed by the creepy way his creature moved.

Anyway, it was an amazing, excitement-filled trip, but I missed my boys terribly. I’ve never been away from Finn or Jack for more than one night and I’m not sure I’ve been away from Patrick for much longer than that - so I am very, very glad to be home. It’s been hard adjusting to not having Zod around. I love my sisters so much, it’s crazy and I really wish that we could all live closer together. But I’m grateful for whatever time we have together.