Sometimes, you’re just hanging out at a luau, trying to get your toddler to eat some pineapple, when all of a sudden some man in a loincloth grabs you by the arm and throws a lei around your neck and pulls you up onto a stage where a lady in a coconut bra wraps a sarong around your waist and says to you, now, you will hula.

And so you hula. And it is awesome, and not as embarrassing as you might expect — that is, until the man in the loincloth comes back and thrusts his hips at you – on stage! in front of everybody! and also the Internet! – and you think, oh god, are my children watching? and you blush, hard.

But it’s still pretty great, because you get to cross one more thing off your life list, and, also, you get to keep the sarong. Sarongs are awesome.

Many, many thanks to Loews Hotels, for arranging for the surprise hula lesson (and for reading my life list and spotting item #17 in the first place) and to Universal Orlando Resort, for bringing us to Orlando so that I could learn to hula and also drink Butterbeer and stuff. Have I said? SO AWESOME.

No, Emilia is not dressed as Jesus. That would have been pretty funny, but I still have enough of a hangover from years of being raised Catholic that I would worry about being smited (smote?) (smitten?) for impiety. She was a cave girl, via Jasper’s Bam Bam costume, which he rejected in favor of last year’s ill-fitting fireman costume accessorized with his sister’s bright pink ankle socks, a choice that we didn’t understand until we witnessed him devote two-thirds of his trick-or-treating schedule to systematic jack-o-lantern safety inspections at every house in the neighborhood (“ooh, Mommy,” he’d say, kneeling by a particularly brightly lit gourd, “PUMPKIN. TOO HOT.” Then he’d try to blow it out.) Clearly, he had a mission, and so he wasn’t so much donning a costume as he was putting on a uniform and pursuing a vocation. We never did figure out the pink socks, but I think that that choice is best left unexamined.

Anyway, yeah: Emilia went as a cave girl, but ended up looking more like a very tiny Jesus with blunt-cut bangs and a leftover steak bone shoved in his robe belt, which is, I imagine, exactly how Jesus rolled. But you didn’t hear that from me.

/looks anxiously at the heavens.

(I dressed up as the ladies of the YummyMummyClub dressed up as me, because, you know, what’s not awesome about meta-costuming?)

(I also dressed up liked this for the Blissdom Canada costume/karaoke party. I’m thinking about adopting it as my regular look, because, seriously, I think that it’s just ME.)

My husband made this commercial. It’s kind of what he does, but this is a little different, because it’s something that he did on his own, with a partner, instead of with a massive creative team and production company and crew of whomevers doing everything from pointing giant cameras to making sandwiches, and it’s for a kind of competition, the result of which exactly will be I’m not sure what, but still. It’s important to him, and it’s a sweet and funny video, and so I’m going to make you watch it, and you will be grateful:

Please enjoy. And pass it on. The husband doesn’t ask much of my Internets, so it’d be nice to indulge him.

(We’re road-tripping right now – this post comes to you courtesy the free Wi-Fi at the Hampton Inn in Louisville, Kentucky – and to say that my attention span is crunched almost flat is to understate things dramatically. So.)

(We’re road-tripping because I’m going to run the Princess Half-Marathon, aka the Tiarathon, at Disney World this weekend. I’m doing it for Tanner. You can read more about here.)

(Also, puppies.)