Livin' La Vida Loca

The past 3 weeks we have been crazy busy.

First a road trip to Indiana where we watched my youngest brother graduate from high school. While we were there, Keith and I celebrated our 6th anniversary. Well, I use the word "celebrate" loosely. We said "Happy Anniversary" to each other and it was acknowledged by my family (including my dad while preaching that Sunday morning) and that was the extent of our celebration on the actual day. At some point we'll get around to atleast going out to dinner and a movie in celebration of surviving 6 years of marriage to each other.

Second we survived driving 14 hours all in one day on our way home from Indiana. (Going up there we broke it up into 2 days.) Surprisingly, Garrett was excellent during that long day in the car. Not one single tantrum was thrown. To say I was shocked by this good behavior would be an understatement.

Once we got home I started in with cleaning my house thoroughly. Because...

Third, my mom, my sister Grace, and my niece and nephew all came to my house a week after we got home from visiting them. No, it wasn't because they were just desperate to see us again, but my mom had a family reunion in Hurst, Texas the following weekend so they came down a few days early to hang out at my house. We spent several days stuffing our faces with food that they don't have up in Indiana. Yummy Double Dave's pizza (mostly their dessert pizza, I wish you could order one of those to go) and Mexican food from Posado's. Our all-time favorite Mexican food restaurant is Mercado's in Tyler, Texas. Tyler is just too far to drive with 3 kids under the age of 6 just for some good eatin'. So we settled for second best. We did some outlet mall shopping and some Target shopping as well. Then we headed over to Hurst for the big family reunion. My mom is the middle child of 5 kids. Her family is really big. There's 5 kids, 4 in-laws, 16 grandkids, 9 grandkid-in-laws, and 7 great grandkids. Her siblings and her parents haven't all been together in about 8 years so we were past due for a reunion.

My cousin Andrea and I did all the planning for the reunion so that also kept me busy leading up to our Indiana trip. Reunions are more work than I realized. But it was totally worth it. Some of the work, I brought on myself because I decided we needed a family cookbook with a compilation of all our favorite recipes. It turned out great and we have approximately 60 pages of family recipes shared amongst everyone. I also put together a video slide show as a surprise for my grandparents. I think they really liked it. The reunion went well. We had a great number of the family come and we enjoyed getting to spend time visiting with each other. My brother and sister-in-law came up from Houston which was great. We hadn't seen them since last December. The family that wins the "who traveled the farthest" award would be my cousin and her family who flew in from Massachusetts. It was decided that we would have another reunion in two years. And any family member who doesn't come will be kicked out of the family. Let's hope I can make it.

Third, this isn't really anything to do with being busy, but it's a good story to share and wrap up the blog. Since Garrett is almost 3, I figured this summer needs to have more activities than the previous summers. He's not content to be at home like he used to be so I've been coming up with some cheap things that we could do that would get us out of the house and keep him entertained. One of the local theaters is showing free kid movies on Tuesday mornings so we went there today for the first showing. The movie was "Shrek the Third". I've never seen any of the Shrek movies and this one really didn't impress me, but it was a free movie and Garrett seemed to enjoy sitting in the theater next to one of his friends, chowing down on popcorn and watching the movie on a big TV (atleast that's what he called it). With about 10 minutes left in the movie (I'm totally assuming that, it seemed like it was almost over) it shut off. My friend and I figured they were having technical difficulties and decided to go ahead and gather our things and head out. Before we got to the door, two movie employees walk in and say that the electricity just went out in the theater due to a bad storm in the area. I have to say that when we got to the theater not even 2 hours earlier, there wasn't a cloud in the sky, so I found that odd. But when we came out of the theater there was a really bad storm outside. It was actually raining and blowing so hard that water was coming into the lobby. There was no way anyone could go outside, in fact one of the high school guys who worked there had trouble even opening the door because the wind was blowing so hard. And he was a pretty big guy. So my friend and I decided to hang out and play some of the arcade games. I mean, let our sons play some of the arcade games. :) Ten minutes later the manager comes into the lobby and says that a tornado has touched down roughly 5 miles from the theater and we all needed to get into the hallway as a precaution. Lovely. Just where you want to be when a tornado strikes. With your 2 year old son in the middle of a theater. My friend and I called our husbands (who work together) to tell them what was going on and have them check the weather. Keith didn't see anywhere that said there was a tornado warning for our area. A few minutes later that same theater manager comes out and says they called the police department and were told that there wasn't a tornado. I would love to know who told them about the tornado in the first place since there wasn't anything about it online (the weather channel website and some local news websites) and obviously they didn't hear about it from the police. Anyway, it was still too bad outside to attempt to go to our cars so we threw more quarters into the arcade money pit before it let up. We initially were happy about the free movie, but I'm sure we spent the equivalent of a movie ticket on those games while we were passing time. Thankfully the storm let up before we were broke and we headed home. Hopefully Garrett doesn't expect that kind of excitement the next time we go to the movies.

I'm sad to say that all of our big summer plans are now over and it's not even officially summer! Of course Garrett and I will do a variety of things in order to pass the time but no more trips are planned for the next few months and no more visits with my family. In fact we won't be seeing them again until Christmas. I'm sad. But that's just life when you don't live close to your family. Hopefully these last 3 weeks haven't given Garrett high expectations for the next few months. Long trips in the car and stays in nice hotels with indoor pools just aren't on the agenda. Maybe the occasional free movie at the theater combined with running in the sprinkle will be good compensation.

Yeah, I don't think so either.