The Stay-cation Draws to a Close...

The past 12 days have been a wonderfully restful and fun time!!

I always laugh when one of these little adventures wraps up because I look back and realize I did NONE of the things that I fervently planned for weeks to do! "We're going to go here and there and do this and that....." Yes, we had a few road trips, but at the end of the day (or usually it was towards the beginning!) I would think, "What do I REALLY want to spend my time doing??"

Instead of playing the "local tourist", the answer more often entailed reading (I devoured several great books!), going to the gym, riding bikes, going to the park, getting ice cream, hitting the library, and a little retail therapy! All of these things were randomly peppered with those moments when we just had some good quality hanging out time together, and in the midst of those were the occasional "funny things my kids say"...

YA'SHAR:
This child has been a bit more spoiled than the rest, what with having me all to himself most of the day when the others are in school. Each day he would hop out of bed and say "What are we going to do today, Mommy?!" Everything's an adventure when you're 4... I would say, "We're just going to the post office, that's all," and he'd say, "Awesome! I'll go get my back pack!!" One morning I told him that we were going to see Barbara and Bella. Barbara is my friend from work who has an adorable black lab named Bella. The kids LOVE to go play out in the backyard with Bella, and I guess it'd been a little while, because Ya'shar said, "Oh good! Barbara and Bella!" And then he was quiet for a minute, thinking I guess, and then he said, "So which one is the dog and which one is the woman? I forgot."

MA-LAK:
One evening Ma-lak asked if I'd read him yet another one of his crocodile books that he got from the library. All four of the kids were cuddled close to me as I read about the differing characteristics of crocodilians versus alligators. Ma-lak kept interjecting all these fascinating little tidbits of wisdom about alligators and the different species and all this stuff that he'd learned from other books and probably the the Discovery channel. Finally Rea said, "Ma-lak, you know a lot about alligators, maybe you should be an animal scientist!" Ma-lak looked reeeeeally sad and just shook his head and said, "No, I can't. I have to cut their stomachs open to study what they eat, and I don't think Daddy will let me use his knife."

REA:
Today was Parent-Teacher conferences at the kids' school today, so I was able to meet with all their teachers and see how they're doing so far. (All is going well for the most part....) Rea's teacher gave me Rea's daily journal to see the kind of entries she'd written. It's sorta their first opportunity to be creative and write anything they want to, and then they were supposed to color a picture to go along with what they wrote about. My favorite entry was one that clearly verbalized her feelings about an event that had happened a couple weeks ago.... She'd drawn a picture of Daryle holding a gigantic Michelin-sized do-nut in one hand, and she'd written, "My daddy told me we were going to go Krispy Kreme for do-nuts and then I couldn't go because I was naughty and when he got home there were none left."

NI'KE:
This week since I was home (and this made it easier) I agreed to a "trial run" of packing the kids lunches for school instead of them eating school lunch. After calculating multiple times the cost versus the headache of it all, I figured it was about the same either way, and told them we'd pack lunches this week to see how it goes. The first morning, I came down stairs and they were all feverishly throwing all kinds of stuff in their lunch boxes. When I looked into Ni'ke's, she had packed pringles, cookies, a candy bar, a can of soda (yes, we did some nutritional education that morning) and then for good measure, ONE grape. Only one. I asked her what the grape was for, and she shrugged and said, "Daddy says I need meat on my bones." :)

Thanks, Lord for the blessing that this precious time off with my children has been! I am so grateful!!