Getting back to the real world

Hi Strangers!! It feels like it’s been forever since I’ve sat down to write a post. Well, at least at my desk. I posted once from on the road, and it was harder than it seemed since for 90% of the trip we didn’t have internet! As I said in my last post, for the past two weeks, my family has been on vacation. My husband and daughter took off from work, my son is off from school for the summer and I am lucky enough to be able to put aside my projects whenever I need to. Since our kids are old enough to not need a potty break every hour or so, and they aren’t  too easily bored by sitting in a car for long stretches of time, we decided that a cross country trip from South Florida to the Grand Canyon, and back, would be a good idea. So, loaded up the rental car and took off across country. (ugh, don’t even get me started on the rental car situation! )

We visited New Orleans, the Grand Canyon, Flagstaff, Oklahoma City, The Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo TX, Roswell, Memphis, North Carolina, and very briefly, Atlanta.

We were supposed to be gone for two weeks, but we came back early for a few reasons. The first one being that my sister and her family were visiting from California, Hawaii and NJ and we wanted to spend some time with them. The second reason, well,  the house sitter that was staying at the house on the days that my sister wasn’t there, decided to throw a house party at our place. Yeah, that was a great call to get at 12 am from our neighbor, asking if there were supposed to be a boatload of teenagers partying at our house. Uhm… NO!!! We had just gotten to Atlanta around 8 pm that night, but we decided to head home that night instead of finishing the trip. Our furry and feathered friends were there, and we needed to make sure all was okay with them, and the house. Besides, we were tired of hotels and wanted our own beds. I’m still a little bummed that we didn’t get to see and do all the fun things in Atlanta, but maybe next year I’ll bring the family with me to the Haven Conference to check it out.

Since we’ve gotten home, we spent the last few days going through the mail, catching up  on email, cleaning house, visiting with my family, and sleeping – lots of sleeping. I know, it’s not really exciting news to relate to you, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every second I’ve had to visit with my family. Yesterday, we hosted the family at our house. It included my dad, two sisters, two brothers, one brother-in-law, one sister-in-law, one should-be-our-sister-in-law-already, six nieces, two nephews, one great-niece, one great-nephew and one family friend. So, altogether, it was 23 members of my family. And that wasn’t including all my siblings and their kids – there were a few still missing!  There was volleyball, swimming, ping pong, billiards, eating, drinking, talking and five little people literally running around the house screaming at the top of their lungs, just because it was fun. It was WONDERFUL. Nothing like family to make a person feel loved and accepted, warts and all 🙂

So, why am I telling you this? I’m hoping that you will forgive me for what a cruddy blogger I’ve been. And I’m not ready to fix that situation yet either. My sister’s family leaves on Tuesday, so I’ve got a few more days of visiting to go. So, I’m sharing a few of my favorite pics from our trip, and hope you will enjoy them enough to forgive me until I get back to blogging again later this week.

Hope you had a great two weeks, and I’ll be back in just a few more days 🙂