Back from Vacay

phew. that was a marathon. we drove up to sd, dropped the kids with grandma, continued on to minneapolis, had a bocce extravaganza, dropped addison at the airport, drove to sd, hung out for a week on the farm, got in the car with the babies and drove back home to texas. phew! actually, the driving really wasn't so bad. the kids were amazing there and back. we left the farm at about 7-7:30 on sunday morning and made it to norman, ok by 5:45pm. by the way - if you are ever needing a hotel room in norman, ok you MUST stay at the la quinta. they just remodeled and seriously it is so cute and clean and fresh and bright and fabulous. here is a picture i took of our room (that's annie doing circles on the bed) but you can also go to their website and find the "vibrant room design" and that's what our room was. so nice. WOOD floors in the bathroom and entry way. well, laminate wood, but still. and only $79. i think we paid $100 in topeka on the way up north and that room was DIRTY and grody and yucky and below average. this room was pristine and awesome. ok that's enough about the hotel. seriously though, good move la quinta!

so anyway, we got home yesterday at about 1:30pm. it's good to be home. we were missing addison/daddy and he has a beard now so i guess he turned into a hermit while we were gone. hee. he says he's doing it for jay's wedding. you hear that, jay? hee hee.

our trip was so much fun. mom and i were talking about how we always have a little separation anxiety when we say goodbye. so true. it's the one thing about being this far away from my family that i just can't stand. the separation when i do see them again. it hurts my tummy a little sometimes. but hey, it's part of life, right? anyway, it was great fun. we were very busy. we went to the rogen farm on tuesday and visited and annie and jasper discovered momo the cat, much to momo's chagrin. poor thing. annie would just chase him around the house and say "i'm gonna GET you momo!" in her little mischievous voice. it was fun to get to see the rogen clan again and shally stuffed us silly with her chicken fettucini alfredo and peach pie. mmmmm.

oh and that reminds me - i need to give a little holla to all the cousins who are starting their freshman year at college: andrew, paul and dani - HOLLA!! i hope you guys are settling in and having fun. soak it in because before you know it you'll have been out of college for 10 years, have 2 kids and will have turned into a boring, old married person. :) hee hee. actually, it's not boring at all, but that's neither here nor there. the important thing is that you are having fun learning a lot.

i digress. can you tell i have my post-vacation-attention-deficit-typing problem? i can't seem to stay focused on one subject. that's what happens when it's been so long since i've updated. i apologize.

back to the trip: so we played around the farm all week and had a great time as usual. a friend of ours - who also did some of our wedding photos - took pictures of the kids for me, we got annie's hair cut, we shopped a little, we hung out and did my favorite thing of all: sipped gin and tonics on the front porch. ahhhhh. mom and i tackled 3 puzzles and would have finished that 3rd one if a certain 2 year old tornado would not have gotten her hands on it. maybe she was upset that we weren't doing a puzzle SHE could do or maybe she thought she could help us...only annie knows the truth. all i know is we had the thing pretty well put together and then i went to go get jasper up from his nap and when i came back downstairs the puzzle was destroyed. and i mean destroyed. it was as if she had the little angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other - like in the cartoons - and she chose to listen to the devil because his plan sounded much more fun...

...but in the end, it wasn't so fun. when i told her she had to tell mom she was sorry, her eyes got all welled up and her lip popped out and she was so sad. hee. not that i'm laughing at her, but the girl can turn on the waterworks at the drop of a hat. come on!

what else? lots of kite-flying, gardening, sandpile playing, tractor riding, rockpile climbing, sleeping beauty watching, horseyback riding (courtesy of papa's back), etc. it was very busy and not busy at all...all at once. perfect.

i took a bunch of pictures so i put them on the kodak website if you want to check them out here, you can.

so i took off early sunday so we could get back and get settled for annie's first day of preschool today...only to get there and find out she actually starts TOMORROW. ha! off to a great, organized start! it was a nice dry-run though, because we were out of town for the meet-and-greet day so we didn't get to go and get all the info, so this way we got to meet annie's teachers "miss susie" and "miss dawn" and see her little classroom and all that. it was so cute. i'll write more about it tomorrow when we have the REAL first day.

that's enough for now. i can't even stand to keep typing anymore, so i can't imagine what it must be like reading my spastic-brain-writings. time for me to peace out - i have to check on jay and sarah and see if everyone survived their respective batchelor/batchelorette weekends...