Eleven Days of Travel

I'm backtracking here.  It's mid January now and I'm bitter I missed all the opportunities to talk about our ELEVEN day vacation.  Now that we are home, whenever someone asks what we did over break, my line is:  "Eleven days, 3 kids, 3 cats, a Barbie Dream House and no snow.  Ugh."  Don't get me wrong, we were so glad to go back home, and the kids and cats did (I think) pretty darn well considering no one could move more than a few inches in the (what Kenny calls) his Tetris-packed van.

The only downside (besides the travel space) to spending your whole vacation on the move is, well, you spend your whole vacation on the move.  This makes coming home and jumping right into the routine again, a little hard. We can't figure out why nothing in our house is clean or why zero projects were accomplished - oh yeah, we weren't home.

The upside to all the going though, is that we got to visit and visit and visit - with each other, with our families, and with our friends and truly the best part, we got to watch our kids befriend the next generation of our favorite Oklahoma and Nebraska people.  Since we don't make it home that often, it's a relief when Elijah and Lydia and Lanie play with these boys and girls they see maybe once a year.  I think there is this assumption by adults that just because you throw 8 kids together who have similar ages that they'll be best friends.  Doesn't always happen.  We are just lucky I guess, really blessed that this trip worked in our favor.  I loved seeing Elijah play soccer with Jenny's kids or Lydia beg for a sleep over with Sharla's daughter or Lanie tagalong with her second cousins.  For those moments and so many more spent visiting this past Christmas, I know I'll take another 11 day road trip sometime in the future, maybe minus the Barbie Dream House.

For those who we visited while up north, I've got pictures to share, or comparisons to make.

The Old & The Young.