I'm Back

So here I go again. I'm back on the blog wagon. Willingly. Although, I was threatened with my very life if I didn't blog again. 'Sall I'm sayin'.

Here goes.

So we're back from vacation. It was great! We traveled with my aunt and uncle to south Texas to visit my cousin (their son) Randal, his wife Brandi, and their children, Chorel and Aspen. They were wonderful, gracious hosts, and I am truly grateful that they opened their home and allowed us to disrupt their lives for a time. Randal works for NASA, and he arranged a tour for just our family. It was incredible! (Tobey's favorite part) We saw the old Mission Control room (It looks exactly like the one in Apollo 13), the current Mission Control room (we didn't actually get to go inside that part--had to look through the giant glass window. We saw the astronauts floating inside the International Space Station on a giant screen in Mission Control. Super Cool!!!), a room they use for practice runs, a life sized Saturn rocket (OMG it is enormous!), and a full scale ISS that they use for practice (again super huge). We were thoroughly impressed.

Since they live so close to the ocean, of course we had to visit the beach. We had a fabulous time! We splashed, wave dived, built sand castles and smashed them down again, picked up shells and hermit crabs, fished, and looked for sharks teeth until sun crisped, covered in sand, and pickled from the salt, we went back to Randal’s house.

Their house is set on about 3 acres, and Randal has been experimenting to turn it into Green Acres. He has chickens and turkey. They are still young and very cute. The kids chased them around some to catch them then spent most of their time holding the turkeys like they were infants. The turkeys seemed content enough to be held, so what do you do? He had lambs, but they ran away just before we arrived. (Hmm.....ESP?) We shot all kinds of pretty and loud, and pretty darn loud fireworks on Independence Day, and just had a fun time in general. Several other members of our extended family joined us on the 4th and stayed until Saturday. It was loud, busy, packed with people...just like old times! I felt a bit like I was a child again.

We left on Sunday and traveled to the Dallas/Fort Worth area to visit my sister-from-another-mutha, Mandi and her sweet famille. More fun, fun, fun (discounting all threats made to my very person)! Once all the formalities were out of the way, it was time for some serious game playing, because after all the smack talkin'-- it was on!!! We played games (Nertz mostly) until the toothpicks would no longer hold our eyes open. Monday, it was pretty much the same thing, except we squeezed face stuffing into the schedule.

All kidding aside, going to see my dear friend is always like going home. We pick up like we were together a couple of days ago. Upon entering their house, I think it took all of 3 seconds before Tobey's mood piqued and he started laughing and cracking jokes. The kids were so happy to see each other we barely heard a peep out of them the entire time we were there. Yes Virginia, there are miracles.

Wednesday we drove home, and I pretty much fell into an exhausted heap. Vacation is great, but there's nothing like coming home.