Something that makes me happy: We had a few meltdowns during the trip, but overall it was nice to spend so much time with the kids. We did a lot of fun stuff as a family in the past 9 days!
Something I’m thinking: I’m thinking I wish I had one more day to relax before going back to work. We went to the mountains with friends and then to Cincinnati and Lexington to visit family and museums.
Something I’m hoping: I’m hoping I’ll have enough energy to start my next book tonight, but I doubt that’s going to happen. I also hope for a better night of sleep than the last few nights.
Something happening around the house: We just returned from a 9 day vacation to a clean house! It was a nice surprise to remember that the cleaners came the morning of the day that we left.
Something I’m reading: I finished Life from Scratch. I have been reading this one off and on on my iPhone since getting it as a free kindle book. I enjoyed it well enough, but I think I have a hard time taking the free books seriously. A free book on the kindle just doesn’t feel like a real book to me. I know it’s mostly psychological. I also finished Kushiel’s Justice, and I’m very happy to be reading the Kushiel series again. I hope I can keep the momentum up for the next 4 books in the series (though the last 3 are a new trilogy).
Something I’m watching: Not much aside from episodes of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
Something I’m playing: We played Scene It at Gabe’s parents’ house.
Something tasty: My in-laws have a shop in Lexington, Kentucky called ShambroLa. They just recently started serving bubble tea. I had never heard of bubble tea before they started talking about it to us months ago. When I looked it up, it didn’t sound like anything I would like! I was especially disgusted by the tapioca pearls. It turns out that I couldn’t be more wrong. My in-laws make it with popping bobas (little balls of juice). They do offer the tapioca to those who want it (yuck). While we were in Lexington, we were able to sample 7 different flavors: pineapple, mango, blueberry, raspberry, banana, honey dew, and peach. It’s hard to say which one was my favorite. I thought they were all very good. I would probably pick mango, pineapple, or peach. All of the flavors have cute names. I’ll have to post more about the bubble tea later, including a video (if i can manage to splice together the clips we took this week). I also need to mention here that we went to a restaurant in Cincinnati that served a page full of special mac ‘n’ cheeses. I had one that had spinach and sundried tomatoes. It was the tastiest mac ‘n’ cheese I have ever had! I may just have to go back to Cincinnati just for the mac ‘n’ cheese!!!
Something Maddie is doing (39 months old): This was the first trip where we were able to play some road games with Maddie. We played “I spy…” on the way to Cincinnati. She did pretty well guessing (though sometimes needed extra hints). She also did alright with coming up with things to spy, though she got a bit repetitive. I can’t tell you how many times she spied something green and it was grass. Sometimes she would switch it up, and the thing that she was spying would be the trees. In her defense, there wasn’t much to spy on this particular stretch. We went many miles without seeing anything but the road, grass, and trees. While we were in the mountains (for Memorial Day weekend, as the first stop in our big roadtrip), she and Keira played hide and seek. Only they hid in plain sight, mostly, but they are starting to get the concepts. The funniest thing to me is that they call it “hide and sneak.” One will say something like “I’ll hide, and you sneak.” This cracks me up every time. I don’t know if I will ever call it “hide and seek” again. Maddie is very into the Minnie doll that the Easter Bunny brought her. Minnie and Mickey were must haves on this trip. It was hard to tell if we were in Cincinnati or Disney World. Maddie had her biggest meltdown to date this afternoon on the way back from Kentucky. I think that traveling over 1000 miles (1300 once we got back!) and many days off schedule/routine had taken its toll on her. She wanted one of us to pick her up when we left the fast food restaurant to get back into the car. She acted like her feet were stuck in cement and she couldn’t walk. This would be funny if we weren’t so exhausted, and she wasn’t about to throw a giant tantrum! Gabe had his hands full with Cullen, and I had my hands full with the diaper bag, cups, and the junk food we purchased from the combo restaurant/gas station. We told her that she was a big girl and needed to walk and hold one of our hands when going out into the parking lot. The end result was her screaming at the top of her lungs and me nearly dragging her by the arm/shoulder all the while earning me “worst parent ever” in the eyes of onlookers (at least those without children, hopefully those with children understood!). Whew, she really can scream. I dropped everything, picked her up, and put her in the car. She was screaming the whole time and continued to scream as we pulled over to the gas pump. I’m sure we were quite the spectacle. She calmed down before we left the station, so thankfully her fit was short lived. She fell asleep about 5 minutes after we got onto the highway. We were obviously dealing with an overtired preschooler. She almost never naps, even in the car. The only times we’ve seen her nap in the car recently has been after 4pm when she’s very, very tired. This time it was only about 1pm, so you know she must have been exhausted.
Something Cullen is doing (16 months old): I wrote down a lot of the new words that I heard from Cullen this week. Some of them seemed brand new to me, and others I recognized as words that I don’t think I had recorded previously (and in some cases, I finally figured out what it was that he has been saying). The words and phrases that I recorded were: blocks, bird, nose, neigh, baa, moo, meow, yum, yummy, tweet tweet, snack cup, stinky, seat, rock (as in rocking in a chair), truck, I’m stinky, pancake, slide, swing, blanket, I wanna do it, steps, yellow, shaker, shake shake, bench, stop, I want milk, chips, I want chips, sleep, waddle waddle waddle, walk, straw, cracker, shirt, go away (?? he says this a lot with birds??), ribbit, I see (when he looks at the Brown Bear book since it says “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see? I see….”), balloon, backpack, and trash. Whew. He also sang a little bit of Keira’s song from Sleeping Beauty. It sounded like “I know…..I walk” while waving his hands around in the air. He did the motions to Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (from school). Cullen is very friendly to almost everyone he meets. He’s rarely scared of people, and he often goes up to strangers and says “Hi!!” quite enthusiastically. It’s cute to me, though I’m sure it’s not cute to everyone. It seems to put a smile on most people’s faces. Cullen is very attached to the Mickey stuffed doll that he got from the Easter Bunny. He’s quite territorial about Mickey. Even if he’s not playing with Mickey, he does not like when other people get near his special friend. This is the first time we’ve noticed him forming an attachment like that. It’s been going on for a few weeks, at least. He met his Grandpa Robin, Aunt Jessica, and Cousin Ava for the first time while we were in Cincinnati (and charmed them as well). We had some cute moments at Grandma and Grandpa’s where he pretended to go “night night” and pretended that Maddie, Grandma, and I were going night night. He said, “night night” and patted us on the backs. He had some extremely rotten nights during our trip. Having all of us in one room at night is certainly not ideal with two small kids. A few of the nights, they kept waking each other up. That was not fun!
Something I am struggling with: We planned our trip to visit with Gabe’s family and to see our nephew graduate from high school. Not only did we not see our nephew graduate (because he didn’t), our nephew didn’t even bother to see us while we were in town. We were very bummed about this, and hope that he is OK.
Something I’m doing towards my goals: My photography class started (without me) last week, and I’ll be going to my first class this week. Yay!
Something I learned: I learned I like bubble tea (with popping bobas!).
Something I’m looking forward to: It’s a busy week, unfortunately. I’m sure the kids will have fun with Maddie’s ballet sampler class and both kids’ swimming lessons. All of those start this week. My photography class is Wednesday. I hope that we can get some time to relax and catch our breath next weekend.
Something random: We were asked at least half a dozen times during the trip whether Cullen and Maddie were twins.
Something captured: Heidi and Debbie showing off the bubble tea. Yum!
Others writing The Sunday Somethings: Audrey
