Playing catch up

So I am here now to fill you in on the many items I have neglected to post on my blog and that is only partly do to Janae's admonishment.

The van We got a van 3 weeks ago. David and the older 3 girls drove home(500 miles) so David could buy the van near where we live. He actually got it in Plano. I spent hours and hours and hours online and finally found this one on Craig's list. We gave $1500 which is great because we have no payment and it work for a couple of years. That way we can save more money and will be able to replace it with something much newer while still not having a payment.

The visit home David and the girls went and got the van one weekend and the very next weekend we headed home for a 2 week visit. We got to see family form out of town on both mine and David's sides of the family.

I am really disappointed in our visit home. I expected so much more and the time was just too short. There were way too many things that needed doing. I didn't get to visit with my brother's family from corpus nearly as much as I wanted and I didn't get to visit with David's brother's family from PA nearly as much as I wanted.

I did get to see some good friends from our home school group and some good friends from church. We miss everyone so much.

The geography bee The girls participated in the home school geography bee while we were home. They had been practicing Africa all summer. They did a great, great job. I am so proud of them all. They studied hard, learned a lot, and enjoyed themselves. (well Gennifer didn't enjoy herself a whole lot. She didn't want to compete against friends because in order for her to win, they would have to lose)

Yesterday's One thing we enjoyed on our trip was eating at a restaurant called Yesterdays. It is a flashback to the 50's and has a life size Marylin Monroe standing in the middle of the room. The walls are embellished with everything 50's, movie posters, records, advertisements, toys, you name it. There are even 50's trivia cards on all of the tables. When my brother comes up from corpus, his kids always insist on going to yesterdays.

On the way back out west We left home on Saturday and instead of pushing it to get home as fast as possible, we spent the night in San Angelo. We stayed in a pretty nice motel with a pool and free continental breakfast. The next morning after our free continental breakfast, we went to the mall and went to office depot's one cent sale. Some of the girls went to Petco, while a few others went to Ross. We all ended in Target terrorizing the snack bar guy with our huge popcorn mess. Again we are sorry about that. After we left there, we went to Sam's for groceries and then we were on our way again. We arrived here about 7:30 yesterday evening. The trip took us about 36 hours but it was much more enjoyable than the 10 hours straight shot.

We went swimming in the wonderful San solomon springs pool all day today. We missed it so! The pool spoils you! We went swimming several times on our trip home but small chlorinated pools are just so lacking compared to this huge spring-fed pool.