Mississippi

So, I feel that I have recovered sufficiently from my vacation, so I am finally getting around to a blog post about it. Most of you have either seen pictures of the trip and/or were there with me, but for the few of you who weren't, here are the highlights:

-Well, I thought I was going on a vacation with my Perkes family, but came to find out that this was actually a Wade-style family vacation, which means we go on vacation to work not play!  The way it worked out, I showed up the day that my parents were moving into their house, so I set up beds, installed a towel rack, cleaned windows, went grocery shopping, made dinners, set up a foosball table, raked the yard, pulled ivy off their tree, and a few other things.  It was not what I had planned on, but it did kind of make me wish I had a house and a yard with projects to work on, especially a beautiful old house like my parents.

-It wasn't all work.  My parents live within a block from the beach, so I went running twice along the beach, and we went to the beach twice and Tanner swam in the ocean for reals.  Well, swam for reals, not so much ocean for reals, I guess.  He stripped down naked on the beach, and I let him stay that way, and then when the water hit his toes and wasn't like the arctic water we've got here in Morro Bay, he went in up to his neck.  And the crazy boy even kept trying to get me to let go of his hand and let him do it himself.  I've already got close to drowning one of my babies, and since I didn't have Uncle Chris to save us, I held on to Tanner despite his confidence.  Here's another cute butt shot of him, in case you didn't get enough from the previous post.  Ethan and Carter also really enjoyed playing in the water since you can go out really far before it gets deep.

And then of course, there was Isaac, who was impressively good-natured about Tanner throwing sand at his face and digging up the sand we had already placed, and about Katie and I turning him into a mermaid while he wasn't paying attention.

-It was also fun to see my friend Chelsey, whom I haven't seen since Carter was one, so in three years.  It was fun to have our kids sit around the dinner table on the wraparound porch on a warm Mississippi night and tell silly jokes to each other. 

-On the one day that Cami, Katie, and I overlapped, we were able to have our traditional Easter picnic.  I was a little bummed that we did no egg rolling, but since there are possibly no hills anywhere in the entire city of Biloxi, I was okay.  We went to this neat little spot nearby on the back bay where there was a tree that puts all other trees to shame.  It was awesome.  And so, we did our king egg contest, egg salad sandwiches with a candy egg hidden in one (Ethan's), and an Easter egg hunt, in addition to all the great climbing that we did on the tree.  It was great. 

-Other than that, there was some game-playing, playground-playing, cousin-playing, and scratching mosquito bites.  And most of the rest of my time was spent keeping Tanner from messing with the dog, messing with Isaac's stuff, and scratching their newly finished beautiful wood floors. 

-Oh boy, and then there was getting back.  I've recounted my adventures enough, but they included spending four hours in the airport and on the plane only to be sent back to Grandma's because of an oil leak; Tanner setting of the fire alarm in the airport; and skidding in front of oncoming traffic and crashing my car.  This is never where you want to be seeing at a tow truck from:

My dear friend Jen asked me if I said a prayer before I started driving, and I hadn't; but I tell you what.  I sure did right after I crashed.  It was completely unreasonable that we drove away from this unharmed, and I felt very much protected, and relieved that I didn't kill all my kids and myself.

Oh, and Mississippi did not disappoint.  I got to have a real serious thunderstorm, just as I had hoped for.  It was one of those crazy storms that California will never live up to, and my kids slept right through it.