A Week at Mattie & Grandaddy's

Aaron was speaking at a youth summer camp last week, so the kids and I headed up to visit my mom and dad for the week. It was laid back and fun, as always.

Some of the highlights from this trip were:

• Art camp at FBC Howe for the kids
• Getting to see my friend Ashley and her kids
• Tucker the Turtle (Tucker because he "tucks" his head in his shell), who was picked up on the side of the road and quickly became the focus of all of the kids' attention
• Extracting honey from the beehives

Planning

When we got married, Aaron and I decided we'd go to Europe for our 5th anniversary. Well, you know how that goes. Life happens. We never made any hard and fast commitments, but we hoped that we might be able to make it happen for the big ten. Even up until very recently, I had my doubts, but I'm happy to say that this is happening!

I am beyond thrilled to say that in September, we'll be flying to Dublin! We'll be gone for 10 days (though two of those will be mostly travel), and we'll do Ireland and Paris (and hopefully another country--like England, Belgium, or Germany--if we can manage)! We bought our tickets to Dublin a month or two ago, but today is the first day that we've really sat down and begun to plan things out. We bought our tickets to Paris today. I'm having a hard time believing this is real.

Our (preliminary) route through Ireland.

Yeah, I make spreadsheets for vacations.

Our poor kids have been a little neglected today with us planning and me making up all my nerdy spreadsheets and trip plans on various websites. Sorry, kids! They're thrilled at the prospect of spending that much time with grandparents while we're gone though.

Stay tuned!

Sunday Afternoon

Sunday afternoon we decided it'd be nice to have a family day after church, and we headed to the McNay Art Museum to see the amazing Norman Rockwell exhibit and enjoy all the Rockwell-era insipired activities! We had our photo taken to resemble one of this famous pieces ("The Runaway"), had ice cream, and the kids did a potato sack race!