Back to the house

Well, the weekend is drawing to a close and we're packing stuff back into the house. Despite the way my last post sounded (I sometimes wonder if my sarcastic sense of humor doesn't come across the way I intend!), we really did have a fun weekend. The weather was perfect, we played in the pool, read books in the hammock, went to the zoo, grilled the most fantastic steak EVER, ate too much junk food, watched movies in the tent at night and pretty much wore ourselves out!
We did learn some things that we would do differently next time (seriously, no more camping out on July 4th. Oh my goodness, the noise. I think every single person in every single house in town was setting off those screechy fireworks in their driveways all night long. Not to mention all the people with their illegal fireworks that really just make more noise than anything else.), but overall it was a really fun experience that I think we'll definitely do again!

I love our little family. We don't really have extended family in town, and we really don't even have a ton of friends that we socialize with, so we do a LOT of family bonding, just the four of us. We don't spend holidays bouncing from one family party after another, we spend them together, just us, with our own traditions, doing all the things that we love to do.

The older the kids get the more I cherish the family moments that we have. I know it's not going to be long before going to the zoo and sleeping in the backyard with mom and dad is going to be totally lame and we're going to have to let go a little, so I'm soaking it all in now. Neither Shawn or I are very close to our families, so we're determined to break that cycle with our kids. That's why these family events are so important to us. I want to fill my kids heads with a million memories of all the family time and all the silly traditions we came up with over the years and how much they were loved and enjoyed as a part of our family.

They're still going to make us walk five feet behind them at the mall in a few years, but at least I hope that we will have made our family close enough that they'll still enjoy spending time with us when no one is looking. :)

OH! And speaking of our family, here's my sweet story for the day. It's probably only sweet to me, but just humor me.

We were a the zoo yesterday and we decided to get a season pass, so we had to fill out a form with all of our names on it. Under the children section I wrote Josh and Matthew's name and when I went to turn the form in Josh stopped me and asked if we should put Clarissa's name on it too so that she can come to the zoo with us when she gets here. I'm pretty sure that the pass will be expired before she gets here (ooh, that sucks.), but the fact that he wanted her name added to our family pass made me smile. I love that he's thinking about her and looking forward to having her as part of our family. It just struck me as very sweet, which is not unusual for that kid. He's always thinking of others. I love him for that.

Anyway, that's pretty much all the news from our weekend! We're all tired and ready to sleep in our own beds tonight, but we made some great memories of a really fun weekend. Next weekend I'm dragging the whole family out the lavander festival again! This is an event that is two hours away from our house and interesting to no one but me, but they're nice to humor me for the day. I really loved it last year and I've been looking forward to it all year. I'll have all sorts lavander stories for you next week.

But today I think I'll just spend some time taking down the tent, taking a nap and I'll wait until tomorrow to start planning our next adventure. :)