Time Away and Time Home

Jessica and I left the house around 10 a.m. for Pensacola Friday. Our convention didn't start until 7 pm, but we wanted to stop along the way.

We more or less ate our way through Destin. Red Brick Oven  Pizza for lunch. When we  ordered we found out there was a wait, so we went to the candy store.

We didn't do too badly there. We only bought one small square of  fudge and a caramel chocolate dipped marshmallow stick.

The pizza was amazing.

And a bit messy.

Jessica was trying on swimsuits. I won't post the ones that she chose :)  This was my "you don't know who is staring at your body so let's cover it up" choice for her.

And this is it with swim shorts instead of the skirt. I think she should save up for the top with either bottom. What do you think moms?

We shopped at the Destin outlet stores, but for some reason I thought "outlet stores" meant reduced prices. Um, no.

With comedian Tim Hawkins. He was hilarious. But the photo isn't. I think that he thought he was being funny, but  you can't really see his face.

We got a chance to talk to Anne and Karen Kingsbury. More Anne because Karen's line was really long, but most people didn't realize it was her mom standing off the the side. Always good to see them again. I haven't gotten her latest book, The Chance, but I've heard it's really good.

Jessica had a bad headache so we skipped the very loud Natalie Grant concert. We were wired when we got back to the hotel room, so Jessica watched Hunger Games at her computer at midnight. We had to be back up at 6:30.

The hotel breakfast was not so great so we had nachos and cheese and a soda at the civic center at great price. Blah.

The had a children's choir there that is made up of children adopted from the U.S., Ethiopia, Haiti and China.

I also got to meet an adoptive mom I'm fb friends with, and we are both on a  Haitian support group page. We talked  out in the hall during an entire session. We would have talked longer, but Tim Tebow's mom was scheduled next. Unfortunately, it wasn't what we were all expecting. I guess we were all waiting to hear her testimony about how God worked in their family and Tim's life, but she actually more preached/taught.

But all in all, it was a good convention. It's definitely something you need to take a friend, sister or daughter to with you.

Of course there always has to be some drama while I'm gone. One child was involved in way too many activities and has an F in an important class so will be reluctantly spending considerable amounts of time working on that classwork that was skipped this week. And entitlement issues are flaring up. 

And Kayla decided to shave the front of her head. She's done this before and you'd think she'd learn. First, a couple of years ago, she cut off a lot of  her braids so we cut her hair short.

And we kept her hair short for a while. Then we braided it again, because she said she wanted to grow it out. And she cut out braids again. Then she shaved off a whole side last year, but I just left the rest of braids and the side was bare.

But this time she shaved the front. You can see on the side where she took it clear down to skin.  Rick took her in  to see if the rest could be cut down to like a half inch, but they said it looked ridiculous and shaved it. They said it needed to go down to the skin like the one patch to even it out, but that will be done later once that patch grows out a bit. Right now there is just no way to make it look good. I hope this is lesson learned. And thankfully there are no important pictures coming up right now, but it's not that long until summer vacation and the cruise and this is what she'll look like. Oh well, at least it will be easy to take care of at camp.

After church yesterday.

Tyler felt the pictures needed livened up, and he timed his jump perfectly.

Sisters.

Just Dance 4

We are working to make sure we have a least a little bit of family time each evening.  We did for a while, but then everything started getting crazy.

FCAT is over with for another year and now we're into end of the year trips, incentive awards, concerts, appointments, IEP meetings and so on.

I have been dealing with hives for about three weeks and it's crazy. They'll go away over night and then flare up into big red raised bumps all over my body the next day. I will spare you the pictures. It's not pretty. They haven't figured out what is causing it. I'm on steroids right now and I think they may be the reason I hardly sleep anymore. Hope this passes soon.

Tyler is in his third week of his new job and really likes it. He's jut not  big on getting up at 5:20! He wears the mask for weed whacking along the highway.

There were some interesting comments posted on the last post about vacation. If you didn't leave a comment, there's still time. You don't have to answer all the questions, just the ones you want.