Around Here Lately

Whoa! It's been a while since I've made my way to these parts. 

As I type this, Tate is screaming in the background because I won't let him slide around on the floor on a couch cushion. Oh, life with two young children! (Just when I said I was getting my life back.)

Life has been too much of a whirlwind to carve out time for writing. The week before Spring Break, I worked really hard to get a lot of things knocked off my to-do list before going on vacation. Then we left the day after school let out. Usually, we give ourselves a weekend at home before leaving for vacation, but it didn't work out that way this time. 

We left for Flagstaff on Saturday and returned home on Wednesday. On Friday I headed to Chicago for the American Montessori Society Conference. 

Honestly, this vacation was our worst one yet. We got a great deal on an AirBnB cabin, but, ultimately, it was too small to be comfortable for our family of four. Tate was supposed to sleep on an air mattress in the living room, which deflated within 15 minutes of being blown up. So then he slept on a pallet of chair cushions that kept separating in the night. 

Henry slept up in a loft on a bean bag thing, which seemed fine but he kept saying his back hurt in the morning. Because of the open concept, whoever woke up first would automatically wake up the other brother. 

Matt and I normally sleep in a king-sized bed, so it was pretty uncomfortable to squish into a full. 

Despite our fatigue and discomfort at night, we made the most of it. We went hiking in the Coconino National forest, ate at a delicious pizza restaurant, visited an observatory, drove to the Grant Canyon, visited the world's best preserved meteor crater, ate dinner at a casino (the only place available on the way back from the meteor crater), I spent the morning at a spa in Sedona (while the boys went fishing), visited an awesome creek, ate breakfast at a college dining hall, visited a firefighter museum, and sat on the grass at a Cubs spring training game.

It sounds so fun when I put it into a summary paragraph! I think the challenge was that it often involved a lot of driving and the boys were fighting a lot. I started to read Siblings Without Rivalry (which is an especially great book to read if you think you only want to have one child). I'll write a separate post about it to share some of the wisdom in the book.  

One of our priorities as a family right now is to travel together in the spring, summer, fall, and winter. Normally it's really fun! I hope this trip was not indicative of the trajectory we are on. It should be getting easier!

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