To Washington we go...

For spring break we took a last minute trip to Washington. My nephew Thomas was getting baptized, so we thought we could go and support him. We had a wonderful time. The car ride as usual is kind of long and hard. The kids always get tired and grumpy with being in the car for that long. We normally start out early and then don't get there til late.


I was so happy to spend some good quality time with all my family. I normally always see and spend time with my parents. I also got to see my sister Becky who is really struggling at this time to find happiness and I think even more to find herself. She use to have it all, but trials and choices have brought her such unhappiness.


Most of us all went out one night to dinner. We have such a good time when we get together, or I do anyway. It is just laughs after laughs mostly. I hope my children have this same great relationship when they are older too. I know I didn't always feel this way with my sisters and brothers. I wouldn't trade any of them now. Being around them really makes me miss them and miss the whole family... all the small times they get together. I have been so busy and caught up in my own world that I often forget about those things and how much I miss it. Being back up there, and I think combined with my brother and his family coming here to visit, really brought back that ache I had when I moved out here.


I have a friend up there that I use to work with, she had twins last year. I was hoping to go suprise here with my visit there, but I was sick the whole time. I started off with a horrible cough, it started before we left to WA. It was a not stopping cough, the kind that you lose any sympathy for the person and you just want them to stop coughing because they are just noisy and annoying at this point. That was me, my brother and his wife took Robert down to the airport with me, and they kept saying, stop coughing! Or they would talk back and forth and say, we are stopping to get you cough drops! After the cough was a bit better then came a bad sore throat. I think I took Nyquil most the nights there. I really wanted to see Jennifer and her babies who were just turning one... but I didn't want to get her sick or her little cuties! Such a disappointment for me. I was really excited to see her, and kept waiting to get over my cough. I didn't even call and tell her I was there. I didn't want to call and say, "I am here, but I am really sick... do you want to see me?" and then have her feel obligated to say it was okay even though I was sick. (I am just now feeling a bit better in the throat area.)

We had a Easter Egg hunt on Saturday and a lunch/dinner too. Everyone was there, it was so great. I think most everyone stayed up that night until like 1 am. Of course then my kids didn't sleep that night real well and I was SO tired the next morning. It was well worth it.

Who put an egg up there??

No one wants to get eggs out of the pokey monkey tree.

There were SO many eggs that we ran out of places to put them. It wasn't very challenging really for the kids. There were some older kids that hunted eggs too. Two of the older boys were just looking for the eggs with money in them. They would pick up an egg, open it, and if it had candy in it, they would just put it back or throw it. Or they would say, I don't like that candy and look for something different.