Vacation 2015

September 6: Day 2

Sunday morning, Daniel dropped me off at church early to prepare the “opening” activity centers for the three year old Sunday School. We were learning about Noah, so I had a sticky wall rainbow and, by now, I can’t remember what else. Oh, but it’s coming back – pairs of animals to match and blocks to build an ark with.

Daniel went back home to take care of our guests and to get Tirzah Mae ready for the service.

After church, we went out to the land, where we inspected the then-current state of construction – at that point, the walls had been poured but the forms not yet removed. Timothy and I tramped around the perimeter so Tim could see our land more fully.

From there, we went out for Thai at Chiang Mai Thai (Oh my, so much going out to eat this vacation already!) As is our custom, we served Tirzah Mae from our own plates – in this case Green and Yellow curries. The older woman who served us kept exclaiming about “The baby!” “Eating Thai curry!” After expressing her astonishment to us, I heard her in the kitchen, expressing her astonishment there as well :-)

Once home, Daniel and Joanna and Tim watched the very bloody The Untouchables, about the attempt to put away Chicago mob-boss Al Capone. I squawked around like a chicken with my head cut off, doing endless loads of laundry and attempting to get us packed for our trip to Lincoln.

When the movie was done, we “scared up” breakfast for dinner – caramel apple oven French toast I’d prepared earlier, as well as bacon and sausage and kiwi and whatever else I could find in the fridge that needed to be used up.

Then, all four of us adults got busy getting the packing done and the house cleaned up so we could leave for Lincoln at a decent hour the next day!

September 7: Day 3

After the usual scurry of last minute preparations for a trip, we took off – Daniel and I and Tirzah Mae in our gold Trailblazer, Tim and Joanna and their baby-on-the-inside in their blue Trailblazer (one of the fun parts of having a large family is occasionally accidentally matching!)

We stopped at the world’s largest porch swing in Hebron, NE where we took pictures and then took Tirzah Mae over to the playground. Tirzah Mae enjoyed her first swing ride (that is, she enjoyed a swing for the first time, not that she rode one for the first time.) She also went down a slide for the first time.

Once we were done in Hebron, we wished Tim and Joanna good-bye and headed on toward my parents’ home in Lincoln.

I don’t plan blogging breaks – but only because I’m not that intentional about blogging. I rather expect that I’ll post daily (except on Sundays), but I (generally) don’t stress if I don’t. Usually, that means I end up posting 3-5 days a week.

And then I started doing I-don’t-know-what at the beginning of this month. (Probably trying to get my list of books read since starting my “read every book” challenge organized and counted for this post.) I was busy and just didn’t blog. Then my brother and his wife and their baby-on-the-inside came to visit over Labor Day weekend. Then we went north for a week-and-a-half-long vacation.

I didn’t intend for that to equal a blogging break. I’d have access to a computer, as well as my tablet (with a keyboard). I’d probably even have time, since we weren’t there over a holiday – meaning that our families were still generally working during the day.

But blogging barely crossed my mind.

Which means I have plenty to report, right?

Of course right.

September 5: Day 1
I spent the morning writing up the aforementioned challenge progress report. Then, when Timothy and Joanna texted that they were about an hour away from Hutchinson, we took off for Hutchinson’s Cosmosphere.

If you ever find yourself in southeastern Kansas, you really should check out the Cosmosphere. The first time we went (with my parents sometime last year, I think?), we bought tickets for the whole shebang: the museum, the “digital dome” theatre playing some documentary, “Dr. Goddard’s lab”, the planetarium. We spent a fair bit of time exploring the “upstairs” portion of the museum – with all sorts of facts about the planets. When we went downstairs for the “Hall of Space museum”, I was already tired, but I took a fair bit of time reading everything in the first gallery, a display all about the Nazi V1 and V2 rockets – precursors to modern space flight. I had no idea how large the museum was.

This time, we knew better than to waste our time on documentaries and planetarium shows we could see just about anywhere. We were prepared to plunk down our cash for tickets to the Hall of Space museum – and nothing else. As it was, my brother asked for the military discount (a couple dollars off ticket price), was asked if he was active military (which he is), and was handed free tickets to the Hall of Space for us all.

Anyway…we toured the Hall of Space, reading about and seeing artifacts from the entire history of the Space Age – from the aforementioned V1 and V2 rockets of World War II through the Cold War space race and the Apollo missions up to today. This time, I had more energy (not having wasted it on the upstairs stuff!), but I still wore out by the end of the museum. There is SO much to see and to learn.

Once we were done, we were all worn out – so we ordered Mediterranean in (from Le Monde – a delicious place).

And that was our first day of vacation :-)