July 4th week/end

I know it's been a while since I was on here blogging. I had to take a last minute trip to New Jersey last week on Monday to a client up there. New Jersey is most definitely not my favorite place to go, but this time I had a colleague that went with me and we stayed just on the other side of the river from Manhattan, so 2 of the nights we went into New York City. And I had never been before.

The first night we walked down to Times Square and zigzagged around trying to find a restaurant. Our problem was that there are too many restaurants, so when we saw one we might like, there was always the wonder about what else there was available. Finally we were just too hungry to keep walking so we settled. It was good, but damn, it's expensive to go out to eat in NYC. Anyway, we walked off our dinner calories by browsing the M&M store. 3 stories of walls covered with M&M's.

I bought nothing though (it was a good thing I was really full at that time!).

Then we walked back to the train and marveled at the fact that there were lawn chairs in the middle of Times Square (the streets were closed). Apparently it's something new for the summer.

Anyway, the second night we headed to Little Italy for dinner, which again there were too many choices. But with Italian food, you really can't go wrong. Then we hit up the H&M store (oh how I missed it since moving from Chicago). I had never shopped for kids clothes there since I didn't have kids in Chicago. They were so cute! I bought 4 things for $15 and then we headed back.

So on Thursday I flew into Charlotte since we were planning on going to my parents for the 4th anyway. Braden drove the kids, the dogs, and 2 of our friends from Blacksburg and their nephew down on Thursday and met me there. The guys got their chance to play golf and we hit up the pool with the kiddos. Ethan tried out the arm floaties (which are "illegal" aka not Coast Guard approved anymore) and loved them. He loved being able to swim on his own. We'll try them out at our pool next time and see if the lifeguards say anything. At first Blythe wouldn't go down the big slide and then once she finally did, she never stopped. People were amazed that she would go down by herself with no flotation devices on and we would tell them that 2 weeks ago she wouldn't even put her face in the water. And then we would tell them that her dad is a swim coach and they'd be like, "oh, wow. no wonder." when in reality that makes no difference at all since she listens to about 0% of the instruction we give her in the water.

On the 4th, my friend Emily came up from Charlotte and Doug and Ada drove down from Durham and we all went out on a pontoon boat on Badin Lake. We did some tubing, some swimming, some sightseeing and then at night we watched the fireworks. My kids actually made it through all of the fireworks, and didn't go to bed until 10:30, which is incredibly late for them! Which made me optimistic that they might sleep in, but alas, they were up at 7:15 like normal. I can't win. Ever.

Braden stayed at my parents (he's doing some recruiting down there tomorrow) and I drove the rest of the crew back. We had short naps in the car and then no more napping once we were home. Ugh! It was raining, so the last thing I wanted to do was drag 2 overtired children in the rain to the grocery store, so instead we hit up McDonalds. And Blythe was stylin there.

Too bad she forgot her giant oversized sunglasses that she was wearing later. She would have looked like a total movie star.