Trip to Texas

Last weekend (Thursday - Monday), we flew down to Texas. Yep, flew. With all 3 kids and no checked bags. There have to be people like us in airports so other people who are delayed or missed a connection can think, "well, I guess things could be worse....at least I'm not travelling with 3 small children".

Getting down there was not so bad. Getting back was another story. One I will save for the end of the post.

We got in on Thursday evening and headed out to Murphy, TX to my cousin Amy's house. She and her husband Mik also have 3 kids, all girls - Anna (5), Mia (3), and Lila (3 months), so pretty much the same ages as my kids. Ethan had to play with a bunch of girl toys and may have dressed up as Minnie Mouse 1 or 4 times, but he still had fun with all the girls.

They just finished a new pool in their backyard, so compared to our sandbox and 1 swing in our yard, their house was fun central. They have a pool with a diving board and slide, a hot tub, a trampoline, and a playground with playhouse, swings, and slide. The kids were in heaven.

We did a lot of swimming and playing! We had a little party/get together on Friday night at their house and then on Saturday we headed to my cousin Chris's wedding in Dallas. Chris is my cousin who is closest in age to me. Only 5 days older than me. Although he's from Dallas, he went to college at UNC Greensboro so we got to see him quite a bit during our college years.

We got all gussied up on Saturday and headed to the wedding at 4 o'clock.

After a full day of swimming, the kids were a little tired. All of them!

Glad they snuck the naps in because we stayed at the reception until about 9:30pm when Brynn had just about had it. The wedding was beautiful though and it was so nice to see that side of the family. Wished we could have socialized a bit more, but weddings go by so quickly and even more so when you have 3 kids with you!

Sunday we headed out to Irving to my grandmothers house (Big Gaga) for a little birthday party for Brynn and my sister, who turned 35 the day before Brynn's birthday. I say "little", but I guess there were at least 35 or 40 people who were there. At one point we did get a picture of my grandmother with 14 of her 20 great grandchildren (and actually #21 was born 2 days ago).

Monday it was time to head home. Little did we know it would take us 2 days to get home. We knew a storm was coming, so drove a little faster so we could turn in our rental car and not get dumped on (and not get hailed on), but we could have taken a 4 hour detour and still made our flight. Stupid storm. So we missed our connection in Atlanta and then the last flight to Roanoke was full so we had to spend the night in Atlanta and then fly home in the morning.

Although the travel home was not great, at least the rest of our trip was really, really fun.