Road Trip!!

I'm on vacation this week and it's oh so relaxing! Marc and I drove 12 hours to Boise on Wednesday to see his sister Jill and her family. For those of you wondering, yes it should have only been a 7 or 8 hour drive. We hit two passes with lots of snow. I spent most of my time playing with "baby" who is absolutely adorable and super quiet until you set her down at a table to eat and then she won't stop humming. Marc played quite a few games of Trouble with Luke and Jakey, built a fort, played with some legos, and had a pretty intense pillow fight. It was really fun to hang out with Jill and Mike too, talk faith, and watch some movies. I, however, have lost my ability to stay awake through a movie. Marc is a pretty good sport and is learning to watch the end of movies twice. :) I feel less bad when I'm watching movies by myself and kind of lame when I'm with others. We watched Roman Holiday the first night (and next afternoon) and a Christopher West Theology of the Body thing the second night.

We had some great CD's on our drive too. We finished up Theology of the Body, listened to Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover (awesome!), and we are now in the middle of The Passion of Christ in Light of the Holy Shroud of Turin by Fr. Fracis Peffley (very interesting so far!). I givinng my recommendations to the first two. I'd throw out a third one, but I should probably finish listening to it first. I also started reading St. Teresa of Avila's autobiography and that is pretty amazing as well. I'm really excited to keep reading it, but haven't quite found the time yet.

Yesterday we drove up to Chewelah, which is about an hour north of Spokane. We are here visting Marc's oldest sister Lori and her family. That means 5 more kids to play with! I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one who starts acting like a little kid when I've been around them for awhile. I have a nice little video of Marc playing (with no kids around) that will be making it's appearance soon. Lori runs a pretty sweet homeschooling program that attaches to different school district, which means parents are getting tax money to fund their children's education as they should be, schools are getting a bit more funding for increased enrollment, and the parents stll have the freedom of curriculum and activities that comes along with homeschooling. It's pretty awesome and the program has doubled in size every year since it started, which I think was back in 2003. If any of you mommies and daddies want some information on it, let me know!

The only downside of the trip has been that I'm a bit injured and a little less able to get or play i forts and jump into pillow fights. I partially tore my medial meniscus Tuesday night in our championship game for indoor soccer. As if that wasn't bad enough, my team did not play very well, and it was kind of a let down. The upside of the injury is that it happened before vacation so I haven't been struggling to take kids up and downstairs at work, I was able to have Marc's doctor brother-in-law Paul look at it for free (always a bonus with no insurance...Dave Ramsey says that's bad), and it's just a partial tear that will heal. I've been doing lots of icing, even on our long drives, and it's now all wrapped up nicely and on the mend! I'm the most disappointed because it means that I've lost a week of my Body for Life program that I was so determined to finish! Next week I'll just be spending time in the pool so I'm at least getting some activity in and not falling totally out of shape. It's a bummer, but at the end of the day, I don't really have much to complain about. God is amazing and he blesses me more than I feel I deserve. Even in my injury, I'm blessed (and forced) to slow down and take it easy. It's a break from my crazy, busy life that I've been complaining about and trying to get away from. It's nice.

I'll be back on Sunday, hopefully rested enough to take on a few more weeks of my crazy life. See you soon! God bless you all!