Part 2 Of The Whew That Was The First Part Of July

So we pull into our driveway after our 4 hour drive back from Nashville Indiana (not going to waste time with a recap, these posts are long enough!  See my previous post if you want to know what I’m talking about), and my husband’s aunt’s truck is parked in front of our house.  We had agreed (or so I thought) to meet them  at their hotel (which was a safe distance of 10-15 miles away) for some dinner and swimming –  after just getting back from being out of town for a few days, which was preceded by constant activities for my family for the 4th of July, I wanted some time to make the house presentable.  Much to my dismay, that did not happen.  We pulled up to our house and see that their truck is there – I could not believe it.  Luckily, they were no where in sight, turns out they had gone shopping downtown.  So hubby and I bribed the kids to all go play together upstairs, we unpack the car as fast as we can, and we quickly run around the house doing some very fast spot-cleaning.  It worked out, but I get really stressed about stuff like that – it would have been better if they had just adhered to the original plan.

So they come over (they called first, so they get bonus points for that), and my mother-in-law mentions giving my aunt-in-law a tour of my house multple times.  Under normal circumstances, I would be more than happy to do so – personally, I love to see the different layouts of people’s houses, and I’m always excited to take a tour if one is offered.  But when I haven’t had the time to clean my house in a few weeks, I’m a bit apprehensive about giving my aunt-in-law (who has never seen the house) a tour…  but I think it’s about time I get over some of my hang-ups, so I oblige and give the tour through the dirty house –  and we all survived and came out alive.

After that, we went out to dinner and swimming at their hotel, and that was a lot of fun until we made the mistake of letting our little 2-year-old boy out of his floatie.  He began to run around and do other brave things, like get onto the pool ladder and act like he was going to jump in, all of which terrified me and compounded my exhaustion from the week before – so I had had enough; it was time to go.  The next day, we  left it up to our guests where to eat lunch, and they chose our local circa 1950’s diner, which has a cute atmosphere but I warned them that the food is not so great.  I hadn’t eaten there in probably about a year though, and my philly cheese steak sandwich wasn’t too bad, although it left me hungry.  After the diner, we decided to play tourist in our hometown some more and went on the “Lolly Trolley” at the Dum Dum factory – you know Dum Dums, and don’t try to tell me you didn’t save up your wrappers when you were little to send them in for various bits of Dum Dum treasure.

The Lolly Trolley was fun, much more fun than I had expected given the factory’s disclaimers of how we weren’t going to be able to see the kitchen where the candy is actually made.  We also spotted our good friends’ son on the job as he is an employee of the factory, so that was fun.  After our tour, we went swimming again in the hotel pool, and someone had a marvelous last minute idea for dinner – let’s go to Walmart, pick up some ingredients, and have my husband’s mother cook us dinner!  She is a brilliant cook, I might add.  So she made us come kind of delicious baked chicken breasts on a bed of croutons with swiss cheese on top, and the house smelled almost as good as dinner tasted…  until my son was left unattended for literally only 2 minutes, when he used that opportunity to produce one of the dirtiest diapers he’s ever had.  I will spare details, but let’s just say that the mess did not stay in his diaper (not an accident,  either), and the upstairs carpet was one of the victims of this disaster.  Luckily, Hubby is great at fast clean-ups, so he helped me quickly clean up the mess and our son before any additional guests arrived for our game night.

Game night with my mother-in-law was extra fun, even if she did sabotage herself in a game of Mafia by talking out loud and accidentally revealing her position – it just added to the fun for the rest of us.  We also played other game night favorites, and people stayed too late as usual – not that I ever mind because it was fun, as tired as I was on Saturday.

Saturday we took the family to the produce tent and the local pizza buffet for lunch, and then we just sat around the living room and chatted for the afternoon while my son napped, learning more about my husband’s cousins’ hobbies (his 16-year-old cousin is really into air-softing, something I hadn’t heard of, but I was glad to hear him provide a little more info – getting pictures in my email of this boy I’ve basically watched grow up wearing camouflage and brandishing a gun was a bit alarming, so I appreciated hearing the details about his sport).  They left for home a little after 4, leaving us just enough time to get to  a dear friend’s retirement party.  We were a tad late, but we overcompensated by staying way past the time the party was supposed to end and had a lot of fun meeting her family and celebrating her accomplishment.

Sunday was my little guy’s actual 2nd birthday, so we took him to the Mexican restaurant where the staff sang to the birthday boy, who was frightened by all the attention being paid to him and jumped out of his highchair, burying his face into Dad’s shoulder.  We returned home for a day of some much needed r and r, and here it is Tuesday, and I’m STILL recovering!  But in this family, busyness is the norm and while summer provides us a break from school, youth group, and other obligations, we always find plenty more to do – besides, would we be able to survive boredom?  I think not!!

Lisa