Vacation over, time to get back into routine!

We are back home safe and sound after a great vacation of visiting family and friends! Quick recap of our last week in Alberta: on Monday we were off to Calgary. We stayed with Terry and Marilyn and I had to chance to visit with some great friends while we were there. It feels a bit more like we were just visiting than it did last time, I guess that feeling will just increase each time we go. On Wednesday, we headed off to a cold and gloomy Canmore. We were supposed to meet my parents there, but they didn't make it out so we had a big (expensive) condo all to ourselves. We had a nice time in spite of the weather and circumstances, and went to the local Aquatics center for a few hours on Thursday (the hot tub at our condo was closed and it was an outdoor pool, so not an option for us!). Oh yeah and Lynsey pulled out a top front tooth on Wednesday, too! It was hanging by a thread and she wouldn't pull it out, so frustrating! We finally told her she had to pull it out because she was going to choke on it at night, so she let Brian do it (with much convincing). Friday we packed up and they let us use the pool after we checked out since the hot tub was up and running again. We killed some time at the Balzac mall on the way through Calgary and then off to the family campout. It was a very nice weekend, the kids had lots of fun and we had a 50th anniversary celebration for my parents on Saturday night. It was a great time of reminiscing!

Our trip home was not an uneventful as I would have liked unfortunately. Sunday we made it to Fernie, and we didn't have any issues on that day. The kids had fun at the pool, slept reasonably well. Monday, we were on pace to be home around dinner time. We were on the I-90, about 240 miles out of Seattle, when it happened. We got a flat tire. Ugh. Luckily it happened in a fairly undramatic way, I was able to pull over safely and it happened to be on a stretch of highway that had a large shoulder and lots of room beside the highway as well (and the flat tire was on the passenger side). As far as flat tires go, it was about as good a situation as you could hope for, aside from it happening right by a roadside turnout. Nathan and Lynsey got out and played in the grass (although Nathan was playing in a culvert and then a State of Washington truck came by and told us that there are rattlesnakes in the culverts, so we promptly got him out, yikes!). There was a Les Schwab tire center about 20 miles ahead in Ritzville, so Brian put on our mini spare tire and off we went to the tire shop. The kids did amazingly well as we were waiting for them to fix our tire - they just ran around the store, Adam didn't even get upset at all! Amazing! So after about a 2 hour delay, we were back on the road with a newly patched tire. Thinking we had the worst of the trouble out of the way, we see a sign saying that the Snoqualmie pass up ahead would be closed at 7pm for "an hour or more". I looked at the clock and it was 6:50 and we were about 40 miles away from it. Great. I looked at Google maps to see if there were any detours we could take, but unfortunately there aren't usually a lot of roads through mountains. There was one road that we could have taken, but it was going to take 2 hours longer so we decided we should just wait it out on the I-90 closure. Our 8:30pm arrival time turned into 9:30. Nathan and Lynsey had fun running on the road, so it wasn't all for nothing:). It was so nice to be home! And all our fish were alive this time, yay!

This week has been about catching up and trying to settle into some kind of routine before school starts again on Tuesday. Lynsey had her meet and greet with her teacher yesterday which was nice, found out her teacher is Mr. Daly and she does know some of the kids in her class. It looks like they just scrambled up the classes. She seems okay with not being in her BFF's class, I told her they would see each other at recess and could still have playdates. Trying to get everyone on a decent bedtime schedule has been a bit of a challenge, but we're getting there! Everyone was asleep/settled by 9:30 last night, so we're getting closer! Nathan has been a bit easier at bedtime lately, letting us actually leave the room so that's encouraging.

All in all, we had a great time back home! Two and a half weeks away at a time is a bit much, but it worked out okay. I'm not sure I would do such a long time away when the kids are this little again, but I don't regret giving it a go:). We were really happy with how Adam especially handled all the transitions that last week - he was a superstar! He had loads of fun at the campout, really the only problem was at group picture time. We were doing the picture at the firepit but lo and behold, no one was making a fire! Very troubling for both him and Nathan actually! So they are the only kids crying on the big family picture, sigh. Oh Kaylene's baby is crying too, but he's a baby!

Back to routine! But first we get a long weekend with no agenda, no plans. Looking forward to just taking it easy! And NO SWIMMING! So done with swimsuits for a while! I'm glad the kids like water and it was a lot of fun, but a few weeks without swimming will be a good thing!