tucson weekend

If you go back in the archives, you might remember that every summer Jake's company sends families on a weekend get away. It's usually relatively local (thank goodness, long car trips are not kind to my car seat hating squad) and this year was in Tucson.  

Tuscon. You desert flower you. Thanks for hosting our clan this past weekend, you were really the  hostess with the most-ess. 

Let me go ahead and bullet point our weekend for you because paragraphs sound like a lot of work right now and sometimes I regress into lazy toddler mode around 2:37PM.

+ Traveling with kids can be super stressful with sleep schedules thrown off (and I live and breathe by the children's sleep schedules ... roll those eyes!), new "strangers" (especially for our resident mean mugger Beck) in the mix, and forgotten stuffs (always) but I was oh so pleasantly surprised by this weekend. A new Miller frontier? Possibly. 

+ The two hour drive up wasn't terrible. The older boys watched an episode of My Little Ponies nine times in a row and slept for 18 minutes (!!!!!! call the miracle police because the last time they simultaneously slept in the car was 2014), Beck was a trooper because he doesn't care about screens like his brothers do and he only got really angry about being strapped in for multiple minutes a few times. Jake introduced me to the hit known has Hamilton and spent the two hours enlightening me on lots of Alexander trivia.

+ Our room had a balcony that caught the boy's fancy. One morning Rhett shared a balcony experience with us. 

Rhett: It's a glorious morning.

Rhett: When I woke up mom, I sang a good morning song in Spanish on the porch. 

Julia: Ooooh. 

Rhett: I wan't naked mom. I was in my underpants. 

Julia: Did anyone see you singing?

Rhett: Yep. I was polite and waved at them. 

Julia: Well I'm glad you were polite...

+ We always bring our own grocery store when we travel, always in the most classy way possible.

We also bring a fully stocked cooler so the boys don't have to suffer a lack of milk and go-gurht. When Rad opened the cooler the overwhelming ice cube situation lead to this thought "WOAH! Elsa was HERE!"

+ Curse hotel pools for making our rinky dink backyard pool look like a glorified puddle. You'd think we deprive them of pool time because it was like getting gum off the sidewalk trying to get them to l-e-a-v-e. It was a good problem but still...a problem.  Amphibians they are.  

+ Rhett just finished swimming lessons so he was pumped to show off his ice cream scoops and super man tricks. Most of the pool was about 3ft deep so he had a decent amount of freedom to roam. Multiple times I noticed he would chill at the swim up bar chatting with the pool staff and slightly inhebriated pool guests. We did let him order french fries and charge it too the room one day. Because cool-parents-R-us. Rad LOVED walking (not swimming) around the shallow end of the pool with his life jacket. He preformed lots of ninja tricks on the stairs and while his pool walk-about which leads me to believe he has a promising career in leading water aerobics. 

+ Beck was the recipient of an epic amount of suncrean. He has the conundrum of a very large head (finding a kids hat it impossible but and adult hat is ginorm) and almost no hair. Still. His brothers were uber intrigued by his floatation device and for about 3 minutes a congo line around the shallow end with a few random pool kids with Beck leading the pack happened. Beck actually smiled during it. 

God bless digital cameras...so many tries to get everyone looking at the camera.

 + I coordinated the after dinner kids activities for the 78 kids in attendance. Ha. The regional leaders were super grateful and offered several public thankings (which always make me feel and act super awkward...who do you look at??) and although it took some time so plan stuff for so many kids and such an age range the budget I had made it much easier. During the public displays of gratitude, I wanted to shout "No thanks necessary! I've planned kid's birthday parties for 20 kids with $80 bucks. This was nothin." We has several bounce house/activities, a face painter, photobooth and a game truck. Good times for everyone.

+ On the last night we get fancy and I make Jake take a lot of pictures of us. He's just glad it happens once a year.

And Jake got a production award! Go you honey boo.

And we're done. Weekend recaps can make for stale blog posts and this is probably one of the stalest (most stale?) so please accept my half-hearted apology for putting this on the internet. ;)