lesliepurchase

We are sitting in our hotel room near Yosemite.  Joe is playing with the crappy toy contents of his Easter eggs as though they were beloved treasures. Jack and Rob are having a rousing game of go fish.  Jack is winning. Olivia is covering her body with stamps.  Life is good.  The trip has had some bumps.  Jack threw up the very first night and his health went down from there.  I’ll spare you the details but suffice to say that he is going home with significantly less clothing than we came with.  Sometimes it’s just not worth saving the unders and shirts that bear the brunt of a sick kid.  The hotel that was chosen for us was just outside the southern entrance of Yosemite so to get to the Yosemite valley where the waterfalls and big rocks are took about an hour and a half of driving on a windy steep mountain road.  We have spent more time in the car on this vacation than we typically do in a month at home.
It was not all driving and puking though.  The first day we went ice skating in the rink at our hotel.  It was the first time on the ice for all of our kids and they really enjoyed it.  There is a former Olympic ice skater who now works at the hotel and she took Olivia on the ice to spin and play.  The look on Olivia’s face as she was spun around and around was one of the highlights of the entire trip.

Ultimately, we would have done things differently if we were allowed more input but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter.  We had a chance to spend precious downtime together as a family and I am grateful for it.  I have done a good job of focusing on the  present moment and not thinking too much about the life that awaits us back home.  As a wise Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”  This week we stopped and looked around and I really like what we saw.