Being Flexible?

So my life goes a little like this these days........

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!




Let's see if I can catch us all up in one post? Now where were we in the bad karma tsunami......

well I decided one Friday evening that the sunset and cloud formations warranted an attempt at using the camera with my left hand. These were the early set. Then these followed....

and then they turned nasty and dumped 8 inches of rain on us in a very few short hours....

and Auntie Peggy needed a submarine to get through the underpass which stands between her house and ours!!!!!! (psst Gardenia, those are Wellingtons on Julia's feet) While our basement was spared with only a hint of seepage, the rest of our neighbors did not fare as well!! Poor Alyssa woke in her lower level bedroom to find her bed floating in TWO FEET of water!!!!

Many are still trying to pump the residual water out as well as dragging all the ruined Rec Room items to the curb. Then on Monday afternoon I get a call from Patrick who's at work. He NEVER calls from work?!?!?!?


In a rather panicked voice he tells me that the August vacation requests had just been posted and that his had NOT been granted due to their strict, unbending seniority system. The brilliant plan to wait until after all my doctoring was over and done with to go on a vacation was not so brilliant after all!?!?!? Now our options were to leave immediately...as in Tuesday or go without a summer vacation this year.




Seeing as how we were still without internet or phone service, I was quite challenged to pull something together on a couple of hours notice! But we packed and were on the road by mid-morning Tuesday and here's your hint of were we went.......

Three hours drive to our east in the Goshen, Indiana region there is a rather large Amish population. In a rather monumental breakthrough in maturity, the girls realized that their unanimous FIRST choice of a Wisconsin Dells water park was possibly not a good choice when your Mom is sporting a splinted and bandaged right arm soooooo......we found a hotel with a great indoor water park right in Amish country (:

We toured several Amish sites which really grabbed Mari's interest and she took most of the pictures for me (since the 90+ degree and 90%+ humidity weather was really bothering my arm!!!) but I did catch this one of her which I really love.....

She had already been wearing the hat for over an hour before it dawned on her that it was a man's hat! In a moment of wavering over whether to continue wearing the hat I showed her this picture and it helped her conquer the teen insecurity/peer pressure she was feeling. She even inched a tiny bit closer to maturity after asking me "Just when can I expect to feel comfortable in my own skin?" It was a great opening question to a great discussion about self-confidence!!

Julia was pretty much all about the water park.....

and the water park.....

and the arcade!

On the trip home we just couldn't resist the lure of a bright golden beacon.....

C'mon, you never know when you might be the parent of a future Domer?!?!? One can never be too young for a visit to Notre Dame!

Patrick even has aspirations!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Only an Irish family would have the cheekiness to pose like "Touch Down Jesus"!!! We opted for a quick self-guided tour of the campus and my point and shoot was just not co-operating with either Mari or myself....or maybe more fairly the hot and sweaty operators just were not patient enough???




Hmmmm, somehow missed the final stop on the tour???? Hammes Bookstore made their sales quota today!!!!!!!!!

Home safe and sound and anxiously awaiting tomorrow's appointment to have the sutures removed and a hopeful reduction in the size of the splint....