The Other Side of the Tree

I hope I don't offend any of our family when I say this, but all week long, as I was telling Sydney who we would be seeing, she would respond with a nice, "Oh, I like her!" or "Oh, I love him!" and then would follow up the comment with, "But Alana is my favorite."

Alana is her seven year old cousin, her only somewhat close in age female cousin, and she adores her. So as we went to see Sydney's grandma, "Oh, I love her! But Alana is my favorite." Or The Great Aunt Peggy, "I want to see her! But Alana is my favorite!" I finally started saying it for her, "We're going to see Aunt Rachel today." Sydney would say, "I love Aunt Rachel and Will and Baby Jamie," and I would say, "But Alana is your favorite." Sydney then looked at me with surprise: "How did you know?"

So finally, on Tuesday, we saw Alana. And Grandma and David, but Alana is her favorite.

I think one of the things that makes Alana so very cool is that Alana is old enough to have Barbies... lots and lots of Barbies. Sydney really wants to own Barbie dolls and I just don't think she's old enough. But Alana is, so the two of them conspired to get together at Alana's house to play.

While we were there, I took advantage of the opportunity to have the kids and my mom pose for a grandkids picture.

After playing with Alana, we went to the north side of town to play at the Woodlands Children's Museum with Uncle Nick, Aunt Kay, Aunt Suzanne and Baby Zoe.

Aunt Suzanne even had Zoe wearing one of the dresses I made for her. I was so excited to see that the dresses fit in the summer time as I hoped they would.

Sydney and Jack happily played at the museum for almost four hours. It's a great little museum for the six and under crowd.

When the museum was closing, we headed over to Aunt Suzanne's house to play some more.

Uncle Dave got home from work just in time to play more Barbies with Alana and Sydney. Uncle Dave is a great "little girl" daddy.

I love that the Langs have this great house, with a separate living area and play room and the kids all wound up in the master bedroom to play. I also love that their home has the openness to feel like wandering into the master bedroom is okay. Apparently it's the space where Uncle Dave reads to Zoe before bed and all of the kids thought that was a great plan.

In fact, it was such a great bedtime routine moment, that I went ahead and put my kids in the tub in the master bathroom and took care of the pre-bed bath as well.

We wound up with some extra time at the end of the evening because my sister left before we did and called with the information that there was a complete standstill on the freeway, so the kids hung out with my mom watching Cars in the living room.

It was a great day and should have been the start of the second half of our vacation in Houston, but the following morning, Jack woke up throwing up and that was that. See the romper he's wearing there? Hope everyone enjoyed it this evening because after the events of the following morning, that romper is on its way to a landfill somewhere in southeast Houston.

What I did learn from this mini-vacation is that the kids and I do really well on road trips together and it makes me want to take another one with them before the end of the summer.