Tuesday, June 09, 2009

On May 4th, we loaded up the truck and we moved to Beverly.


Okay maybe not, but we did load up the van and we drove to Indiana and it did happen on May 4th.  The start of our two week vacation that would involve family, friends, lots of sight-seeing, lots of walking, and lots of good memories.

First we stayed with my mom for a couple of days.



At the time she was watching this little guy, Thomas Wayne.

He was two months old and he was only the same size my Nathan was when he was born!  But boy oh boy did my kids want to take turns holding him.  They did, but only after I had my fill of holding the sweet little boy!

On Wednesday the 6th, my sister, Margie, came over for awhile before we left my mom's and headed north to Indianapolis to visit another sister.  



Lynn is the manager of a DSW and we first scoured out some good deals (hey we needed comfy walking shoes for D.C. right?) before she treated us to supper at my friend RPW's favorite restaurant, Skyline Chili. It was delicious!  My kids enjoyed playing with her two grand babies.
The next morning we left Indy shortly after breakfast and drove all the way to Manassas, VA where we invaded the Wolf family and set up base camp for our D.C. trip.

Four days into vacation and we've spent two of them driving, with five kids, no tv/dvd player, no hand-held electronic games, no i-pods, and to the surprise of some, we enjoy it this way!  We had many people offer to loan us their tv/dvd player, because we would need that with kids and such a long trip.  But that isn't us.  We enjoy listening to music, or books on tape, or I'll read a book out-loud.  This trip was no different.

For Christmas my sister (Lynn) and her husband gave us a B&N gift certificate.  With it we purchased, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" on CD.  We had been telling our two oldest to read this great book, but both always had some excuse.  Now we had them captive, so-to-speak, and could help them learn how good the book really is.  They enjoyed it as did the other three.  Our 9 year old son laughed and laughed at Tom's antics.  They all requested we buy Huck Finn now to listen too.

Besides that, I finished our read aloud of "Little House on the Prairie."  Unfortunately I finished it the first day of traveling (not remembering we were so far along already) and had forgotten to pack the next book in the series.  I also had forgotten to pack anything for me to read myself - oops.  But Hannah and Ellie had brought along some of the history books I wanted them to read for their WWII study.  So I grabbed the Albert Marrin book, "Hitler," and began to read to myself at one point during the drive to my mom's.  But David wanted to listen, so that became our read aloud.  The little ones didn't listen as much, but Hannah and Ellie did.  The Albert Marrin book, "Stalin - Russia's Man of Steel" is also very good and David and I each read that ourselves at various points during the trip.

In the next few days I plan to highlight our sightseeing in D.C.  We had simply a wonderful time, and saw so many things, met some wonderful people, and put over 3000 miles on our Odyssey.

4 comments:

Kim said...

We have the Stalin book you mention, we didn't like it when we read through it. Maybe I need to try it again :)

Glenda said...

Kim,

Our 2nd daughter didn't like it either and didn't want to read it. It definitely tells what Stalin was like (purely evil!) and how awful he was. I encouraged her to keep reading it and talk to us about it. The thing that bothered her the most was how they encouraged the children to rat out the parents. We talked about that quite a bit. I think overall the two Marrin books do a good job to help a person have a basic understanding of Hitler, Nazism, Stalin, and Communism. I definitely have a better understanding and will most likely tackle my college book, "Stalin" by Ulam sometime this summer.

So my advice to you is maybe you read it first (it really isn't a hard or slow read), and then decide what you think your kids can handle.

Kim said...

It wasn't that dd couldn't handle it, she just didn't enjoy the book itself. We read it aloud and we just couldn't get into it. We read it last after a number of other books on the subject so we were probably just burnt out.

Glenda said...

Ahh that makes sense. I know I always grab lots of books from the library on a particular topic and the girls say, Mom this all repeats and it is getting very boring!