Home Again, Home Again...

We just returned home late Saturday night (around 10:30) from our trip to Texas this past week. We were gone for 8 days. It took us an excruciating 14 hours to reach our destination. Imagine a 14 hour trip with a 4-year old, a 2-year old, and a 6-month old. Sounds fun huh? Now imagine that the 4 year old was HORRIBLY carsick and threw up about ever 10-15 minutes for the last 8 hours of the trip. Exactly! It was miserable. We had to stop several times, to clean her up, to bum plastic sacks from a convenience store, to stip her naked along the side of the road and change her clothes. I can't even begin to describe how frustrated we were. We did have a quite enjoyable time once we got to Houston though. We visited several different places, looked up an old friend of my husbands and saw his new home, drove down to Galveston for an afternoon - visited Moody Gardens and then walked along the beach for a few minutes. We stayed with Alan's parents in their new home. (They moved about the same time we did this summer.) Their new house is lovely with lots of room. They even have a small coy pond in the backyard which my 4-year old got a kick out of "fishing" in. I took the opportunity to visit several stores out there that are not available to us at home. We took another day and turned it into an all out excursion of the Katy Mall. That thing is so big that it actually has about 15 different "neighborhoods" and you could spend an entire afternoon in each one. The day before we returned home, we took the girls to visit the local area's park. It too was huge. (I guess everything really IS bigger in Texas). I'm used to our little rinky-dink parks around here where you are lucky if there is a slide and more than 2 swings. This park that we visited actually had paved roads with names within its boundaries. It had a HUGE playground with all sorts of equipment that made me wish I was a little kid again. It also had a small zoo that included: emu, a donkey, some sheep, some Texas longhorns, two buffalo, several varieties of parrots, some peafowl, two owls, a few goats, and a BIG pig. I couldn't belive that it was just open to the public for free. It had almost as many animals as our local zoo that costs us 25 bucks a piece to get into. Oh, and there was also a large pond with a little wooden bridge in the center where the girls got to feed bread to the ducks and geese. My two-year old (Bugga Bugga) was feeding one duck when another sneaked up on her and snatched the bread out of her other hand, nipping a few fingers in the process. "HEY! That duck duck BIT me..." she cried... "Stupid duck!" LOL