Leisurely Monday
After a very busy long weekend, today was much more relaxed. It gave everyone a bit of time to rest (except for Kirk who had to go back to work)! 🙂 I guess it’s relaxing if you can say that Sarah had her flute lesson, Brittany had her violin lesson and track practice, we had our friend’s kids all day, and we washed, dried, folded, and put away 8 batches of laundry! 🙂 That said, I guess I (Kirk) got the most rest of all! 🙂
Some of the kids had fun slip and sliding in our back yard and running through the sprinklers. They love to get wet and it was a warm day to do so for a change. It’s been unseasonably cool the past few days.
Carmen had a good Siesta today. She started reading Eclipse (book 3 in the Twilight series), didn’t understand much and fell asleep. 🙂 I can only imagine how draining it must be on her to try and understand what is being said all the time. She is doing GREAT, however! After resting, she came down and she and Angela folded clothes together for awhile until everyone else finished up what they were doing. Angela greatly appreciated Carmen coming down and offering to help. She wished that our other girls would do the same thing more often! 🙂
At 6pm, we took Carmen over to the Nye Family’s home, who also live in the area. This is the family that hosed Carmen’s brother, Pablo last summer. They invited her over to dinner with them. She had a great time there.
This week, Sarah and Brittany are going to Girl’s Camp and so we spent the rest of the evening dropping off their bags at their leader’s homes, shopping for sunglasses and water socks, and finishing up their 80’s outfits for one of the days (“Whacky Wednesday”). They are very excited to go to camp this year. Sarah is a little mad because the camp cabins are VERY nice and this year Sarah is in a tent! 🙂 Kirk is going to take Carmen to the camp on Friday and will bring all three girls back on Saturday morning. Carmen seems excited to go and is very willing to do anything new! That is good news for us because we have been doing a LOT of things lately that are very strange to her! 🙂
Today was also quite a busy day for all of us! Zachary turned 5 today and he is now a “big boy” like his dad. 🙂 We opened his birthday presents this morning and he loved all of them. He got a slip and slide, a digital camera, a stuffed animal, some cash, and more. He was VERY excited! I (Kirk) had to skip out on some of my early morning meetings to come back home to open presents with him.
did NOT want her to miss him opening his presents! He would not hear of doing this without her! 🙂 He looks at Carmen now as one of his big sisters, and she has only been with us for less than a week!
After Church, Carmen left to go to Ribfest and we sang happy birthday to Zachary and ate his cake. He made sure that we saved a piece for Carmen. 🙂 Kirstyn decorated the cake to look like a baseball diamond with a pitcher’s mound and everything.
said that they had a GREAT time there and the food was good. She had pizza and a BIG milkshake. Unfortunately, the milkshake made her very sick to her stomach and she sat for about an hour until she felt better. When we picked her up, however, she was all smiles and laughter. “Huey Lewis and the News” were playing in concert but they didn’t hear much of it. We don’t think it was very popular with the kids. 🙂 The adults like us, you bet, but not the kids. The music came out before they wre even born! 🙂
Today we really let freedom ring! We started out the day by attending our annual 4th of July breakfast at the church. The food was REALLY good and there was a LOT of it. Much of it Carmen didn’t recognize so we helped her out! After the meal, there was a
pie eating contest and I (Kirk) thought that I had gotten out of it when they called me up to participate. I had to eat a whole lemon meringue pie and felt very sick afterward! I had lemon all over my entire face and it took a long time to clean up! I am still smelling lemon in my nose! 🙂 I won, however, and got the prize for that round! The girls and Carmen thought that this was absolutely hilarious. Carmen has seen some things here in the past couple of days that they would never do in Spain! 🙂
What a great day we had today. Not only was Kirk off work, but we got to do many things! The day started off as we went to watch Brittany’s track practice. She is doing so well. When we go there, she was practicing discus and shot put. As she was finishing up, we (Sarah, Carmen, Kirstyn, Zach, and Kirk) went to the Waubonsie Valley High School tennis courts with our rackets and balls. We played tennis for awhile and Brittany and Christina joined in.
Carmen plays tennis at home and is pretty good! Even though our girls don’t have much experience playing tennis, they were excited to be out and trying it! Zach tripped and cut his knee on the cement and so we spent a little bit of time making him feel better. This involved going to Wendy’s 
and getting frosties for all! That did the trick! Carmen absolutely loved the chocolate frosty she got! Slurpees and Frostys are now her thing! 🙂
Wow, what a full day of activities! Sarah and Carmen hooked up with Taylor Gaul and her student Marta and hung out in Naperville for much of the day. They went to Mrs. Gaul’s book warehouse and then to the old Waubonsie Valley High School Gold Campus where Sarah attended her Freshman Year last year. Mrs. Gaul pulled some strings and they got to wander around the school! Carmen was amazed at how big the school was! After visiting the school, they went to 7-Eleven and got Slurpees! Carmen’s tongue is still orange! 🙂 
Metea lost, but only by 3 points! 🙂 Carmen and Sarah had a great time.
While the girls were at the basketball game, Kirk and Angela went to Ribfest in Naperville and saw Heart in concert! What a GREAT show! It really brought back a TON of memories and made us feel younger again. It was really interesting to see Ann and Nancy Wilson on stage after all these years! Some of the songs they sang were over 30 years old! What a career these two have had. They are working on a new albom which will be out soon. The whole way back to the car, we were humming the tunes! 🙂
Sarah took her down to the basement and together they played DDR on the Wii for a while. Even though we knew she was exhausted from the trip, she never let on that she wanted to sleep. 
She’s going to fit into our family just like an additional daughter! We can’t wait to show her around the area and do a bunch of things as a family with her. We’ll keep you posted with all we do!
