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Highlight of the Week
Braelynn, Leander, and I have been at the Lake House all week long with my Mom & Ruby! Unlike the last week we spent at the Lake (when it rained & was cold every single day), it has been a beautiful, sunny, & warm week! We’ve gone swimming every day & spent as much time as we could outside in the sunshine!
The specific reason that we stayed this particular week at the Lake was to attend our church down here’s VBS program. We love the way our church here does VBS – it’s completely different than the “average” VBS & we always have so much fun! Everyone stays together (from the young to the old) for singing & a lesson, then they feed everyone dinner (and on average there were around 175-200 people every night), then they orchestrate a game that everyone can play (from little kids up to big “kids”), and then they finish everything off with a another time of singing & popsicles. The theme this year was: “The Greatest Rescue” & while that phrase has tons of spiritual meaning, they also brought in real-life rescue heroes every night to provide a tangible example for the spiritual lesson. So, we met a doctor, a pair of paramedics, a police officer & his K-9 partner, and a firefighter! Braelynn just ate it all up – she was absolutely mesmerized every single night. We’ve had so much fun!
And then last night was the “grand finale”! At the end of VBS week, on the last night, they always bring in a bunch of bounce houses & jumping apparatuses & needless to say: Braelynn had been looking forward to Friday night for weeks. She definitely remembers how much fun it was last year & she had a blast last night!
Yes, This Happened
- I feel like we’ve been living in on a wildlife preserve all week long! We’ve seen so many cool animals up close right around our house here on the Lake! We’ve seen deer multiple times (doe, fawns, and a buck!), pretty butterflies, a Mama duck with her mostly grown up babies, a weasel (maybe a fisher? we’re not exactly sure about this one), and a super strange bird that Braelynn & I watched from the shore as it walked on our dock (probably some sort of heron). It’s been so much fun!
- Braelynn calls “VBS”: “PBS” and it’s so cute (even though we’ve corrected her a number of times, it still comes out “PBS” & so by the middle of the week, we just let it go).
- Since we’ve been up so late every night this week – Braelynn has had an opportunity to do something that she just about never gets: catching lightning bugs! As we were finishing up at VBS every night, the lightning bugs would come out & all the kids would run around & catch them. We even brought a bug catcher the last two nights & Braelynn and her little friends caught about a zillion lightning bugs!
- Braelynn has been super into the show Paw Patrol lately – she absolutely loves “the pups” & she knows them all by name. She has slowly been collecting Paw Patrol toys – she had a Sky (the girl dog) stuffed animal from about a year ago (before she even knew what Paw Patrol was), and she just got a small Everest dog last week as a special reward. So, last weekend, we went to a huge multi-family garage sale & Braelynn spotted an “extra-large” Chase (the police dog). Obviously, she instantly wanted it & Derrick haggled the price down to a ridiculously amazing bargain (we don’t go to many garage sales, but when we do, haggling is Derrick’s favorite part). So, we now have a fancy 3-dog Paw Patrol collection – featuring an extra large pup, a “normal” sized pup, and a small pup. It’s quite cute & she’s been carrying the 3 of them around everywhere this week!
Feeling Blessed
As much fun as we had this week, it’s meant extremely late nights every night. We didn’t get home from VBS until around 9:30pm every night – which means the kids didn’t get to bed until closer to 10pm. Just in case that doesn’t seem too late to you – Braelynn & Leander are typically in bed by 7pm every single night – so that means they both got about 3 less hours of sleep every night than they typically get (and no, they don’t just “magically” sleep in, they’re still up between 6:30am & 7am every morning!) All things considered – they’ve done pretty good!! Leander has taken solid, long naps every day, and even though Braelynn has had a few “bad” moments that we all know are just symptoms of her sleep-debt (think about it, she’s lost about 15 hours of regular sleep by staying up so late every night!), we’ve still had a really wonderful week.
I would be lying though if I said I wasn’t looking forward to getting back to our “regularly scheduled programming” with bedtimes & sleep – that’s for sure!
It’s been a wonderful week, but Mama is ready to get back to our normal sleep routines!
