Friday

FRIDAY

Well sometime around 6:30 am the kids started to wake up. I had wound up sleeping in a bed with Alyssa, and while sleeping she seemed a bit warmer than usual, but I normally don’t sleep with her and thought perhaps she was just warmer because of the shared body heat. I jumped in the shower and got myself ready and while Rich was showering I started getting the girls changed and ready. By then Alyssa was awake and I could tell she had a slight fever. She started coughing and wound up coughing up the yellow acid that sits in your stomach when it’s empty… oh.. the night before she really didn’t want to eat much for dinner- I guess that would have been a sign she wasn’t feeling all that great. So we drugged her up with ibuprophen and finished getting ready. We loaded the suitcases back in the car and went to breakfast. Sometime in there we lost Angela’s baby blanket. We went to breakfast and the kids behaved great. We actually got compliments from others on how cute and well behaved our children were. Shocking I tell ya! ;-)

Then we loaded into the van and hit the road again. We had driven 8 hours the previous day and had 10 hours on the itenerary for that day. The drive went relatively well. Alyssa had her fever and wasn’t feeling great, but she didn’t throw up anymore- until we stopped at the gas station. I had her out of her seat to go to the bathroom and she threw up again. Luckily my hand caught most of it and a bag was closeby so we didn’t have a huge mess all over the van and her. I gave her some tylenol to help the fever and lots of water (with a pull-up on so she didn’t have to worry about having an accident), and went back to driving (what else can you do? ) We wound up taking an alternate route by accident that turned into a fun drive. We had a map printed out we wanted to follow, but we also pulled up the car’s GPS system and had thought the map it pulled up was identical. Instead it was slightly different and took us by the north rim of the grand canyon. A scenic drive that was fun, but not really quicker than the original route. The kids did well on the drive and got along fairly well. Alex and Ashley cooperated and took turns choosing movies and didn’t complain when it was the little kids turns as well.

We got to St. George and the hotel where my parents, and three sisters and their family, fiance, and boyfriend were staying at. I checked in at the front desk for a key and they gave me a key to room 241. Angela and Alyssa had fallen fast asleep so Rich and Alex and Ashley took a load of suitcases up to the room and I stayed out in the car with them. I called my parents to let them know we were there and unloading and my dad came out to greet us. Of course Alyssa woke up and being sick I had my dad take Angela and I took Alyssa and we went into the hotel. (It was 105 degrees outside so sitting in the parking lot was not comfortable). Rich came around the corner with the kids and told me there must be a mistake because he opened the door to the room and someone elses suitcase was sitting on the bed. So I went up to the front desk and at the same time my dad realized that the desk had gotten things mixed up. Our entire party was all registered by my mom and dad and they had given us the key to my sisters fiance, and boyfriends room, instead of the adjoining room to my sisters hotel room which we were supposed to have. So we got that all straightened out and suitcases deposited into the room.

In the meantime my dad was holding Angela and she woke up and got frantic that she had no idea where she was, or who she was with and cried so much that she threw up… all over herself and my dad. I took her and calmed her down and changed her clothes. Then we went and ate pizza that my parents had gotten delivered to their room. Rich stayed in our room with Alyssa since she had the fever. I made a plate up with some pizza and fruit and took it over to him and he had realized that we had forgotten to put the garment bag into the car when we loaded the car. The garment bag had all of our church clothes for the entire family in it, and Rich’s dress shoes. Luckily I had stashed dress shoes for the kids and I into our individual suitcases because the garment bag was full.

So… my sisters family and my other sister were planning on heading to the pool. Alex and Ashley wanted to go and I just put Angela in her swimsuit and sent her with them too. Rich and I took Alyssa with us and we went on a shopping trip. My sister Nancy had made new skirts for she and I, so I needed to find a shirt that would go with the skirt for me, and dresses for the girls and shirt and pants for Alex and the expensive stuff was Rich’s shirt, pants, tie, belt, and shoes… Kohls really is a great one stop shopping place and we were able to get a shirt for me, dresses for Alyssa and Angela, and shirt, tie, pants, belt and shoes for Rich. Ashley is at such a hard age to find a dress for. There were absolutely no dresses in her size at Kohls. We did find one cute shirt that was nice and I knew I had seen lots of skirts at the wal-mart at home, so we got the shirt and then went to wal-mart to look for a skirt for her and get pants and a white shirt for Alex. At wal-mart it was easy to find Alex a shirt and pants… then we went to the girls section and started looking for dresses. The only dress I found at all was one with a halter style neckline- no sleeves of course. The skirts they had were like denim shorts cut offs, with a lace ruffle… and they were short… not something I would find appopriate for a six year old to wear. So we decided that she had a pair of gaucho’s that could kind of pass as a skirt and she would just have to wear that.

We went back to the hotel and went to our room and our room key wouldn’t work. So I went to the front desk again… and we figured out that my sister with my kids had gotten into the room through her room (which was the point of having connecting rooms) and when they left someone had turned the deadbolt on our door, so the key won’t work. My kids were hanging out with my parents, since my sister and her boyfriend and our other sister and her fiance had taken off to go watch a movie- so we didn’t have the key to my sisters room either… so the front desk opened up her room and we got into our room through the connecting door. That night luckily the kids went to sleep relatively easily and quickly. The time in the pool helped wear them up and we all got to sleep before midnight.