Friday we drove 1 1/2 hours to watch Beautiful play basketball. They won their game! It was a game that last year we had taken Rose to, so it brought up some memories for me but thankfully they were "factual" and not too emotional :) After that we headed another 1 1/2 hours to the next city where she would be playing basketball.
Potty training JJ as been more fruitful. He stayed dry the ENTIRE weekend! However, during our drive from location 1 to location 2 he decided that he needed to go potty. I told him that we did not have any options and he would have to go in his pull up. That led the big kids to tell me what a terrible parent that I was for sending him mixed signals... So, I told him that he would have to "hold it." He said, "OK Mama," handed me his ipad, and immediately grabbed his crotch to..."hold it!!" It was hilarious and I was at a loss as to how to fix the problem. We all laughed a long time before I found an ice cream bucket for him to relieve himself (we keep buckets in the van as garbage cans). Of course JJ thought it was novel and wonderful to use the bucket so for the remaining 20 minutes to the hotel he tried to convince me that he had to use it again ;)
We checked into a hotel at almost 11 p.m. We got 2 rooms and let Beautiful, Buddy, and Superman be in a room by themselves. We wanted Beautiful to be able to get enough sleep before her day of basketball on Saturday and I am glad we made that choice. My husband and I had the 3 youngest and after an hour finally physically separated the girls as far as we could and they fell asleep after midnight. We got adequate sleep. I am used to 6 hours of broken sleep by now so I guess it was pretty typical. Buddy, who by far is our latest sleeper, knocked on our door at 7:30 saying he was heading down to breakfast. We are trying to figure out how to replicate that at home lol!
The Holiday Inn Express we stayed at had very comfortable beds, was quiet, and the breakfast was great. It is always nice to be pleasantly surprised when paying a lot of money to stay somewhere! Swimming was less successful...although we were very thankful that Superman lived up to his name and saved his sister when she got too far over her head and panicked. JJ was terrified of the pool. As soon as we walked into the pool room he stopped in fear and demanded that I carry him. He clung to my husband or I the entire time. He is so fearful of all novel experiences.
We did a "quick" trip to Sam's Club to get butter...and ended up filling the cart. We try to do our big shopping trips every 8 weeks or so, so I guess we are done for awhile! We got to the location where Beautiful was playing basketball and set up in a relatively uncrowded area. We need a space of about 10 feet long by 4 bleachers deep to manage all of our family and stuff. I had made Fri and Sat bags of snacks for each of the kids with their names on it so they couldn't eat anyone else's food and they could not complain "but he got a ____ and I didn't!!" They hardly ate any Fri night (and refused to finished the concession food I finally bought them when they insisted they were starving!) Saturday was another story. I had brought homemade "lunchables." They were quite incredulous that I thought that crackers, cheese, and meat was supposed to be lunch. I had to smile that they didn't know what a Lunchable was;) They ate the rest of their snack bags within an hour and pretty much the remaining 4 hours was a broken record of "I'm tired, I'm bored, I want to go play, I'm hungry, I don't want to just sit here, etc." If we could find a place for Miss Grace to go during every basketball game (or even some of them) we would take the opportunity...
Buddy was thrilled that we happened to sit right next to a wifi hotspot so he could check nfl scores and there was a power strip so he could keep his ipad plugged in lol! He was thankful for those small things as much as he wished that he could have been left home:)
The basketball games were quite competitive. Friday night the referees hardly called any fouls, etc. The referees on Saturday called fouls when a player was thinking of causing a foul. Beautiful was laid out on the floor a lot and is full of bruises and scratches from both of her games. She has never been that banged up before after a game. We need to remember antibiotic ointment and band aids for future games... A girl also got in her face and called her names that I cannot type here. Beautiful tends to be quite competitive on the court anyway...so that really got her riled up...
We ended our evening at Chic-fil-A which was quite the treat for our family (first time!) I saw another family with an adopted toddler so introduced myself and we swapped adoption stories. Love doing that:) JJ had fallen asleep within the first mile of leaving the gym and slept in my arms all through supper and almost 2 hours into the drive home. Thankfully he fell asleep again within an hour of us getting home so I got to sleep about the same time as normal:)
The 3 hour drive home went OK as long as the kids had movies playing on the ipads...not so much afterwards. Two days being out of schedule for Miss Grace was not a good experience. We have just completed some new testing on her this week and are anxious to get the results and see if some other things may help her. I am very hopeful about this testing. I learned about it at the Trust Based Relational Intervention training I attended at TCU 2 years ago. I will post about it when we get some results both from the testing and its recommendations effectiveness.
Today...recovery and play off NFL games:) While we have basketball games almost every Friday and Saturday until the middle of March we are thankful that no more will involve hotels until March. There is no place like home!
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