Vacation Day 17

Sigh. This vacation is drawing to a close. Just tonight and tomorrow night left, then it's back to work...assuming I can remember how to find the hospital!





I had a peaceful evening going to church ALONE last night.



As for today, Subvet's gone to church and the hooigans and I are sitting around the house watching The Muppet Treasure Island....

Because the kids want to be pirates, donchaknow.

I'm hoping to get one more trip out of this vacation and take the troops to the Aquarium tomorrow....because, don't ya know, I'm getting cabin fever all cooped up in this house "recuperating"!!

I realized last night that according to my kids the whole world runs on batteries and tape!

Whenever anything breaks they think new batteries or some tape are all that's needed to get it up and running again. Sure wish that worked for everything!

Well, now it's time for me to go be Mess Cook and rustle up some grub for my merry band of pirates.

PS, the long lengths of Thomas The Tank Engine's track are too short for swords! (my poor fingers!)

Vacation Day 16

Trying out my new camera while recuperating.

It's a lot smaller than my other one...which makes t harder to keep still, but it takes very nice pictures with less work.

The zoom is pretty awesome... compare this picture to the new header!

And this was taken from clear across the living room....
makes me wish I'd had this camera at the Cathedral last week!

Vacation Day ????

Oh, it's day 15. Had to go back and count!

So, this afternoon I'm scheduled for some minor gum surgery. I didn't realize that it would require "no strenous activity" for a WEEK!! I'm going to have to ask if taking the hooligans to the Dallas Aquarium counts, because this is the last week of my vacation and we haven't been yet!!


I'll probably be out of commission for the rest of the night. The kids are outside with Subvet right now playing in the pool and I'm catching up on 3 weeks worth of blog reading!! Yes, all 200 posts! If you don't have email alerts or comment moderation I may have left comments on your old posts.

You know, I do try and comment. It's hard when I'm reading on the phone though. I'm sure you can tell my comments get a lot shorter! And then because of the small screen on the phone word verification becomes some strange memory game. I can't see the letters and the keyboard at the same time! And my brain is constantly trying to make them into REAL words. arrgghh! Anyway, I'm trying to read everything and comment as I'm able.

I have noticed that this journal style blogging I've been doing over Vacation has NOT induced many of you to comment. And the hits are dropping too.....Which just proves that reading someone else's vacation journal is no more fun that watching their slideshow haha.

After I go back to work this Friday I'll return to my normal odd-ball method of posting.

In the meantime....if you're an ADULT in need of a bit of animal comedy go watch the video on this old post of Cookie's...

This is what it's like to see Nature up close and personal!

yeah, I stole this one from Cookie too.....

Vacation Day 12....recap

Remember when I said I couldn't remember what we did before Fr Philip came to visit??

Well, geez whiz! A flash of lightening and thunderclap just reminded me!!!

We colored on our driveway!!

This was a brand new experience for the hooligans as the sidewalk chalk was a gift.

It didn't take them long to get the hang of it..

Then they started asking me for particular pictures....

Gator really liked his green chalk....

It was hot and fun, and I don't know HOW I could forget it!

Vacation day 7 Church and Church Yards...

Today, Vacation Day 14, we are taking a BREAK! It's a day to stay in the jammies and watch movies.

So, I'm going to show you pictures of last Sunday, our last day in Louisiana.


We started out going to Mass at The Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Lafayette.

This was our first experience going to an old cathedral.

Sonshine spent the first half of Mass just looking around at the gorgeous archetecture and the paintings of the Apostles on the ceiling. Unfortunately my regular camera was broken and the iPhone camera doesn't have a flash or good zoom, so most of my interior pictures didn't come out.

Just trust me that it was gorgeous! The kids did ~okay~....after Mass was over the man sitting behind us winked at me and said "you made it"

Sigh. I'm not sure all the SUPPORT I'm getting for taking the kids to Mass is making me feel better or worse!

We parked right next to this beauty....

This is a building adjacent to the cathedral. Fr Philip said it was probably the original rectory.

I just love the archetecture......

This "grotto", or Mary's Garden was just to the right of that above picture. Sooo pretty!!

This is the main entrance to the graveyard. That's the cathedral on the right. The fountain in front of the gates didn't show very well...neither did the sign over the gate, which is in either French or Latin, I don't remember now and can't see it well enough to tell.

Here's the side entrance...in English. Just like my friend Linda, I love me an OLD cemetery!

Because I had 2 more cemetery stops on the agenda for the day I didn't haul the kids out of the car to walk around this one. But I did circle it thrice in order to grab a couple shots of some very old graves. In this part of the country you can't dig 6 feet down without hitting water. So most everyone is buried above ground to some extent, depending on where you are.


This leaning brick crypt is obviously ancient!
After a 40 min car clean out to get our toy bags restocked for the trip home we headed back to the cousin's house for left over hot dogs and burgers and final goodbyes. Then we started our LOOONG journey home.

I'd planned on visiting both sets of grandparents' graves on our way home. One set is in Church Point, the other in Shreveport.

Church Point is a small town about 15 miles from any major freeway and there are no direct routes from Lafayette to town. I found out that while I am a good driver, a good kid-tamer, and a good navigator....and am NO GOOD at doing them all at the same time.

I took so many wrong or missed turns that if I hadn't had the GPS on my iPhone with me I might STILL be in Louisiana!

We did finally make it to the correct graveyard.

The little church my Grandparents attended for many years. Through that gate to the right is the graveyard.

Where we found my Grandparents.

And my Aunt.

From Church Point we headed towards I-49 along an only slightly less meandering road with only slightly fewer wrong/missed turns to Sunset, La. Where my empty cooler had an appointment at Janise's Grocery. (That's pronounced with a zsha-neess')

There I bought 3lbs of Janise's fresh homemade sausage and 12.5lbs of Richard's (pronounced Reh-shard') smoked sausage!

From there we headed north to Shreveport, but the sun was low in the sky (ie, in my eyes) all the way there and was setting as we pulled into Shreveport so I made the executive decision to not visit the other graveyard this trip. I'll go again another time WITHOUT hooligans and put flowers on my other grandparent's graves.

We crossed the Texas border about 8:30pm and finally made it home at midnight.
almost 940 miles later.