a few special things this summer

 My posts are really all over the place, but I keep thinking of things I have failed to document that I never want to forget. This summer I tried to do something special with each kid. Being a single parent has been a hard transition. The hardest part is time, or lack of it. It is difficult to get 3 children to all the activities and to map it out from week to week. I feel like I fail to spend one on one time with each of them and I feel like each of them really craves that, and they won’t always. I will have to make extra efforts to make any of this happen and over the summer I was at least able to get something in for each of them.

 Reese’s was big. I took her to Cancun for 4 days. She didn’t get to go to camp with her friends this year because the week they were going just didn’t work for her schedule. She was bummed to miss camp but asked me if she and I could go on a trip instead. I needed a little break anyways and Cancun is always a good idea. We had the best time. 4 days was a perfect amount of time to be able to rest and swim and eat and talk. We rode water slides together, ate lots of food, played water volleyball, she played beach volleyball, rode an electric bull, rode the wave rider and had many frozen drinks. We had a really good time.

 

I took both girls on a pre-kindergarten trip and the plan had been that Neal would take William on one but he couldn’t miss out on this so I knew we needed to figure something out. The days that I had available to make this happen were so hot that I didn’t want to do anything outside. I decided to take him to Tulsa. We stayed in a hotel with a good pool, and we went to see the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie. We took Ella along because those 2 are close and I knew he’d have more fun with her, also Reese didn’t want to miss volleyball practice. Before we left I took him to Top Golf alone because he has been asking to go there and we have that locally. He ate his weight in soft pretzel bites, and he took all of his turns and most of mine too. We had a fun time there together. The new turtle movie was good, it had a lot of action/violence and scary enough that is what seems to hold his attention best.

 

Ella has loved Luke Bryan for as long as I can remember. We took the girls to see him when I still worked for Walmart and they brought him in for shareholders, they were 2 and 3 at the time. Maybe that’s why she’s always loved him. I got tickets to see him when we’d planned to go to the Houston rodeo just before covid hit, but obviously that got cancelled. So last Spring I got tickets again to see him at the Rodeo. At the rodeo, a bull rider was pretty badly injured and that delayed the concert start time by a couple of hours. He went on so late that William just didn’t have it in him to stay long. I pushed him to stick around as long as I could, but Ella only got to see him sing around 4 songs before we had to get going. We were parked a long way away and William was just falling apart. Ella was disappointed but she handled it really well. So, when I saw he was coming to the AMP I decided to get tickets for just she and I to go. The week leading up to the concert we saw that Luke cancelled 3 shows due to sickness. We worried our show would get cancelled but there were 5 days between the last of the cancelled shows and our show so we hoped he would have enough time to recover. He did make it to the show, but he was so sick. He could barely make it through songs, sounded pretty awful, was coughing and had to take breaks. We felt bad for him. We still had a really fun time and it was fun to see him but he didn’t have nearly the energy that he normally brings to concerts. I had fun with Ella but we will be getting tickets to see him next time he comes. 

 

I hope to cherish these days with them because time is flying. I know I don’t always do it as well as I’d like to, but I do hope that I am making lasting memories with them because they mean more to me than anything this world. I am in the middle of a transition into full time work which will only add to the juggle. It is what I need to do right now and we will adjust if needed in the future. The juggle isn’t always easy but I hope they always feel my love.