Dallas!

My cousin lives less than five hours away from Jason and Jeni, so after the 19 hour drive to get to Houston, this just felt like a hop, skip, and a jump!  The only tricky thing was that we needed to time our drive with Craig's meetings.  He didn't want to be leaving the Smith's home or showing up at the Guzman's in the middle of an IEP meeting.  I always freak out about trying to leave on time, since I never know how long it will take us to actually get packed and out the door.  But this time I over-did it and we had the car loaded a full hour earlier than we wanted to leave.  This meant we let the kids sit around watching TV for another hour, so they were thrilled.

But finally it was actually time to go, and we gave everyone hugs goodbye and loaded ourselves back into the van.  Craig sat in the back for his Zoom meetings so (hopefully?) his coworkers wouldn't be able to hear me singing along to Taylor Swift.  (♬"They say I did something bad!  Then why's it feel so good???"♫)  And I enjoyed Texas speed limits of 75 mph!  WOOT!!!


We got to Anne and Simon's even earlier than expected, which gave all the second cousins time to get to know each other.  I'm older than all my cousins, but Anne is the closest in age to me (so I guess technically I could call her my oldest cousin, but that makes it sound like I'm younger than her, which would be a lie! 😂).  Anne is also my ONLY cousin who has more kids than me (she's got six, ages 2-12), so it's fun to see how other people who also have fairly chaotic lives get by!

Yay for cousins!!!

That night we all pretty much had ice cream, continuing the tradition Jason and Jeni had set for us in Houston.  Yay for Blue Bell ice cream!

Our first morning in Dallas, I woke up and it was surprisingly quiet.  I found all the kids sacked out like this:

Sometimes TV is the best thing ever!!!

But then I shooed them outside, especially as Anne had work to do.  (She has her own interpreting business, and has been busy with that as things are starting to pick up again!)

Craig got Ryder flying on the trampoline

Kendra took all the girls (plus little Lorenzo!) to a nearby pond to catch minnows and frogs

Camille and Lorenzo were buddies!

One night, Simon decided it would be fun to set off fireworks.  They started with pop-its, worked up to sparklers, and then finally Simon set off some large ones.  This being Texas, the neighbors immediately joined in and we ended up with quite the little fireworks show!

Distributing explosives to all the neighborhood kids

I love the colors in this picture!

I'm sure this is perfectly safe

My kids really enjoyed pretending they had wands!

Ryder has asked that I photoshop some wizards robes onto him for this picture!

Camille started out pretty nervous about the sparklers but quickly loved them!

Sitting on the playground watching the big booms!

The next day another cousin of mine, Trevor, came to visit!  We're all cousins from the same grandparents, but with different parents.  So with the three of us together, we had all of our grandparent's children represented, so that was kind of cool!

Offspring of Patrice, Bob, and Bruce!

Trevor and his wife Danielle have four kids, and I was meeting all of them for the first time, so that was fun!  AND, I got to hold her tiny 2-month-old Eve, so that made me super happy.  It was wonderful catching up and hearing all about Eve's birth story-- few things in life excite me more than talking about birth!

Here's most of us-- quite the crew!

After Trevor and Danielle left, Craig and Simon took the kids to Buckee's to get slurpees, and Anne had to run some errands.  I stayed home with the two napping children.  Lorenzo woke up and put up with me feeding him snacks and reading him stories, but he kept giving me the side-eye, worrying about when his mommy was coming back.  I got this amazing shot of him:

Love that look.  (And I love my new phone!)

For church on Sunday, some family friends of Anne and Simon's arrived.  They've known each other forever (and were instrumental in Simon joining the church when he was in his early 20s!) and they brought another five kids to play with everyone!  So for church we had 16 kids and 6 adults-- that's more people than some of the branches Craig served in on his mission!

This was during Zoom meetings with our home ward

Colton and Lorenzo were so cute together here!

After sacrament meeting, Anne took me and Ryder and a few of her kids to a friend's house who owns a pig.  Ryder, as always, was delighted to make the acquaintance of Hamlet!

Hamlet would do tricks for banana chips!

And all the time in between was mostly spent hanging out and talking and eating, still my favorite things to do!  I haven't gotten to BE with people in so long, I think I had a tendency to just follow Anne around chattering away-- hopefully I wasn't driving her crazy!  But I sure was excited to have a friend to be with again!  (And everyone knows that cousins are just friends that you can't not stay in touch with!)

Anne and Simon have this super fun game room.  I have never felt like such a boring parent as when I was with them!

Bentley started out a little reluctant to play with his (younger) second cousins.  But then a bunch of their neighborhood friends showed up and suddenly he was having a ball...

Seriously, I can't figure out what the big draw was with these neighborhood kids...?  😂

This is Anne's youngest daughter, Jasmine.  They called her Jazzy for short, and the nickname fit her perfectly!  She is SO CUTE!  Most of the time we were there, she had scrunchies on both wrists and ankles, a fashion statement that Anne just laughed and shook her head at.

Here's Kendra twirling Jazzy and Camille (on the other side where you can't see her) on her fingers

Lorenzo waiting at the fire pit for a s'more

And suddenly-- it was time to return home!  I wasn't looking forward to another long drive, but I was getting ready to be back in my own house again.  Our first day we drove to Cookeville, Tennessee (an hour past Nashville).  I'd managed to find a hotel with suites, so we could get one room that we all fit in.  AND the pool was open, so as soon as we'd thrown our stuff into our room, we put on swimsuits and let the kids splash around for a bit while Craig picked up dinner from Chick-fil-A for us all.  (This was probably our first trip where we weren't ever traveling on a Sunday, so it was nice to have them open!)  I was hoping we could sleep in a bit since I knew the kids were exhausted, but once again Craig's Zoom schedule had to be taken in to consideration and...  he had a 7am meeting. 😑  So we needed to be back on the road bright and early.  Waking everyone up was a bummer, but the upshot was that we got home by 3pm, so that was fabulous.  AND my wonderful neighbor had picked up milk for me and left a fruit salad in my fridge, so that was amazing.

Needless to say, it felt good to be home again.  The best vacations are the ones where you have a great time AND you're happy to be home.  We were so happy that we had such a wonderful time with everybody!