We're Back

After nearly two weeks, we're back home. We had a great time, but living out of your suitcase quickly becomes uncomfortable. At the end of the day, though, both children and the dog did remarkable well considering they were stuck in the car for 8 or 10 or 12 hours at a time (excluding the potty breaks, of course). We ended up driving through and/or sleeping in seven different states! South Dakota, Iowa (where we spent our first night in Des Moines on the road), Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota (where we returned home a different route and slept in Rochester on the way back). We've got some well-traveled kids. Thank goodness they do it well.

I don't think I ever mentioned why we decided to travel so far to have the children baptized. We do attend a church where we live in South Dakota, and we really like our new pastor. But even before we brought the children home from Russia we had always talked about returning to Chesterton, Ind., to have them baptized by the pastor who married us. We attended church there for five years while living and working in the little Northwest Indiana town outside of Chicago. Pastor Terry "helped" Mikel propose to me in the church at the beginning of one of the services, and, of course, we were married there more than six years ago. We just love Pastor Terry to death and really wanted him to be the one to baptize the children. He's retiring at the end of June, so we had to go ahead and get this on his schedule.

The trip as a whole was very convenient, too, as far as seeing family and planning a vacation. It's only a 3-hour drive up to Detroit to visit Mikel's mom, sister and childhood friends. And it's a very easy commuter-train ride into the beautiful city of Chicago, where there is no end to the list of things we could do. Also, Chesterton is on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, and the Indiana Dunes and beaches are beautiful.

Even though a nearly 2-week trip sounds like a long time, we were only able to make it into Chicago one time, when we took my Dad back to the airport. And, I didn't get to see two of my friends (and their children) who I really wanted to. Kristi and Lisa, hopefully we can catch up next time — whenever that is!

Now that we're back home and almost settled back in, we will look forward to a fun summer. It will be a busy July. During the first two weeks the children will take tennis lessons (I think Mikel is hoping Anna can be the next Maria Sharapova and get to college on some sort of scholarship — and that we'll find what Alexander is great at and let him hone those skills for a scholarship, as well.) The second two weeks of July the children are taking swimming lessons. They may take another two-week swimming lesson (at the Y) in August, but we can decide that later. I was going to sign Anna up for a little summer ballet class, but it's $60 for a three-day class (only an hour and a half each day). It seems a better value to just wait a couple months and sign her up in the fall when classes are ongoing. Mikel seems more skeptical about the chances for a ballet scholarship, so I think he'd rather her continue to take gymnastics! I'd love for her to take both, as well as music and soccer and all that, but we'll have to draw the line somewhere. I don't want to be one of those families that never gets to eat dinner together, so the children might even be limited to one extracurricular when the time comes. We'll have to see how it all shakes out.

I've been trying to figure out how to group our vacation photos I want to post. You know me by now — I can't post just one or two. It's probably easiest to group them by category or event, each with a different heading. In the meantime, here are a few "singles," including what our back seat looked like on our way over, the children sleeping in the car on the first day of our return leg; and me holding Shreve in my lap the entire first day back, as we were rushed to check out and did not stop to put the luggage on the roof, thus leaving no room for Shreve in the back.