We Survived!

We survived!  We made it a whole week without the whole family unit being together!  That hasn't happened since our Denver days when dad had to head out to the great white north for days on end.  At least this time, it was much more fun for everyone.  We did miss each other though.

Last we checked in, dad and I were driving away, leaving mom standing all by herself in the middle of the street watching us go.  She had a relatively relaxing week of eating cheese and crackers for dinner with a big bowl of ice cream for dessert and an even bigger glass of wine.  She did also eat all the fruits and veggies that were loaded into her grocery cart from the previous blog.

Meanwhile, dad and I were whooping it up good at Disney.  We are such experts at this now.  

We do make an effort to try one new thing each time we go.  And yes, as much as we've been, there are still new things to discover.  This time around, we found a new restaurant that had ribs!  I loves me some ribs!

We also rode Guardians of the Galaxy several times.  That is a brand new ride and we pretty much loved it.

 Believe it or not, we also headed to Knott's Berry Farm for a day.  That was just so-so except for the biggest wooden roller coaster on the west coast.  Dad didn't think it would be all that bad since it was just a wooden coaster but holy cow, we both about lost our breakfast on it!  It was super fast, super tall and kind of scary.  But we survived.

The next day, we headed to their water park.  That was a whole lot better.  We had our own cabana and spent the day screaming down water slide, being lazy in the lazy river and washing up in the wave pool.

This is just a random picture of the cake mom took to a 4th of July party.  She is impressed with her artistic talent....

While we were amusement parking away, mom headed up to Portland, Oregon to go to a co-workers wedding and meet up with her college roommate for a girl's weekend.  Mom has never been to Portland and it was perfect timing because it was 111 degrees the day mom left Tucson and about 70 degrees in Portland.  Sweet relief.

 Mom and Heidi did tons and tons of walking and really got to explore the city.  They found and ate Voodoo doughnuts, walked to the Japanese Gardens.....

headed to the wedding (which was super fun by the way)...

 woke up Saturday and walked all over again.  This time, they went to Pok Pok for some amazing Thai food and then walked about 12 miles back into downtown to go to Powell's book store which is an amazingly huge (like really super huge) used book store.  They spent some time being completely overwhelmed by the shear hugeness of it all before heading out to do a little shopping and then a beer tour and history lesson of old Portland.

It was an impressively busy weekend considering that Heidi was sick (their weekend also involved a quick stop at an urgent care for drugs to deal with a sinus infection and cough.  They got to see all sides of Portland) and both of them were exhausted from lack of sleep.  Just like college!

Mom got back to Tucson Sunday afternoon and was pleasantly surprised to see it was only 100 degrees.  Ahhhhh!  That's the good stuff.  We were all so very happy to see each other again.

And finally, Monday night, our monsoon kicked off with a bang.  It started at about sunset with everything turning pink and then it started raining and didn't stop until 7:30 this morning.  I think we are through the worst of the summer heat.