Staycation week + more

We traveled for a week and then we had a week of vacation at home.  Ben took each of the kids on a date and I capitalized on him being home to get things done.  I realized at the end of the week how un-vacation-y it was to go to the eye doctor and dentist and spend a day catching up on school stuff, but it needed to be done and I'm so glad I didn't have to do it alone.

So, it's kind of funny.  I really had no reason to take Alison to the eye doctor; she has never complained of anything.  I hadn't been since high school and I realized that the pediatrician barely speaks English and wasn't sure if she passed the eye examination or not (not joking), so I made us appointments just to keep on top of our health.  We saw a great optometrist who told us that Alison is near sighted in one eye and far sighted in the other eye and therefore her depth perception struggles.  She said if she didn't get help, the development of her depth perception would be altered.  Alison was thrilled that she had to get glasses.  I very quickly had flashbacks to basketball...it all makes sense now...no wonder she was always flinching when the ball was coming toward her...and now we feel really bad for yelling at her to "Get in the game!!!".  The optometrist was so nice that she let Alison look in my eye and gave us some good tips on how we could dissect an eye for school.  I made Ben take Alison to pick out the frames and apparently this is the style now.

We also toured the Quartermaster Depot:

And we had to say good-bye to FOUR families.  PCS season is not fun.   Liza lived just a few doors down and her friendship with Alison throughout this year had it's up and downs, but something really clicked while Ben was deployed.  I think she just become more comfortable in our home and would come over often after school.  I actually became excited for the days that Liza came to play because it was so good for Alison.  The last few weeks they have been working on making a video.  They wrote a script and had their Barbies act it out and then edited it together.  It was pretty cool.

Liza pretending to hold cheese because I said "Say cheese!"

We set up our own "Book It" system for the kids.  It really was intended for Eli, but the other two couldn't be left out of a reward.  Eli is a great reader, he just doesn't like to read.  So for every 10 books Eli reads, he gets to go get a treat with Daddy.  For Colin, it's 10 reading lessons and Alison it's 5 big books (we want her to take on more challenging reading.  That may sound like a lot but she can fly through books).  I'm thankful to say that it worked and really inspired Eli to read.  He asked to go to the library and checkout 30 books!  So we did.  Sunday afternoon, he brought a stack into my room (I may have been trying to take a nap...hello, mother's day) and we read all afternoon.  It was the best present ever to hear him excited to read.

We checked out a new-to-us park and I was really sorry we haven't been there before.  It has a track running around it and would have been perfect for a deployment workout.

Life is back to "normal" this week and it's actually really exciting.  Ben's at work and we're doing school and it feels so nice.  Vacation was good for us, but when life has been out of sorts for 8 months, normal almost feels more refreshing.