Too much busyness...

What a week!

We barely saw James all week, what with work, music practice, jury summons, night work....we only ate one of our five meals together as a family, which is very unusual for us. It made the week seem SO long.

You should see the kids and how excited they are to see him when he normally gets home from work, I'm excited (and relieved) inside! Arran and Bryttain run to him shouting 'Daddy! Daddy' huge grins on their little face, and Asia, bless her, is not far behind these days...she stops whatever she is doing, grins and crawls as fast as she can (her little bottom wiggling from side to side) to clamber up his legs saying 'Dada, Dada'. It really is so precious. On the rare occasions that I'm out and am the one returning, I get (almost) the same treatment and it can bring me close to tears.

Anyway, after a long week we then had a Saturday that was not exactly the most fun. We ended up having to kill time waiting for a tyre repair for the minivan, which took two and a half hours in the morning, after which we found out that it couldn't be repaired but that they would credit us back towards a replacement, which of course they didn't have in stock. Instead James had to go out in the afternoon for another two and a half hours at a second location. It was exasperating to say the least. We normally try to do fun family activities on Saturdays and I was disappointed that we'd done nothing fun with the kids.

We did buy Asia her first big-girl car seat though. She'd outgrown her infant one, and pretty much outgrown one we'd borrowed from friends, which was a larger infant style one, which could still be clipped in and out of the van and onto the stroller base. I'm sad not to have that feature anymore, and sad that it's another sign of her growing up, but glad that she seem much more comfortable and that we ended up finding a good deal.

Even though it was late, we decided to go for a walk downtown after dinner and get hot chocolate together. We walked across the lit up bridge, looked in shop windows, just sauntered along. It's so fun just to hear the things they want to talk about. Both Arran and Bryttain were fascinated by the 24-hour fitness center. It's one of those with all the machines in front of long windows facing out on to the street, so that anyone walking by can watch you as you exercise in all your sweaty glory. They both stared in wonder and told me that they would really like to go there someday. Probably not going to happen anytime soon, at least I'm not going to be the one using that facility and taking them with me. Huh! Exercise? What's that?

We got our hot chocolates and just hung out for a while. We do value our family time, even when it's not the most exciting ventures. It's just fun when it's all of us together.