Saturday morning, we tried to get as many rocks moved and leaves cleared (in Bella Vista, leaf maintenance every fall is a 3-saturday job.) We are surrounded by trees and it takes about 20 total hours of labor to remove them. We've been lucky to have a dry autumn, because it is sooo much easier to blow, rake, and burn dry leaves than wet.
But it was just too windy on Saturday, so we abandoned that project after 1 hour and a few tarps hauled.
Onto the rocks. Unfortunately, someone called our poa and filed a complaint about our boat on the island and car parked on the street, and we were ticketed. We have until Wednesday to find a new location to park the boat (every storage facility in NWA is full, btw.) and move the cars to our driveway. Well, in order to get the cars both in the driveway, we need to move the rest of the rocks. So saturday was a scramble to make progress on the rest of the pile. It's not awful or impossible, just time consuming. We got a lot done, but still have so much to do tonight. (Hello FHE! Haha I'm sure I can come up with a doctrinal message that applies here.) but we did make really great progress on Saturday, and even the kids helped a significant anount. We gave them some small buckets to fill with the rocks on the lawn and they cleared a huge path all the way to the car! I think they felt really great about their noticeable contribution in just a short time.
By noon we were off to Kansas City for the BYU game! We were so sad Taylor couldn't come. She is recovering miraculously fast though and hopes to be back to flipping and flying though the air in two weeks. We did spy her boyfriend among the players and kept tabs on him. That's right, McCoy, the Willies are watching you!
It was nice to see the KC skyline lit up in support of France after recent terrorist attacks in Paris.
The kids loved the football game. They loved watching the marching band half time show, they loved when we scored a touchdown, they loved stadium hot dogs and hot cocoa and dancing to loud music between plays. They loved all of it.
The drive? Brutal! We've made trips a dozen times longer, and several yo KC before that were just pleasant and fun, but this one was unfortunately not. And I had no patience for it. It really discouraged me to hear my children fight with one another for six solid hours and sort of ruined what should have been a really fun trip. We aren't sure what variable led to this too being so different than the others, but it did not go as peacefully or smoothly as we had dreamed. Maybe our expectations were too high. Maybe we should have reacted differently. Maybe we could have prepared differently. Maybe, actually probably all three. Live and learn. At least we got to see some cougar football.
But I'm being totally serious when I say that we will probably never do this again. The drive was really really terrible, and even though we shuffled seats around, there was no way to avoid the mass contention in our van, and we did not like it one bit.
We attempted some diversions to cheer up our angry elves along the way in the form of food, and a pit stop at IKEA for a book case for Reese and Quincy's bedroom. Sadly, the book case was out of stock, and shipping to Ar is $350! Forget that! We'll pick it up next trip. The elves did not like this.
So yeah, a lot of things went terribly wrong on Saturday. Even with leaving shortly after half time and making it home by 12:30am, and our best efforts to get everyone ready, (I even had clothes laid out for everyone), we were still almost 30 minutes late for church.
What we learned:
We still love BYU football.
Aaron is infinitely more patient than Meg.
It is worth the extra cost to have seats near the BYU fan section and lots of friends.
When going to KC, always go early and squeeze in a temple trip.
We are not bad parents because our kids fought a lot.
We do need to improve our reaction to kids fighting a lot.
I can't control the behavior of others, or force anyone to have a good time.
This post sounds negative but we really did have some fun. It was a doozy though, and definitely a trip for the willy memory book!
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