Taking Another Risk

...the birthday party being the first risk. It went rather well, so I'm hoping my next bet is as successful.

We don't travel here like we have in other places we've lived. It's just too dang expensive-and they are very strict about the number of kids in a room-so we would always have to have 2 rooms. We have spent a total of 2 nights in a hotel here as a family the last 2 years. That's not even entirely true, because we left Pedro behind, poor kid.

It's only partly the money though-it's just not that fun to travel with a toddler. Having to fight with him to go to sleep in an unfamiliar location? Trying to enjoy a meal at a restuarant? I just don't want to spend a lot of money to do that- I can do it for free at home, thank you very much. I know someday it will be easier, but right now it's tough.

Anyway. The problem is that when there's no school I have 4 kids in an apartment. No yard. No neighborhood. Just three wild boys who tend to irritate one another (and me) after being together for about 15 minutes. Not pretty.

This week the kids have their Spring/Fall break. They also had last Friday off-so really it's not a week-but 10 days. I knew I would be crazy after about Tuesday, so I started looking around for things for us to do this weekend. The first option was a decent hotel in the mountains. Their 4- night special package for a family of our size would have cost us upwards of $2,000.00 USD.

I think I would prefer to go crazy in my apartment.

But then a friend told me about a site where you can rent homes.

So, tomorrow we will leave to stay in the same mountain town for 3 nights at a cost of around $100/night. I am a little worried though, because the site only had pictures of the outside areas of the house, which looked lovely-pool, soccer field, fishing pond, forest- but no pictures of the interior of the house. It could be totally nasty and creepy.

Looks nice, at least on the outside. We'll see...

In other news (things I don't want to forget):

...I took the kids to the zoo today. A mean money threw a paw-ful of mud all over Margarita. Pedro told me the armadillos were "awesome"...

...Pedro calls Yoda "Soda" and the W11 numchucks "dumbchucks"; he also calls both of my parents his gender-neutral creation "Tampa". It's not pronounced like the city, it comes out sounding much closer to "tampon"...

...Julio cannot be physically separated from his soccer ball. It irritates me to no end to hear the constant kicking of it, but then I try to remember we live an an apartment and the poor kid doesn't have a yard to go to...

...speaking of soccer balls, Pedro can play "kick-it" all day long. When we kick the ball to him he always says, "nice one!" so cute...

I hope not to post again until at least Sunday-if I post earlier that means we've returned prematurely from our scary rental house.

Have a great weekend!