a fun weekend

Last weekend was really great. Bethany did a lot of new things and handled it all amazingly well. My niece's birthday party was last Saturday. My brother and his family recently moved to St. Pete for a new job, so the party was over there. They are currently living in my great-grandmother's house, so that means nobody else has a place to stay when we go over there anymore. Nathan, Susan, Ricardo, Bethany and I all stayed at a Days Inn about 15 minutes from where the party was going to be. Bethany was great the whole car ride over. She just talked and read books and ate some snacks. Then, when we got to the hotel, we put her down for a nap (we requested adjoining rooms so we could put her down and hang out next door). She just talked for about an hour and then finally fell asleep about 5:00. We had to wake her up to go to dinner. There was a Cracker Barrel (YUM!) across the street and my brother and his clan came to meet all of us (mom was with us, too). She was pretty good and kept pointing at Hope across the table and saying, "Ho!" (she's not very good at those ending consonants yet). So, then she went to bed pretty easily, too, and we just hung out watching "What Not to Wear" in Susan and Ricardo's room until we got tired. Our only problem was that I had been sick (on the verge of bronchitis) and woke up about 6am with a horrible coughing fit. I went into the bathroom but Bethany heard me and woke up. We decided to just get up and go to breakfast then see if B would take a nap before we went to the party at 10am. She did, and we actually had to wake her up to go! She had a lot of fun at the party. They had the party at a park. It was the first time she actually walked around in the grass and went on a playground. We tried putting her in those toddler swings, but she didn't care for it too much. I thought that she would love it, but maybe she'll just have to get used to it. But she had fun just walking around everywhere. And they had bubbles and hula hoops and pinwheels (which she calls "Fi"-sounds like eye). I think she thinks it looks like a butterfly, which she calls the same thing. Anyway, we had a great time and it only took 20 minutes for her to crash in the car. She slept almost all the way back to Orlando. She was really good the whole weekend. Too bad mommy was too sick to go to church on Sunday. She hasn't seen her church friends in awhile. While mommy was in Tucson, B stayed at Grandma's house while Daddy went to church. He was working sound that week so he had to be there REALLY early! Hopefully we'll all make it there this Sunday.

I'm sorry to say that we may not be posting any new pictures for awhile. Our camera broke this weekend. We don't know what happened. It just stopped working. We'll have to figure out a way to get the pictures up from this weekend, because there were some really cute ones.