2. Badminton is also old news, we've moved on to Track & Field - but no pictures of the latest sport. Carmen was able to go to divisionals in the doubles category. Jaclyn was home from college by then and she provided a mixture of coaching and cheering. Well, not cheering. We don't cheer at badminton tournaments.
3. Steven has one game left for spring football next week on Wednesday. (It's almost old news.) The truth is if it had been up to me Steven would play piano rather than football, but I love it now. I've come to appreciate football as I've watched Steven learn discipline and dedication, resilience and accountability, and then apply those lessons to other areas of his life.
4. We're taking the family vacation of a lifetime this summer! This is old news because we decided to do it back in December, but it is ever on my mind.
We are travelling together to London, Paris and Ireland. I started out with a travel agent, but I guess I just wasn't communicating what I wanted very well, so I gave up and booked it all myself. For the most part we are staying in small (20 room) hotels. Our typical style of family vacation has been the road trip - this will be our first time flying as a family. Really, we've just taken our road-trip-style vacation across the ocean. I'm calling it our Planes, Trains and Automobiles vacation.
We're flying with Air Transat to the Gatwick London Airport. London travel will include the tube, a hop-on-hop-off bus tour, and a bus trip out to the Harry Potter Studios north of London. We are travelling to Paris via Eurostar, going through the chunnel (which apparently doesn't get called that anymore). In Paris we are doing a guided bike tour, and possibly renting golf carts to tour Versailles. We then train back to England, rent a VW minivan (right hand drive standard transmission), drive to Wales, spend a day, get on a ferry (with a bunk room for us)(to get a feel for Grandpa Stapleton's emigration to Canada), and we will then road trip our way around southern Ireland. After a few days of that we'll ferry across a different route returning to England, visit a family history spot, see Oxford, and then fly home. I keep joking I need to find a way to travel by horse just to add yet another mode of transportation.
While we're in Paris we're having family pictures done. The blurry iphone photo above is Chloe's outfit. Everyone is set for clothes but me, and I'm hoping the sweater Kelly has sent me will tie in to the colour palette. (I'm sorry in advance for our Christmas card. I'm afraid the Eiffel Tower in the background is going to be pretentious, but I'm doing it anyways, what does that say?)
5. A few weeks ago Jaclyn taught Carmen how to apply eyeliner, which is OLD news in a different way.
