Awesome Wednesday

Yesterday we had a pretty awesome day.

Why?

Inter won of course. Here's the goal in our 1-0 victory:

Okay, that's a joke. We did win but that's not why yesterday was so awesome.

My girlfriend, daughter and son came home yesterday.

Our kids did an amazing job cleaning the house. Carys especially worked hard all day on Tuesday and yesterday morning as well. Even our teenage boy worked on cleaning up his room.  Missing people you love can make you do crazy things. The house looked great.

Tuesday night the kids had gone out to buy some welcome home flowers.

I let all three of them skip school yesterday. We felt like it deserved a skip because it felt kind of like a holiday.

We picked up Leni and Auristela, who had brought their own flowers, and we were off to the airport.

Their plane was a little late.

That made waiting tough on the kids and on me but it was well worth it when we finally got to see and hug everybody.

We left the airport, got some pizza for lunch and went straight home.

After lunch we had "present time."

This is a family tradition in our family. If somebody goes on a trip they usually get presents when they come home.

The kids used their own money to buy something for all three of the travelers. I take them to different places but leave the decisions totally up to them. I love their generosity and the love they have for each other. Wish Bronwyn could have been here with us but she'll have her turn again at Christmas.

Benay looked at me yesterday, during this time, and said, "this is something about our family I wouldn't change for anything." It really is fun to see the excitement in the eyes of the givers.

Naturally having visited the United States and seeing relatives those of us who stayed here received some gifts of our own.

We liked that part as well.

Some more than others.

We had a good time.

After present time, Benay and Anderson had some make-up drawing time together.

Giovanni got off the plane with a bad cold, Garrett has had a cold this week, I've haven't been feeling well this week, Carys was tired from all the cleaning, Anderson can go to be bed early any night and Benay and Ansley had jet lag. All of that to say that we were all in our beds at 8:15.

And it felt like home again.