A much needed vacation

We have been back from vacation for a little over a week now. It was wonderful. 10 days of no work and no responsibility. We went to the 11 year old Dizzy Dean World Series held in Rossville, Georgia. We actually stayed in Chattanooga, Tn. The park was about 20 miles away from the hotel. Some people say that it's a lot to take a week of vacation for a baseball tournament and that's not how they would want to spend it but we love it. How often do kids get to go on vacation with 11 of their friends and hang out at a hotel and swim with them everyday? Okay so maybe a few of those 11 you don't want to be with a whole week but you get the idea. We left on Thursday the 19th at about 3pm. Chandler went up earlier with a friend so he could be there for the opening ceremonies which consisted of a parade and a picnic at the park with a rock climbing wall, home run contest, bunting contest, and other activities. We met them at the hotel at about 8pm and the kids of course went swimming. Later that night, we made a family trip to Wal-Mart to get some groceries and lots of candy and junk food. We stayed at Country Inn & Suites so our rooms had a small kitchen area with a sink, fridge and a microwave. Note: vacation is the only time Richard goes to the grocery store with me. Richard's brother Russell stayed the weekend with us and his dad stayed the rest of the week. The games started that next morning at 9am and of course that's what game time we got. It was actually raining that morning so the games got pushed back until 11 so we got up at 6am for nothing. Oh well. We won this game and played again at 5:30 that night. We won that game also.

This is Chan playing 1st during our first game.

Anyway...we won Saturday's game and didn't play again until Monday night. We ended up losing Monday to Tallahassee (the team that beat us last year in the championship game) and Tuesday we lost so that put us out of the tournament. They ended up tying for 5th out of about 30 something teams so I guess that's not too bad but they should have done better. Let's just say we'll blame the coaching and I won't go into any details:) Chandler played great and had a great tournament. We are very proud of him and his talent and attitude!

Between game times we were able to do some fun things. One night we went to a place that had putt-putt, go-carts, batting cages and so forth. Hudson thinks you have to ride the go-carts every time you are on vacation no matter where that might be so luckily we found a place to do this.


This is Hudson with wind blown hair after the go-carts!


Richard had to get in the batting cages!



One day we went to a Children's Discovery Museum. It was okay. Not near as cool as the one we went to in New Orleans last year.

Here are the boys digging for dinosaur bones.




Hudson had a great time at the hotel and the games with the other "SOB's" (I'm not cussing, see earlier post for explanation) We were able to go swimming every morning and pretty much have the pool to ourselves since the bigger boys couldn't swim until after their games. The hotel had an indoor and outdoor pool. Hudson amazed the other parents by his swimming abilities. While other kids his age and older were wearing life jackets, he was doing flips off the side and swimming in the deep end by himself! He wanted to be a big boy and hang out in the lobby and walk around the hotel by himself but we couldn't let him do that just yet. The park where the games were played had a really nice playground so I took him to play on that everyday before Chandler's games.




All in all we had a great week and it was fun to spend so much time together. In the weeks leading up to this, Richard had been working like crazy so we hadn't been able to see him much. We ate a bunch of good food and at a couple of different places. It was a much needed break!