Or, This one’s for all the grandparents out there…Part 2

I guess I didn’t really mention it much (except in my last post), but Troy has been on holiday leave for the past two weeks. And we didn’t go anywhere! That’s pretty rare. Usually when Troy is off work for that long, we’re either traveling or moving or unpacking. Just staying home and relaxing has been quite refreshing.

We went out for lunch and breakfast several times, which is rather a novelty. We go out to dinner more often than we should, but during the past two weeks we ate lots of dinners at home. Lunch was more likely to be the meal out, since we were often out running errands. Other times we were sitting around the house in our pajamas all morning and lunchtime snuck up on us. On those days we either ate PB&J’s or went out. Hey, eating lunch out is cheaper than dinner, right?

I don’t know if breakfast out is cheaper than lunch or dinner, but it sure is fun! We love breakfast at Chick-Fil-A. That’s something Annalie and I often did in Maryland, meeting up with a group of moms and kids at the one place in town with a relatively clean playground for the kids and decent food for the moms. I am totally in love with their Chick-N-Minis, which are just their chicken nuggets on a little sweet roll. It doesn’t sound spectacular, but for some reason
they are utterly delicious.

The coffee there is good too.

Hmm, maybe the coffee is a little too good.

And of course there is always the playground. For some reason Chick-Fil-A playgrounds never seem to be as scary to Annalie as Mickey D’s playplaces. They’re usually a lot smaller, and most that I’ve seen have a little set-apart area for toddlers and smaller kids to play so they won’t get trampled by the big kids. In my experience they’re also a lot cleaner. I have personally witnessed Chick-Fil-A playgrounds being cleaned and inspected. They’re just more…welcoming.

Although we all love Chick-Fil-A, we have not gone there much since we moved here. It was too sad to go there by ourselves for the first few months. it’s still a little sad to be there without our Maryland friends, but it’s also a nice reminder of them. (We miss you guys and can’t wait to see you soon!)

Other than relaxing and eating out, Troy used his vacation from work wisely. He worked on organizing the garage, sorted through and filed a whole mess of paperwork, and completed several small home-improvement projects that had been on the to-do list for a while. I’m so glad I’m married to someone who sees what needs to be done and then does it. He doesn’t always do things right away (which I can totally understand, being one of the world’s champion procrastinators) but he always gets stuff done eventually. Probably that military discipline the recruiters are always going on about.

Another thing Troy did while on leave is teach Annalie how to play games online. Thanks to Brenda, Annalie was already familiar with the strangely addictive jacksonpollock.org and she has liked to type on the keyboard for a year or more.

Since Annalie received a few Webkinz (Webkinzes?) this Christmas, Troy helped her register them on their site. Then he showed her how to click around and find the games she liked. Most kids’ sites are really great about having easy-to-follow instructions, and we found that with only a little guidance Annalie soon became comfortable clicking around and quickly developed some favorite sites.

Chick-Fil-A, home repair, organizing, showing Dana around town, teaching our daughter to be as geeky as we are…I think it’s fair to say all got the most we could out of Troy’s leave.

Now it’s back to life as usual.