Somehow this week flew right by. It hardly seems like we were here longer than last time! But it’s already time to leave. We’re driving up to Dallas tomorrow. Our flight doesn’t leave from DFW till late afternoon on Sunday, but to get there in time to return the rental car and make it through security we’d have to leave here around 3am Sunday morning. We decided it would be better to drive up the day before and hang out with Sarah and B, and Kristen and her family some more. Troy didn’t get to see them when we did, so he is looking forward to that.

I have so many great photos and stories from this week to share. I guess I’ll have to space them out over the coming days as best I can. I’ve had no time to blog about all the fun things we’ve been busy doing: swimming every day, hanging out with family, playing with the dogs, eating doughnuts, driving the golf cart, doing crafts, watching Tom & Jerry, carving pumpkins, buying and setting up a laptop and DSL, going to Peter Piper Pizza…

Annalie has been bugging me to take her to Chuck E. Cheese for a while now. I’ve been putting her off because, well, I don’t really know why. I was waiting for Troy to be home for dinner at a decent hour one night so he could suffer go too?

When we went to exchange our rental car because of a problem (yeah, forgot to add that to the list o’ fun things), Annalie spotted a mini-arcade and begged for some quarters to spend. The only machine she could really use was one of those claw-prize-grabber things. Troy tried twice but sadly failed to win anything. Annalie was tired and hot and she had a meltdown over not winning anything and the fact that we wouldn’t let her play anything else. So Carol suggested that if Annalie liked games, maybe we could go to Peter Piper Pizza for dinner that night.

Annalie was sooooo excited to be there. She danced around impatiently while we ordered our food, and as soon as we’d gotten our drinks she begged to go play some games. She tried out skee-ball (which was called something else there, I forget what, but it was clearly skee-ball) and a basketball game and a few others before our pizza was ready. She won a handful of tickets and thought that was very neat.

After we ate, Annalie rode the little train and then we played some more games. She played one game of chance, a Spongebob game where you just inserted a token and depending on what color square it landed in you won some tickets. Annalie put her token in and won the big one, 50 tickets! But the machine was broken and nothing came out. We got someone to fix it, and that thing spit out tickets for what seemed like five minutes! It was very exciting. Even better, apparently some people before us had won tickets but not bothered to ask an attendant for help because we actually got 80 tickets. Score!

In the end we had 240 tickets, which seemed like a huge amount to Troy and me, foolish children of the 80’s that we are. I guess tickets have undergone inflation right along with everything else. Pencils and bouncy balls and cheap jelly bracelets were 100 tickets each! Troy and I were amazed and a bit worried. We’d thought Annalie could get something really cool for so many tickets. I guess we were wrong. But we didn’t count on two things. First, the guy running the prize counter cut us a deal and gave us a 400-ticket princess puzzle/coloring set for our 240 tickets.

Second, kids don’t really need fancy prizes. Annalie was just fine with her cheap we-probably-coulda-bought-it-for-a-dollar puzzle. But mostly she was happy she got to eat pizza, ride a train, and play some games with her parents and grandparents.