A Family Fortnight

I'm pretty sure a fortnight is two weeks.  We just completed almost two weeks of family related stuff.  A week ago Sunday granddaughter 1.1 flew in from California. She was with us for 6 days, the longest time we've had any grandchildren with us alone. Originally we were worried about what we were going to do to fill the time. In the end, we were rushing around trying to get everything done we had hoped to. 1.1 is 10 years old. That's a great age. Their minds are really starting the transition from kid to older person. And they are physically capable of doing lots of things. She and I went hiking and cooked a number of meals together. She sewed a skirt with her Wife's help but with her doing lots of the hand sewing. We went to museums. We did our local amusement parklet which everyone loves when they come here with the Grandparents managing to escape with only two injuries (Wife - some whiplash from bumper cars and Me - a nasty contusion on my thigh getting out of some computer game pod). Wife and 1.1 went to the movies and did shopping. 1.1 needed to earn some money and I had a bunch of files that needed to be thrown out with certain documents shredded so she did a number of hours of that. We played cards.  We had a very full six days.

Then this last Sunday we drove with her in tow to Las Vegas where we met up with her parents #1, 1A, and her brother 1.2 who flew in from California. 1.1 did very good on the drive which is 8 hours from Albuquerque even though the movies she'd thought she'd downloaded to her Kindle had failed to download correctly. We'd rented a nice big house with a swimming pool. Vegas is very hot (highs of 105) this time of year so you can get good deals on rentals and such. We got up real early one morning and did a child friendly hike in Red Rock Canyon National Park. We got up not so early and tried to do Hoover Dam but it was way too hot for the kids. We went out to eat dim sum (1.2 thought the food coming around in the carts was way cool and was choosing all kinds of things before we could censor him). We spent LOTS of time in the pool and the spa. Wife and I spent more time in a swimming suit since the time daughter #2 used to live in St. Pete Beach Florida. We could only get the rental for 3 of the 4 days we'd had planned, so we moved on to Four Seasons Hotel at the Mandalay Bay where SIL 1A (aka Armenian Deal Hound) had gotten us a great rate where we spent even more time at a pool ordering lots of summer drinks.  We got a babysitter through the hotel that only required we sell one of the two children off into slavery but that allowed us to have and adults dinner with daughter and son-in-law, something that is pretty rare indeed and was very nice.

On Thursday, we got up early because it turned out that we could get a visit in with our oldest granddaughter, 2.1, who is at a special school in Sedona, AZ that limits the amount of visits from relatives. So we drove the 4.5 hours to Sedona, had our two hour visit which she seemed to really appreciate and we certainly did and then drove  5.5 hours back home to Albuquerque.