Family Vacation

What better way than to initiate another probably doomed attempt at blogging than by reporting on our family’s summer vacation?

We are headed east--our entire family: all four kids, both parents. It feels like a long time since we all six of us made it away together. Our plan is to see some sights in DC, then head up to Philly for a visit with my sister and her family, then back to West Virginia to drop Jacob off at his new school.

Jacob had a most remarkable semester at the military academy. By his own reckoning, it took about two weeks for him to feel comfortable and make friends. Then he was off. He enjoyed his classes, especially Spanish. He enjoyed making friends with the international students and learning cuss words in several foreign languages, including Spanish and Korean. He became quite an expert at hospital corners. He did not much enjoy the food. When he came home at spring break, he cooked us up a breakfast MMA-style: sloshy, watery oatmeal, saltless scrambled eggs, and grapefruit hunks floating in a vat of water. Nevertheless, he shed a tear or two when it came time to say goodbye. Need I mention that he received the top academic award for his grade? Both his social and academic performances were stellar. We were very proud of him and were delighted to see him thriving.



Shortly after bringing him home for the summer, Jacob got going on a little neighborhood mowing business.



Meanwhile, the younger kids and I headed west to Albuquerque for a couple of weeks. Most recently, Jacob, Sophia, and Meredith came off three weeks of theater camp, sponsored by Uncle Rick and Grandma Susie. Those events deserve their own posts, but we’ll skip them for now and move on, as promised, to the Full Family Vacation. But first, I should note that Jacob recently turned 14, was advanced to the office of a teacher in the Aaronic priesthood, and attended his first church dance.



Now back to the introduction to our family vacation.

We all adored MMA, but Jacob had caught a glimpse of the co-ed prep school lifestyle when we made a round of boarding school visits last January. He decided to give MMA a go for a semester and then take up at a coed prep school this coming fall. He’s going out for soccer and starts pre-conditioning in early August, so we thought we’d bring the whole family out to deposit him at school, and might as well make it into a sightseeing extravaganza while we’re at it.