The Great Worm Adventure

Revelations on my Chosen Carreer

A long time ago in a land far, far away....

Wait a minute, I'm not that old. Let's begin this again.

It happened back in my high school days, I can't remember if I was a sophomore or junior. The school district decided that it would be a fabulous idea to give each class a standardized personality test that was supposed to predict what we should be when we grew up. You know, according to our interests and personality strengths.

So after 2 hours of questions like “Do you prefer to sit alone in a cubical or slaughter helpless farm animals”, my test was done and submitted for interpretation. After waiting several weeks for the return of the test results, I found out my future career.

I was destined to be a Vintner.

What the heck is a Vintner?

A vintner is a person who makes wine. Yes, I was destined to be a lush. Of course, no one got the answer they expected. Very few of the tests actually predicted what us high school kids thought we wanted to be. We laughed over our results and then promptly forgot about them. We graduated high school and moved onto college.

Fast forward 12 years. (Yes, 12 years. I’m getting old now). I’m the mother of 2 beautiful girls and have another girl who should arrive in April 2010. I have a degree in Political Science and I am a stay at home mom.

(By the way, thanks mom and dad for paying for my college education. Thank you for the $40,000 piece of paper.)

I had forgotten about that stupid career test, taken so long ago, until one of the girls who babysits for me mentioned that she had to take it the other day. I began to reminisce about how stupid I thought it was.

Then it hit me. The stupid test was right! I became a vintner, of sorts! Only, my wine is spelled slightly different.

I make whine.

Yes, the fruits of my life, my darling little girls, are big time WHINERS.

What a fool I was to doubt the validity of standardized tests.

It's been awhile!

So today, Sarah made me smile. She asked for an apple so I handed her one. She looked at me, looked at the apple, and looked at me again! Then she handed me the apple and demanded "Make it Nakey.".....so I peeled it for her.

We found these kites for a $1 at WalMart. Maddy chose Buzz Lightyear and Sarah liked the the one with Elmo. The kids played with these for about 10 minutes before they lost interest. It took Brice considerably longer to get tired of his. All around a good $2 investment.

We walked from our hotel to the local outlet mall. Brice and I splurged on some summer clothes. We both needed some new things to replace worn stuff from last year (and the year before that, and the year before that....). Sarah completely sacked out in the back pack, while Maddy relaxed and enjoyed her ride in the stroller. Mommy and Daddy were wiped out by the time we got there. Strangly enough, a sleeping child feels a lot heavier than one who is awake and active. I wonder what theory of reletivity that falls into?

Right out front of our hotel, they had this great swingset. We got there on Thursday night and walked out to the beach right away, even though it was cold and windy. We weren't on the beach 10 minutes when we found our first WHOLE sand dollar. That has never happended to me before. I took that as God's blessing on our first family trip together (without friends or grandparents. Not that we don't love you all, but it was fun to be the 4 of us).

Sarah didn't like the sand at first. She didn't want to get down at all and insisted on being carried for the longest time. She finally got the hang of the sand and began to enjoy it. In fact, she developed a taste for handfuls of wet, salty sand. We caught her eating quite a bit of it. Yuck! I'm pretty sure that isn't hygenic.

Oh yeah, check out our awesome hotel. Our room was right under the that big "Seaside" in the middle. 2nd balcony down on the right. You can see the Oregon Flag waving just in front of it. It had a full kitchen, dining and living room, 1 bedroom with a king size bed, a full bathroom with a jetted tub (the Lord is Gracious!). It also had a Murphy Bed (those pull down kind) which Sarah fell off of and scraped the skin off her forehead. Didn't use that again, ha ha. The hotel pool was heated to a wonderful 95 degrees. That was the pool; the hottub was hotter! Felt great to swim at 8 pm when it was 50 degrees outside. The kids loved it.

It was VERY hard to leave.

The Ocean Just Wears You Out!

Its amazing how a child who never wants to sleep can end up like this by her own choice. She just wanted to go to bed.

We were actually in a restaurant. One minute she was laughing and talking to Sarah, the next she was very quiet. Just nodded off without us even realizing it. Needless to say, she was a hit with our fellow diners. A table next to us thought it was a blast to watch her head nodding. She almost cracked it on the table a couple of times.