Enchanted Car Wash

The kids finished school last Friday and are now enjoying one of their long breaks. They are ready for the time away from school, and I am ready for time away from having five lunches (I eat too!) ready by 7:04 each morning. It also means that maybe, just maybe, I will have a few minutes to write over the next few weeks.

Since the last time I wrote, we have taken three trips, celebrated two birthdays, and survived two holidays. Not bad. There is much to say, but I will keep it simple and start with last weekend.

November marked our ten year anniversary of living in Wilmington. It's been a great ten years, but it has also been a hectic ten years, and there are lot of Wilmington events and traditions that we never made time to enjoy. One of those traditions is seeing the lights of Enchanted Airlie at Airlie Gardens, and this year we finally made time to go. (And I even planned far enough ahead to get tickets!)

I really enjoyed seeing Enchanted Airlie, and I am pretty sure the kids enjoyed it, even if mean old Mom would not let them buy snacks.

After Enchanted Airlie, we stopped at the Barnes and Noble Cafe for cookies and cupcakes. (See, Mom isn't so mean after all!) On the way home from our evening o' fun, the gas light came on in the van. We realized we had never seen the gas light in our current van, and when it came on, a message popped up on the GPS asking if we would like it to direct us to the closest gas station. Jeff  and I were discussing how handy this feature was, when a certain boy child, who will not be named, became very concerned. His concern, in turn, led a certain little sister to get agitated. Within 30 seconds, I am pretty sure all but one of our children were convinced that there was impending doom and we might die at any moment because the car was low on gas. This was clearly the kind of thing my little worriers would lose sleep over. So we decided to head to a gas station, even though it was a bit out of the way.

One of our many recent adventures was a trip to Richmond, Virginia last weekend where we got to see my brother Alex and a whole lot of snow. That also met a lot of salt on the road, so while we were at the gas station, we decided to go through the automatic car wash.

I am certain my children have been through an automatic car wash before. I can recall being in there before with the same boy child fretting that the sign said to lower antennas and I had NOT lowered the antenna. I am certain he feared this also meant impending doom and death. But despite my memories of that prior near brush with death in the automatic car wash, they apparently had no such memories. And they found the automatic car wash to AMAZING. As in the most spectacular thing they have seen since Legoland in September. And we went to Disney World three days after Legoland.

They were enthralled the entire time we were in the car wash. They went to bed talking about the car wash. They woke up talking about the car wash. I am pretty sure that if Santa fails to come through, I can just take them to the car wash on Christmas Day, and all will be well with the world. So next year, I suppose, we should skip Enchanted Airlie and head to the car wash. Or maybe we'll just do both again.