Our Staycation

I was kind of funny this year.  I only work a 6 1/2 hour day M-F so that I can pickup Sarah after school everyday.  With the folks around the corner, summer vacations are spent traveling in the RV and finding new places to roam.  I think it's worked out beautifully for Sarah in that she can have the relationship with her grandparents that we wanted for her as well as two parents at home when she needs.  Tray has worked it so that he is always able to take her to school in the a.m. so the days are pretty set.  This schedule has worked out pretty well except for school holidays and teacher days.  My folks aren't always home during the school season since this is generally the time they spend traveling around on their own.  I don't like to ask them to break into their retirement to be around for those unless they don't have something planned!  They didn't retire to be our daycare :)  So....last week came up and there were teacher "in service" days and I took a couple of vacation days.  It turns out that surprisingly, Sarah hasn't gotten sick this year so I have some extra days to use up by the end of the year(still 7 more to use!).  Due to the economy and such we don't have the extra to go somewhere else so we decided to hang out around Vegas for a bit of a "staycation"!

If it were up to Sarah we would stay home and do nothing!  Who knew that we would have a kid that really wants nothing more than to hang out with her friends instead of doing something...anything else.  She could read, draw, write, talk on the phone, play games, watch TV rather than go somewhere.  I suppose I "get it".  She likes her down time more than most people I know and she has no guilt in taking it!  I decided to go with it this time and let her hang out with friends and such and just do one family activity....we went to the Titanic Exhibit at the Luxor.

The Titanic Exhibit was really nice.  I don't know if I would have paid full price for the experience based on our current finances, but I definitely enjoyed the free tickets Tracy's customer gave us.  We were handed a "ticket" of someone who was on the ship.  You are able to walk through all the cases of artifacts with all the information they have on them.  There was a really wonderful man who worked there that kindly kept track of us during our walk through and told us some additional information and stories he had learned while working for the exhibit.  It was really quite extraordinary.  At the end you can look on the wall and try to find out if your passenger survived the disaster.  Mine survived and I think I might look up what happened to her and her family. 

In the end, the long weekend was really nice.  Tracy, Sarah and I were able to spend some time just hanging out with the lessened pressure of schedules and life.  I'd have to say this was a successful "staycation".