We successfully made it through our short week (two days in school for the kids, and three days in the office for me)! For being a short week, it definitely seemed long but I suppose the first few days coming back from a vacation always feel long.

All the kids got enough points on their Reward Chart so Friday night was Family Movie Night and Pizza Night. Adeline and I didn't get home from Girl Scouts until nearly 8:00pm so by the time we got the pizza finished Truman was asleep and it was pretty late so Family Movie Night was postponed until Saturday night.

Saturday morning our alarm clock went off. Those two nouns should never be put in the same sentence. If you naturally wake up early on Saturday then more power to you. For the rest of us mere mortals, Saturday morning is the only day that doesn't have a morning schedule (on Sunday we have church). However, this morning Adeline had her first volleyball game. Her volleyball coach teaches in Spanish and I'm not convinced she's learning much, but Adeline seems to enjoy it so we gave up our Saturday morning to cheer her on.

I'm not sure if we blogged about Jess's strep throat over our Christmas vacation. She got it right before New Year's and it really knocked her back. Finding a doctor that took our Spanish medical insurance, trying to get an appointment and then going to the pharmacy for antibiotics was not much fun. Today, Jess's sore throat was getting worse (the first round of medication didn't kill it apparently) and she's picked up another infection also so we headed back to doctor clinic we went to before New Year's Eve.

Unfortunately, the clinic was closed (it's Saturday). From our stressful doctor search on New Year's Eve we found six doctors in our town that take our insurance. With Jess and I sitting in the car outside the closed doctor's office, we started calling the doctors. The strange thing about the doctors here is that you call them directly. The number listed is the doctor's mobile phone number. I call the first guy, and he and I fumble around in a Spanish conversation (much like The Gum conversation). Not open on Saturday. Open on Monday. After the first one, it became clear that the individual doctors were not working on Saturdays. Jess was not going to be able to wait until Monday so reluctantly, we drive to the nearest hospital.

I won't get deep into the details, but we managed to park the car, find the urgent care, check in, give a sample to the lab, wait for our turn with doctor and get the prescription. Twice we were saved when the hospital staff found someone who spoke English to help translate. Once we saw the doctor, she was visibly annoyed when we didn't speak Spanish (and rightly so). We were also annoyed because we had to wait in her empty office for 20 minutes after our number was called because she was busy talking to someone out in the hall. I guess we're even. The entire thing took close to 3 hours.

In the end it all worked out, and the kids are now old enough that we can leave them at home with the TV babysitter so that made everything 10x easier. And we even made it back in time for Family Movie Night. :)

In the waiting room:

Jess's ticket "number":

Henry shooting a free throw:

Addi's Girl Scout sash:

Mr. "I'm too cool to sit with my family at a basketball game":

Outside the school where the volleyball game was held, they had an entire row of wacky trees that they were grooming into square shapes. Super strange.

Adeline's volleyball game: