Let's go on a College Road Trip, then watch Delaney play softball while celebrating the Fourth of July, then go to a Birthday Party, then...collapse and try and recover!

How about some pictures of all the excitement from over the weekend?

On Friday morning, McKenna and Sydney and I got up bright-and-early and headed out to the campus of the University of North Alabama (UNA). We had heard really nice things about the campus and it's the size of college McKenna is wanting to go to (try as I might, I can't convince her that she wants to go to Alabama; she wants to go to a smaller college, and I can see the appeal of it for her). She was excited...

and once we got there we agreed with all the rave reviews we'd heard about the beauty of the campus. It was really nice...

and Sydney got especially excited by the Lion mascot...

especially the live ones (there is a live lion habitit right on campus; very cool!)...


We walked around for a while, but quickly found out that all the academic and administration buildings were closed for July 4th on July 3rd. We'll just have to come back again for an "official" visit...



We have several other colleges we plan on visiting in-state and I'm looking forward to doing that with McKenna. It's very exciting to dream of the future, and I always want McKenna to have high goals for herself.

After spending some time at UNA, we headed back down South for about an hour and made it to Delaney's softball tournament. It was another statewide tournament and, although it wasn't the typical way to spend the Fourth of July, it did include some "typical" holiday ingredients like: Friends, sports, and red-white-and-blue (her Mustangs wear those colors, so we all felt very patriotic)...




The tournament started on Friday evening and we did NOT start out well. We lost both games in pool play and just weren't playing well like we're capable of. Then we started out Saturday morning with a loss in tournament play, which put us into the losers bracket. But wouldn't you know it? We started playing better and won a game, then won another game, then won another game, and made it into the semi-finals. And then we lost that game by just one point, barely missing making it into the championship game.

Delaney was thrilled to play second base all weekend (it's really her favorite, and best, position!) and played well in general all day long on Saturday...





Even Sydney played some softball with friends...

After losing our last game, Delaney and Sydney and Gary went to one of Delaney's teammates' house for a pool party. McKenna wanted to head home to do fireworks with a friend, and me? Well, I took it as an opportunity to come home, take a shower, get me a barbecue sandwich from my favorite bbq restaurant, and then sit all by myself on my bed with the food and a big glass of sweet tea, and watch some baseball on ESPN. (I guess I'm either getting old, or completely comfortable with myself, because that was a really great way to end July 4th for me!)

On Sunday, we headed down to my nephew's birthday party and had a great time wishing Garrett a big Happy 9th Birthday...




It was a wonderful weekend, and now we're looking forward to another good week. We started off this morning by sleeping late (remember that I mentioned in my title for today that we had to recover from all the activity!) and today we pretty much loafed around, watched t.v., ate meals at all the wrong times of day (breakfast at 11:30, lunch at 3, dinner at 8, with milkshakes in between!), and just enjoyed not doing much of anything!

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend and a fun-filled Fourth of July yourself! I'll be back soon (I've got a fun idea for Random Tuesday tomorrow!).