What I learned on my summer vacation

Home again, home again, jiggity jig. Our vacation now at an end, I come back older, a little wiser, and hopefully with a bit of a tan.

What did I learn?

• No matter how well stocked you are with snacks and drinks, the food invariably runs out. We had to hit the grocery store at least three times during our six day adventure. Those boys can eat!


• LegoGuy thinks Shirley Temple was some kind of psychotic orphan who went around killing people. During one of our nightly games of Cranium, he had to act like the dimpled child star and have his teammate guess who he was. The clue? "Hey everybody, let's go kill someone!"


• Bugs really freak out the guys. Every spider, insect or creepy crawly was potentially poisonous. I ended up catching most of them with a rag and tossing them outside while my menfolk hugged the wall.


• No one under the age of 15 will look out the window at the incredible mountain vistas and scenic plateaus if there are GI Joes in the car. Sport and Lego engaged their soldiers in epic battles and reenacted soccer games while we drove through the beautiful Valles Grande Caldera. What was outside wasn't nearly as interesting as what was going on in their own imaginations.


• Sport has a healthy fear of heights, rattlesnakes and lightning. At Bandelier, we came upon a rattlesnake. It wasn't coiled but stared at us with a baleful eye. "I'm too young to die," Sport said, hurrying us around the thing. He kept an eye on the sky in case an afternoon storm made an appearance, and he was leery of the ladders leading up to the cliffside ruins. "I really wish I wanted to climb those," he told me as Lego headed 140 feet up to Alcove House. "It's okay to be careful," I told him. "You'll probably outlive us all!"


• Avril Lavigne has a potty mouth. We've had 3 of her songs on our last three compilation trip CDs and each one has an off-color word in it. We usually don't realize this until we're speeding along at 75 miles an hour and the word comes blasting through the speakers. It only makes the boys love her more.


• The last 60 miles of the trip are always the longest. I swear, when we hit Weatherford I thought I was going to lose it. That hour crept by. I love planning a vacation, but there's nothing like getting home. Nothing beats it.