Fun with Family

We had a very nice Father's Day at the two churches and when we got home we celebrated with Daddy. Wesley had a special picture and bookmarks he had made at school to give as presents. Parker had picked out a special Marvel comic superheroes t-shirt for Daddy (with Thor, Ironman, Hulk and Spiderman). And Mommy gave Daddy a gift certificate for a massage.

We finished up getting ready and headed out about 6:30pm for Tampa. When we arrived in town, we headed first to Garden of Memories cemetery so the boys could say "Happy Father's Day" to Grandpa. Wesley remembered as we pulled up that this was where we had come with Grandpa. Parker remembered how to find the space because there was a name he connected with on the end of the row (Stark - as in "Tony Stark" from Ironman). Then we took the boys over to see where Daddy's great-grandparents and grandfather were buried. They loved the big Bible monument in that section. When we got to Grandmommy and Granddaddy's, we celebrated Father's Day with them and Uncle Daniel's whole crew as we had cookie cake and ice cream and gave Granddaddy his presents.


On Monday, we took both of the boys to the YMCA in town. Parker will be attending here every weekday while with the grandparents; Wesley will be attending 3 mornings a week. Both boys were a little nervous at first because everything looks so different from our Y back home. But all in all, they seemed to have very good days at camp! Brandon has a phenomenal competitive gymnastics program and both boys got to spend time in the gymnastics room on the equipment and in the foam pit.

While the boys were in camp, Mommy and Daddy drove around Seffner and Brandon running last minute errands for the trip. It's really the most driving around in the area we have done in several years on a trip back to Seffner. It was so weird to see how everything has changed. We found ourselves constantly saying, "that corner looks different", or "remember when that used to be a ______". After we picked up both of the boys we ended up driving around some more, showing them our old elementary schools (Seffner Elementary and Grace Christian) and the cemetery where Daddy's other grandparents are buried.

We had dinner with Grandmommy and Granddaddy and then it was off to VBS. That was definitely a "deja-vu" kind of moment - to walk our children into the very sanctuary where we were married and they were baptized and have them go to opening ceremonies for VBS with their cousins and the kids/grandkids of so many people we knew growing up. Wesley had Miss Mary Angotti as a helper in his class. Mommy used to teach her older brothers when they were Wesley's age, long before Mary came along. And Parker and his cousins Kayla and Bethany were in the same class along with the granddaughter of our high school youth director.


Grandmommy was the storyteller and Micah was her helper. Their room was in the old youth room that Mommy redid as her Gold Award project....back in 1994!

While the boys were in VBS, we spent some good time visiting with Grandma, plus we installed the car seats in her van getting her all set up (Grandmommy will have our van with seats to drive around). As hard as it was to leave the munchkins, we knew that they were in good hands and going to have a lot of fun while we were gone.