Family Goal #1: Road Trip to Oklahoma!

I’ve been Facebook friends with a blog reader for years, and when I asked her for her address so I could send her a holiday card, she invited us to visit her in Oklahoma any time. I plugged their address into google maps and realized they are only 6.5 hours away. Totally a doable road trip! 

We added it to our list of Family goals for 2016. Since my trick for following through with my goals is to clearly articulate when, where, and how I’m going to follow-through on the goal, I got to work with the planning. I realized that it made the most sense to take the road trip over a three-day weekend. There aren’t a ton of three-day weekends during the year. I could only think of MLK, President’s Day, and Labor Day. Oh, and Memorial Day but that’s always a super-busy time of year. 

Are there more I’m not thinking about? Oh, sometimes the 4th of July is a three-day weekend, but our summer is already packed.  

Anyway, we messaged back and forth and realized that MLK weekend would actually work for both of us. And so we started planning it! I created a detailed schedule (yes, I am a nerd, but I also feel like this kind of planning is necessary for helping me be able to spontaneous in a way that also maintains my sanity). Once the plan was in place, it was full steam ahead!

I bought a bunch of snacks (like Pirate’s Booty and Annie’s snack mix) and packed them into small ziplock baggies. These bags kept the boys pretty busy. Matt also bought a Lego kit at the last minute, and it kept the boys busy for HOURS. I brought the tops from two storage boxes, so each boy would have a flat surface upon which to build Legos. We also checked out two audio books from the library: Ramona Quimby, Age 8 and Double Fudge. Additionally, we listened to some Sparkle Stories.

On the first day, we ate breakfast and lunch in the car, in order to reduce the number of stops we had to make. We had a gallon jug of water that we used to refill our water bottles. We did make an unexpected stop once we crossed the Texas/Oklahoma border and it started snowing! 

My colleagues thought I was weird for planning a road trip to visit someone I had never met, but I knew that Anna and I would be kindred spirits. I knew she would be someone awesome to meet from the minute I read her guest post on 2000 Dollar Wedding almost four years ago.

And Anna did not disappoint! It was so great to connect with another family trying to balance it all: work, children, social justice. We had a lovely afternoon, evening, morning, and early afternoon together before it was time to make our way back to Texas.