Life as a Yowler

Several things have happened the last few days. The first is that this guy turned seven.

His main love language(for those that have read The Five Love Languages book) is gifts. He felt very loved. We asked him how he wanted to celebrate his birthday. He chose to go bowling. He said we don’t go bowling very often. He first said the zoo, but then changed his mind. I was ok with that, since it’s roasting hot outside.

The bowling alley was huge. It even had an arcade. We did have one major catastrophe. Just as we were about to start bowling, Caed dropped his bowling ball right on Brielle’s finger. I have no doubt it hurt like crazy. That coupled with her drama, caused her to cry for 20 minutes straight. Then all of the sudden she said “ok, I think I’m good now.” She wanted to bowl the rest of the game.

We played a few games in the arcade after. Brandon won the kids 1200 tickets. He always manages to win the jackpot. Each kid got to pick out several prizes when we were done. Joah got the new movie, Dumbo, from Papaw for his birthday. He wanted to go back to the RV and finish the night by watching Dumbo. We got a Dairy Queen ice cream cake for him, too. He had a great birthday!

Brandon has several store trainings in the Atlanta area, so we are here for a few days. I love being at a campground for longer than a night or two. It starts to feel like home. Atlanta has The World of Coca Cola and a huge aquarium. It was a hard decision on which to go to. We took a vote, and let Joah ultimately decide, since it’s his birthday week. He chose the World of Coca Cola. He said “we have seen lots of aquariums, but never the coke headquarters.”

We bought our tickets the night before. It’s a good thing we did. This was the line for pre-purchased tickets. We waited in line almost an hour. We also didn’t get there until 2pm(Brandon has to train yesterday morning). I can’t imagine how busy the line was right away when it opened. As soon as I saw the line, I asked Brandon to pray for me.

It was worth the wait. We had a blast.

We saw a 4-D movie. Every two seats in the theatre were connected. I held Isla, so that left an odd number of our family members. Caed sat with this very nice, young guy. I should add that the movie was very intense and the seats moved along with the movie. At one point in time, Caed screamed and we’re talking a top of his lungs kind of scream. I looked over at this poor dude sitting next to Caed. He gave me this shrug like “what the heck do I do?” I couldn’t answer because I was dying laughing. The whole theatre was laughing.

One of the things I loved about visiting the headquarters, was seeing how global Cocal Cola is. It’s very much a global thing. We watched several little short films about people all over the world. The taste testing area was so much fun. We let our kids try their very first taste of coke. I mean how couldn’t we? Our very favorite flavors were from Africa. They had a lot of pineapple flavors going on. We loved them. Asia and Europe has some very unique flavors. We weren’t fans of all of them. I think it’s because we’re used to American pops, which are chalked full of sugar. We really are the worst for sugar intake.

Even Isla got to try some. She’s beyond the age of us getting away with excluding her. She was yelling “I want some. I want some.”

When we were done touring the Coke factory, we headed over to Centennial Park. I told Brandon “look, I guess we need 1 more kid.”

We let the kids run around in the fountains for awhile. They had a ton of energy to burn off from all the pop.

They were filming a movie on the other half of the park. They had it all blocked off and there were security guards everywhere. Brandon talked to one of them and found out what was going on.

We also wanted to take the kids to go pick some peaches while we were in Georgia. We found a local orchard. We picked peaches and found a lot of unique gifts for friends and family.