I got back to Athens around 1pm on July 8th. I washed clothes, repacked, ate dinner, and went to bed at 7pm. Why? Because I had to wake up at 2:30am to go to… CALIFORNIA! Because I’m insane, right after I got back from CONA (aka sleep deprivation conference), I was taking my FCCLA babies to National Leadership Conference in Anaheim, California! I will admit that while I got zero very little sleep at CONA, the conference was not at all stressful for me seeing as how I wasn’t the main one in charge (Thanks Randell and Jeremy!).
NLC was a horse of a different color. Don’t get me wrong, I was very excited about it, but it had seriously been the main stressor in my life since April. Fundraising for this conference began at the beginning of the school year. I worked extremely hard to make sure that our club had raised enough funds for us to be able to significantly contribute to each kids trip to nationals, and I thought we had succeeded! That is until EIGHT of my kids made it to nationals! I was thrilled, but freaking out at the same time. I seriously only thought that three, six at the most, would make it! That $3,000 wasn’t going to stretch as far as I wanted it to! However, with a lot of supportive parents and a successful letter writing campaign, all of the kids were able to go!
So there I was, a 23 year old, who had planned a trip for 8 kids and 4 chaperones to California for a week. Sure I could have just used the travel agency, but they were more expensive and we wouldn’t have been able to do half the stuff we did. I will say that in the end the ten years it took off my life all the added stress was worth it. Seeing my babies experiencing things for the first time was awesome! For most of them it was their first airplane ride, first time to Disney, first time to put their toes in the freezing Pacific Ocean, first time to see Russell Brand, the list goes on! As a person who is all about the value of experiences, this was all the reward I needed!
As I said earlier, that day started extremely early! We met the bus at the middle school and rode to the airport. After getting all the kid’s bags checked and we got them through security, I could finally relax. We grabbed some Starbucks and got on the plane.
4 hours later we were ‘hopping off the plane and LAX’ (heard that song a lot)…
We got to the hotel, changed into our beach clothes, and headed to Newport Beach. We grabbed lunch at this great local place and had a picnic on the beach! As previously stated, the water was FREEZING, but that didn’t stop most of my kids from playing in it! One of the other chaperones and I took the kids that weren’t braving hypothermia insane on a bike ride down to Balboa. We saw some amazing houses!
When we got back from the beach we got cleaned up and I got us incredibly lost trekked for over 30 minutes to Downtown Disney where we waited for a millennia on a table. We finally got a table and food (and some of the kids got a nap)! After our journey to get to DT Disney we decided that it was well worth the money to just take a taxi back. The taxi ride took all of 5 minutes. *fist. head.*
Everyone was out before their heads hit the pillow!
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