Summer blues

I am so sad...my sister and her family left this morning. They have been here for 6 weeks. Mariah was here for over 2 months. Their leaving was especially hard for me this year, I think because all the kids are older now and we can all interact and really enjoy each others company. And because they visited longer and they were living with me the whole time. This may sound funny, but I now have empathy for the FLDS families that were torn apart. (not that I didn't have any sympathy at all.) I feel like I too lost half of my family. I had 13 people living in my home and now we are down to 7 (Nadia is still here until school starts in Sept.) But my little kids don't take up much room so it feels a lot less empty than it sounds. It is sooo quiet. Well maybe not today. My boys have been rambunctious. I thought I could relish in the space and the quiet, but instead I have less patience for my kids while they run, play, laugh and cry. Before, I was just too busy planning to do something or packing to go somewhere or talking to someone about anything, that I didn't mind all the other chaos going on around me. Now I have nothing to distract me from the noise.
I may be exceptionally emotional also because of the lack of sleep over these past weeks. I think the earliest we ever made it to bed was 11:30pm, but even that was rare. The usual was around 1am. A few nights we were up till 3am.
I'm very behind on what we did while they were here so I will be blogging about them for a long time to come. I hope you Najdawi's enjoy viewing the pictures and relishing in our good times.