Mother/Daughter Galveston Weekend

The last weekend in March, Tori and I went with four of her friends and their moms to Galveston for the weekend.  It was a great experience and we all had a blast hanging out together.  We did a Passport 2 Purity weekend program.  It's a program by Dennis and Barbara Rainey, and they discuss many of the things that affect pre-teens and teens: puberty, dating, kissing, and more.  Each of us took our daughters out Thursday night to start the weekend.  Tori and I went to dinner at the Olive Garden, and I gave her the travel journal that came with the program, a letter I wrote to her, and we talked about why we were going on the weekend trip.  Earlier in the week we gave each of the girls a pretend passport with their picture and information about where we were going so they knew the general info, but they didn't know much else about the weekend.  Friday morning we met at Christina and Rylee Dingle's house and loaded into the huge van we rented so we could all drive down together.  This was such a good idea and well worth the money.  It was great to all be together in the same vehicle.  We listened to the first session on the drive down.  Then when we got to Galveston we went on a dolphin watching tour.  It was great and we got to see a lot of dolphins really close to the boat. 

Dad and daughter before we headed out. 

 

Driving down to Galveston.  Back L to R:  Savannah Haddox, Sophia Booth, Rylee Dingle.  Middle Row:  Tori and Briley Beard. 

 Enjoying the dolphin cruise.

 

   A few of the dolphins we saw. 

 

Then we stopped at Subway for lunch, finished the object lesson for that part of the program, and headed to our hotel to get settled in.  We spent a lot of the afternoon listening to the CD's and having the girls work in their adventure journals.  They hung in there even though it did get a little long. 

 Then for dinner we headed to the Rainforest Café.  Here is a picture of each of them in front of one of the huge fish tanks.  Tori will never forget how in one of the tanks there was a fish that looked like it was having seizures and had an eye missing.  Gross!

 Enjoying the volcano dessert. 

 Me and my gal outside.  She got a panda bear hat and a giraffe pen that she loves. 

After dinner we rented some of the pedal bikes and broke into two groups to explore the seawall.  It was a lot of fun and a lot of work pedaling all along the beach!  Our group just couldn't keep up with the first group.  Tori was dying to put her feet in the water so even though it was almost 9:00 p.m. at this point, we stopped for a few minutes and the girls ran to dip their toes bodies in the water.  Some of the girls ended up getting pretty wet, but it was such a beautiful night and they were having so much fun that it was all worth it. 

Early Saturday morning, one of the moms, Candy Booth, took the girls to the beach to swim.  It was cold, but they absolutely loved it.  Then after cleaning up, and getting breakfast we finished one more session and headed to lunch at Mario's Seawall Italian Restaurant.  We had a little hiccup with the service, and apparently they didn't have the lunch buffet on Saturdays that I thought they did, but we wrapped up the weekend with a letter from each of the dads.  Then we finished the last session on the way home. 

We had such a memorable weekend.  When we got home, Ben took her aside and gave her a necklace with two hearts on it that he had bought as a token for her to remember the weekend and that our love is always with her.  I hope Tori remembers this weekend and the things we discussed her entire life.  I think the girls learned a lot (Sometimes more than they wanted to!), and we had lots of good discussions and times to talk.  It was a great weekend and we had great friends to share it with.

Candy and Sophia Booth, Karen and Savannah Haddox, Christina and Rylee Dingle, Leah and Briley Beard.