Mini Vaca ~ the words

Hunting for Morel mushrooms.

Friends of ours are in Jamaica right now and they were gracious enough to allow us to stay at their home for the weekend. They live on the river and have a beautiful newly renovated home.

But before our short retreat, we spent Saturday morning at the soccer fields in Ozark for Lyric's double-header. He was pretty amazing in goal and made me proud. He even scored a fantastic shot when playing offense from around the corner of the penalty area. The ball got knocked loose from a group and he sort of volleyed it up and over the goalkeeper, a pretty fair distance for a successful shot in his age group.

We had about an hour between games so we took advantage of Ben's on the Square, a coffee shop on the square in Ozark, which is only a couple minutes away from the park. Coffees, scones, and a muffin later, we hustled back to the field for the second game.

Foraging some sheep sour.

Once home, we worked all afternoon mowing, weed eating, organizing the shop, and deep cleaning our newly acquired pop-up camper (more on that in Jodi's soon-to-be-created blog).

The restful weekend begun Saturday evening when we arrived at our friend's river home and Jodi made a yummy salsa of fresh tomatoes, peppers, cilantro and onions. The children soaked in the hot tub for a bit before bed, but once tucked into their beds and fast asleep, Jodi and I enjoyed a relaxing hot tub night under a clear night's sky.

Sunday morning offered a hearty breakfast of sausage, scrambled eggs, fried potatoes and coffee. We hunted for mushrooms in the woods but came up empty-handed (that's ok), floated a canoe up river with the children to hunt for interesting rocks and came up full-handed (that's ok), played some football, played some soccer, cleaned up after ourselves, had a wonderful-tasting and wonderfully healthy dinner of local beef, mashed turnips with forest-foraged chives, and baked butternut squash.

Ezra's butternut squash babies.

Ezra got pretty emotionally distraught about mom cooking her squash friends, but it turned out that she just needed a nap before dinner and got a pretty good one.

It was a very short retreat of about 26 hours, but enjoyable nonetheless. And, due to all the work we got done on Saturday at home before we left, there was no self-inflicted guilt for taking the break.