So this past week was family vacation. We all packed up the least we thought we could live with for a week and headed down to invade my parent's house in Florida. It was so very nice of my parents to accept four adults and a baby into their home for an entire week. It can be a lot having one house guest never mind five of them!
Florida delivered everything we could have wanted!
Sunshine every day, a wonderful Sunday Service right down the street, family, relaxing, fun, plenty of time in the book store and the wal-mart (regrettably). As you can see, the baby did fine on the boat ~ here he's doing his best pirate impression!
We learned the baby is not a fan of water and it took a full week of auntie Nikki coaxing him gently for him to get used to the pool at all. Let's not discuss how he tried to stop the tide at the ocean! This week he learned several new words: on the list were Meme, Pepe, house, and 'no no no no no no' all in one quick, syncronous plea! Despite his fervent fear of the water, Florida is full of it so we continued to help him through his worst moments and he survived quite neatly as it would happen. He also spent quite a bit of time hunting down 'vroom vrooms' and was seen about town in big boats, small boats, mall motorcycles, antique cars, rental cars, one plastic green four-wheeler and a not so thrilling ride on a helicopter that lasted about 1.5 seconds.
We ate like kings and queens thanks to Mom and Dad's German butcher who knows nothing of the term small or moderation. We had spare ribs that looked like they came from 7,000 pound pigs! We also made sure we had plenty of our own junk food to last the week! I'm sure right now everyone (except the baby who didn't change his eating to accomodate a vacation) are all in food detox!
In addition to fun in the pool and fun on the boat and fun at Auntie and Uncle's house, we also (Jason and I) stole away for our anniversary and had a very nice dinner and movie date. Our overall rating of this vacation was that while we really have enjoyed our many previous vacations that are filled with plans and outings and parks and rides, this vacation had its own special allure, being a week of actually relaxing and just enjoying family and a few rousing games of Scrabble.
As for travelling with baby, that was actually a real success! He did very well on the first few flights with a little wiggling and a bit of drama. The final leg of the flight home was a nightmare for the first ten minutes but no one blames him. When you're 18 months old and being dragged here and there and asked to climb this, ride in that, hit that ball (putt putt), walk over here, ride over there, he really did an amazing job of adjusting and putting up with what must have seemed like a load of adult craziness! We did eventually wear him out (see photo below) and he did have to take a nap or two, but he didn't waste too much time sleeping - that is for sure!
All in all, an A+ of a time and we look forward to doing it all again some day hopefully soon!
