Our Trip: Day 1

Back in the 80's my family would vacation at my aunt's house in New Smyrna Beach, FL! I have the best childhood memories of our vacations there. So when I found out we would be going to a wedding in Orlando this fall my brain started scheming. October is a super cheap time to go to Florida and the weather is still rather warm so we decided to take the whole family and head to the beach for a week. This ended up being a terrible plan since Christian had just gotten out of the hospital. He had just missed a ton of school and then McKenna started throwing up the day before we were supposed to leave. But it was paid for, so we were going!

I didn't blog about it while we were there because I didn't really want to announce to the whole world that our house was sitting empty for 10 days. So all the drama of Will having croup and McKenna having pneumonia was actually taking place while we were on vacay in Florida. Good times! I'm literally spent just as much time sitting in Urgent Care as I did sitting on the beach. Needless to say it was not an ideal vacation. We didn't get to do some of the fun things we had planned like Disney World. And only Ryan and Christian even went to the wedding. ((Sigh)). But, what can you do??

I'm not even going to blog about the 17 hours it took to get to the beach. It's worth forgetting. Enough said.

We finally did arrive at 3:00am on Saturday, October 22nd. The entire family was awake and bouncing off the walls. I guess it didn't help that even after I got everyone settled into bed, I got them back up to sit out on the balcony and look at the moon reflecting off the ocean waves. I was beyond exhausted but there's nothing like sitting with your three babies watching for shooting stars and talking about what a big God we serve who could make such a big sky and a big ocean.

Will didn't get the memo that you're supposed to sleep in on vacation! We woke up to a gorgeous sunny day and the boys and I hung out on the couch and watched the waves while we waited for everyone else to get up.

The last time McKenna was at the "real" beach was when she was 6 months old, so this was huge for her. When daddy took her out in the waves for the first time she couldn't stop giggling at the top of her lungs. Christian was laughing and laughing too. Later Ryan said, "that might have been better than Christmas morning last year." And Christmas morning last year was pretty great.

We found a jelly fish. And collected lots of shells.

Christian practiced writing all the words he knows in the sand.

Ryan taught him to boogie board. It's his new favorite "sport."

The kids learned to identify brown pelicans, sandpipers and seagulls.

Perfection.

I love making memories with these two!