I can’t believe I have allowed so much time since my last post. So allow me to do my best to remember some of they key events of the past two weeks.
We went on vacation for the week of July 4th. We spent the week in Destin, FL with the entire Gosnell family. We left Friday early afternoon, and drove until Montgomery Alabama where we spent the night. We couldn’t check into our house in Destin until 4:00 Saturday afternoon, so we just spent some time in the morning letting the girls play, and then figured they could nap for the bulk of the travel time. We found a really nice park where the girls had a good time in the morning, then we met up with Brian and Amber and had lunch at IHOP. The remainder of the drive wasn’t bad, but as we were arriving at 4:00, so were all of the other vacationers at the exact same time, so the traffic was pretty heavy.
I admit that the first couple of days were pretty stressful for me. I was pretty tired from the trip, and the girls’ routine was messed up enough that they weren’t napping at the same time, and Rachel was resisting going to bed at night more than usual. So I had kind of a tough time at first. But in time their routines got back on track, and I got more comfortable with the environment, and the remainder of the trip was fun. We spent a lot of time at the beach and at the pool. The beach that we were at didn’t have much visible affect from the oil spill. There were crews out there pretty much all the time keeping the beach clean, but to be honest from what I saw it looked like they were just standing around for the most part, but the beach was in nice shape. I talked to a lady at church who’s business relies on tourists, and she said that they are really feeling the effects of a big drop in tourism. While there are evidently areas that are badly affected by the oil spill, it was still pretty nice where we were.
We didn’t take a lot of pictures at the beach unfortunately. Both Rachel and Gabi loved the ocean and the waves. Absolutely no fear at all. So both Jeff and I were pretty much on our toes the entire time to keep them safe. The surf was pretty choppy most of the days we were there. (Red flags Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. We finally had a yellow flag on Friday.) We didn’t even take the camera to the beach most days because after the first couple of days, I realized that I didn’t dare take my hands or eyes off the girls at all when we were at the beach.
We did take some nice family pictures.
The drive home was very long. We left a little after 9:00 a.m. (Central Time), and we got home at about 1:00 in the morning. We had a couple of delays because of heavy traffic, we had a detour because of a semi that overturned. (We had a heads up that the traffic was backed up about 10 miles, so we knew to take the detour.) We also stopped a little bit to let the girls get their wiggles out. Anyway, we were very glad to finally be home again.
A couple of the highlights of the trip:
Rachel pooped in the potty for six days in a row, every single entire day we were in Florida. Okay, to be honest she didn’t poop in the potty each and every time, but she did it once a day every day. On the drive home she pee peed in the potty at every single stop and kept her diaper dry the whole trip except for one poop when we were stopped for dinner. I was pretty surprised at how well she did. I figured with all of the craziness she wouldn’t want to add using the potty to everything else, but I was wrong. She did great.
Not to be outdone, Gabi learned while we were in Florida how to identify my nose accurately 100% of the time. Maybe it’s because my nose is so big, but still, I was pleased. She sometimes accurately identifies her own nose too.
Speaking of Gabi, today she showed that she knows several words:
“ma” means milk, mama, or mouth (depends on the context).
“ba” means ball.
“da” means daddy or dog (again depends on context). She actually did the sign for dog today. She signed it on my leg instead of her own, but she still did it right.