Before I get into our trip, I need to give a quick update on the boys health. We are now frequent flyer members at the doctor's office (ok, not really, but we should be). We were there 3 times in the span of 1 week! We went to have them look at Aaron's stitches on the Friday after he got them, but they weren't ready to come out yet, so we got to go back on Monday. Aaron was a brave boy, and while he cried a little bit, he did a great job holding still while the Nurse Practitioner cut them out. Then on Friday we went back for Tommy's 6-month check-up. He's now 17 lbs. 11oz, and 26.75" long. He's meeting all his milestones, and left after getting 4 shots, with just a little peep.
Now, onto the good stuff. Last week we took our first vacation as a family of 5. We used the gift certificate with the travel agency that we won by contributing to WBUR to go on a family vacation in Florida. We flew into Ft. Myers and stayed at the South Seas Island Resort on Captiva Island for an entire week. We had so much fun! Basically, the hardest decision we had to make all week was "pool or beach?" We stayed in a 1-bedroom beach villa, which had a full kitchen and a great screened in balcony that overlooked the ocean. There was a sleep sofa in the living room, where the big boys slept at night, and we put a pack-and-play in the bedroom for Tommy. The big boys took naps in the bedroom during the day, and then at night when there were sleeping children everywhere, Dave and I would hang out on the balcony. It was great!
The resort was pretty great. We could walk out to the beach, where the resort provided lounge chairs, towels, and umbrellas, and we passed a small pool on the way there. We could also take a trolley (Aaron loved this, as he's very into Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood) to the other end of the resort, where there were 3 giant pools, one of them with 2 water slides! While they enjoyed building sand castles, Mudgie and Aaron picked the "slide pool" every time, given the choice. The first day there, Aaron went right down the slide, without any hesitation. He couldn't wear the life jacket we brought from him because of the buckles, so he just went down bare and Dave caught him at the bottom. We got another pair of arm floats the next day. Mudgie was a tougher sell, but once he tried it, he too loved it!
As it turned out, Aaron was technically a little too short to go on the slide. The first 2 days we were there, no one seemed to care, but on day #3, there was an attendant who was very much "by the book." He did not allow Aaron on the slide, which as I'm sure you can imagine, did not go over well. He just couldn't understand why all of a sudden the rules changed, and I felt so bad carrying him down (while kicking and screaming). Luckily, there was an ice cream and candy shop right by the slide pool, so a trip there made things seem a little better.
And speaking of ice cream and candy, we all ate so much of it! We really tried to make a point of saying "yes" this vacation, as we feel like we say "no" a lot at home. The boys really seemed to take to this philosophy! They had "a pick me up," otherwise known as candy, just about every afternoon after nap, before we headed out to the pool or the beach. And most days, we made it both places. We'd do 1 in the morning, go back to the room for lunch and nap, and then do the other in the afternoon. When we did the beach in the afternoon, we stopped off at the pool by the room on the way back a few days too. We went out to dinner every night, and almost every night we had a treat after that too!
I felt like a spectator for much of the vacation. Tommy was so good and accommodating, really rolling with whatever we asked of him, but he seemed to find all the new scenery exhausting. Luckily, I could lull him to sleep on me at whatever our location of choice happened to be (beach, pool, dinner, etc.), but that meant I was in a lounge chair acting as a pillow while Dave attended to the big kids. For the most part this worked out well, as Dave is really just a big kid at heart, but I know he would have liked a little more "down" time.
Since we were down in Florida, we took a day to drive across the peninsula and visit my grandfather. It had been 2 years since we'd seen him, and he had not yet been able to meet Tommy in person. The drive, though slow to start due to 2 bathroom breaks and a coffee break, went pretty well (once Tommy finally stopped screaming and took a nap), due in large part to the DVD player in the minivan we rented. One kid watched a movie while the other played on the iPad. The drive itself was through what is referred to as "Alligator Alley." Unfortunately, we did not see any gators, there or anywhere else on our trip, though there were signs around the resort warning people not to feed the alligators. We had Aaron convinced that 3-year-olds were alligators favorite food, so he held our hands particularly well when we walked by bodies of water.
While everything with 3 kids is a lot of work, the vacation was a lot of fun, and there were certainly times (like on the balcony at night after the kids went to bed) that it even felt like a vacation, and not a "trip with the kids!" The plane rides, both direct flights, went really well, and equipped with the iPhones and iPad Mudgie and Aaron didn't make a peep. Tommy ate and slept through the trip, and because I never had to put him down, he was happy as a clam. It was sad to come home, back to the reality of life (like snow, work, school, laundry, etc.), but I think our time away proved to be fun and memorable for everyone.
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