Ahh…
We had a really, really great time down in Virginia with our friends. We hadn’t seen each other since last June, when they came up to Massachusetts and threw me a baby shower. Amanda and I were both pregnant, her due date being about 6-8 weeks after mine (how is it that we didn’t take a picture of the two of us pregnant together?!). Until this week, we hadn’t met their second son, and they hadn’t met our kids. Marcus and M were friends and post-college roommates, so there’s something nostalgic and a little funny about taking a picture of the two of them, nearly eight years after I met them both, playing with their kids on the beach. My, how things change.
Anyways, the travel was a little hairy, as might be expected. Unfortunately, we did not have a direct flight, so it was two short hops. On the way down, we left for the airport at 4:30am for our 6:30 flight, but then had a nearly four-hour layover in Newark. Joy of joys. But we made it, they fell asleep on the drive from the airport, and we put them to bed early. Whew. After an enormous grocery run, we threw some meat on the grill, chatted it up like the “old” days when we practically all lived in the same apartment, and called it a night.
The first few days were glorious and sunny, which meant we weren’t too bothered with the windy, cloudy, drizzly days in the middle. We played at the beach, found a mall and a park, and even took turns staying home with the kids so each couple could have a date night. Wohoo! We stayed up too late watching the DNC, and got up early with all four kids. M and I took the kids for a mini road trip to meet my blog-buddies in Williamsburg, which was just as fun as I hoped it would be.
The kids did really well. They stuck pretty well to their normal schedule, slept fine in the Pack & Plays, and were only a little clingy. Their different reactions to the ocean were funny, if not at all surprising. Daniel clung to me or M for dear life, sometimes trying to climb even higher up my shoulder. He did not like the waves one little bit. He was content to sit on the towel farther from the water, though sometimes crawled off to check things out. Rebecca wanted to walk all the time, and get closer to the waves. She laughed when they washed up on her and complained loudly when I took her away from them.
By the end of the week, though, I was ready to come home. Ready to sleep in my delicious new mattress instead of the covered rock that was in our room at the beach house. Ready to be in my own space with my own routines. We had a really fun time with our friends, but I’m almost always ready for trips to be over.
Travel home was also rough. This time the flights weren’t so early, but the first one was delayed enough to wipe out our entire would-be two-hour layover at JFK. We bolted off our first plane, went one gate over, and immediately boarded the second. Only to sit on it for probably an hour before taking off for a 40-minute flight. Rebecca, strangely enough, fell asleep just before our first flight landed, but slept through all of the jostling and plane-changing, until we were at our cruising altitude on the second flight. Daniel slept much of the first flight, but it wasn’t enough to keep him from screaming for much of the second. Sigh. We were those people.
In the end, one of our three bags missed the connection, but it was delivered by this morning. We made it home in the same number of pieces in which we left, and all was well. Our house looks like a tornado hit it, so I’m sorting and unpacking and doing laundry. Our friends were able to keep the house for the extra two days of the holiday weekend, and I was a little sad that our flights were already booked and we couldn’t stay with them. But on the other hand, we came home and still had two days to recover before M goes back to work and I’m back to the daily grind. Worked out pretty well.
Without further ado, a few of my favorites out of the nearly 400 frames I snapped on our week away:
The view from our deck! The location was perfect, right across the street from the beach entrance.
Daniel makes a new friend. Would you believe the baby on the left is two months younger than my kids? But bigger, and walking.
Rebecca would like to walk in the waves some more.
College classmates, roommates... daddies.
A blog-tastic meetup in Williamsburg: Darren, Cheryl, Sarah, Rebecca, me, and Daniel.
On a cloudy day, play in the kitchen!
Daddy, read me a story!
Pots make good drums, but I'm not sure this is what they mean by "boy band."
It was too windy at the beach, so we found a park.
Daniel gets a ride and tries to pull Daddy's hair out.
Daniel gets a little more bold on the beach.
A rare picture of all four of us!
Rebecca decides the beach is a good place to take up yoga.
Waiting around the airport on the way home, Rebecca realizes she can stand on her own.
Daniel kills time by "book surfing" down the hallway
I have lists of lists. They haven’t made it to spreadsheet form yet, but the day is young. I’ve got a packing list for the kids, a packing list for me and M, a packing list for our carry-on. A list for groceries. A master to-do list. A list for the dog, who is being dropped off at a friend’s house. Said friend is really saving me, since my last-minute call to the kennel yielded a new response: they were full until Monday. But we leave Saturday. Doh! Thankfully, this friend thought it would be fun to have a dog for the weekend, so lucky me and lucky Winnie! But, in the meantime, she needs a bath and I need to find her portable crate.
The yodeling is clearly for his own entertainment, he loves to make his voice do funny things. When he’s climbing the stairs or otherwise moving and concentrating, he often does this funny, growling “word” that would probably be “Gof” if I tried to spell it. But it almost sounds like he’s chewing something. It makes me laugh almost every time. Another “word” of his is “dob”. As in “dob a-dob a-dob.” No idea what it means, if anything, but it’s friggin adorable. I also think that, at least 50% of the time that it seems like he’s waving, he’s actually making the sign for “light!” One last thing: he apparently is part-dog. He just loves carrying things around in his mouth when he crawls or climbs.
has become quite a little bookworm. It has happened a number of times, but I’d say yesterday she sat for a solid 25 minutes, carefully turning the pages of one book or another. This morning it was Pat the Bunny, and she took that little pointer finger, turned the page, and patted that darn bunny. So small and perfect. She also now makes funny faces just for the sake of being silly. She kind of juts out her chin and puckers her lips, making kind of a funny “oooh” sound. Silly girl. And god help you if she decides she wants you to help her walk and you don’t get up fast enough. Ooh, 12-month-old temper tantrum!
