Bella, Gabe and Josiah

Well, we made it home. We actually made it home a week ago, but the last week has been a little crazy. Here are our thoughts about coming home... We saw one of the big fires from the sky. The flight attendant said it was Yellowstone. We spent the night in Seattle (which is a long dramatic story about the hotel that was bad enough that I reported it to the hotel management...) before flying home. We got home at three and we were all wiped out. Three of us chose to stay up and go to bed early. The other was so tired that he was falling over while trying to eat a cracker, so he got a nap. Two hours later, I woke him up to eat dinner. Well, I tried to wake him up. I walked in his room, opened the shade, had a long chat with Bella, and he still looked like this. We fed him dinner and put him back to bed and he slept all night. Apparently he was exhausted... Tuesday Bella left for to go camping for the rest of the week. The other three of us spent the week going to b...

For our last day in St Augustine, we decided to go stay in town, wandering the shops and watching the cannon demonstrations at the fort. Once again, things did not go as planned... There was a cafe downstairs from our apartment, so we decided to go down and get some breakfast. All was well. Then the food showed up and Gabe suddenly got very snuggly. He refused to eat and spent all of breakfast leaning on my arm. It was rather odd, considering the fact that he’d been perfectly fine before. Rather than going to the 10:30 cannon firing, we decided to go back upstairs and get Gabe more water and see if we could cool him off. He ended up falling asleep on my chest. Bella really wanted to go to Barnes and Noble, so she and Pat did that while Gabe slept. Eventually he woke up and I got some food and water down him. I figured that maybe he was just wiped out from the trip? Pat and Bella got home and Pat picked up Gabe to snuggle. Gabe responded by throwing up all over him. ...

When we decided to stay in St Augustine for the week, we started looking at things to do near us and Pat found a waterpark in Daytona Beach. We weren’t sure what the plan was for the week, but we kept it in mind. Yesterday we decided that we needed a beach day, so we decided to head down to Daytona Beach. However, we checked the weather and a thunderstorm was coming through. We did not want to repeat Atlantis, so we decided to skip Daytona Lagoon. We drove down to the Daytona Boardwalk and when we parked we realized that we were right next to the Lagoon. Instead, we headed down to the beach. Pat had to run back to the car to get something and while Gabe and I were waiting, a balloon man came by and gave Gabe a hat and a doggie on a leash. The hat didn’t last too long, but the doggie made it all day! We couldn’t find a place to change and the water was a little rough, so we decided to ask the water park about the storm situation. It was about one and we hadn’t eaten lunc...

Sometimes you have days where nothing turns out the way that you plan. That was yesterday. We headed out to Fort Matanzas. We had two different people on Tuesday tell us that we definitely needed to go out there, so we did. However, there was a storm planning on coming through, so they canceled the ferry to the fort and we didn’t feel like waiting for another hour, so we left. As we were getting back to town, the storm hit. Really, it wasn’t bad, it just poured for a few minutes. Those just happened to be the few minutes that we were trying to figure out where to eat lunch and deciding if we were willing to even get out of the car.  After lunch, we went to the Pirate museum. St Augustine had a huge pirate heritage and the museum was amazing! Gabe had a great time exploring. This is one of two actual jolly rogers still in existence. They had a cannon you could fire. I fired it while Gabe was about a foot away and he jumped so far! He refused to try...

The nice thing about staying at an AirBnB is that you can get a place with a kitchen and a second bedroom for the kids to sleep in. The bad thing is that this apartment is right above a cafe that started playing music at 7am. Luckily I think I was the only one that woke up to it... Once everyone else was up and going, we met up with Pat’s friend Loyal from high school. They hadn’t seen each other in nearly 20 years, so clearly there was a lot to catch up on. After a lovely brunch, they had to get going, so we left to explore the Castillo de San Marcos, which was built to defend St Augustine. The fort went back and forth a few times over who owned it due to politics, but it was never once defeated. (This is his current “cheese” face.) They do a live cannon firings sometimes, so we may try and see one of those later in the week. It was pretty hot and we were all wiped out, so we headed home to take a nap. Afterwards, we walked back into town where we got to ex...

We’ve been asking a lot of Gabe on this trip. Naps have been short and sometimes nonexistent. Bedtime has been crazy late (we couldn’t even get in the dining room until 8:15...). We haven’t had a whole lot of snacks and his bottle before bed has basically disappeared because we haven’t had milk. It’s a lot for a little guy. But he’s done so well. That said, we may have found our limit. When you don’t have dinner until 8:15, bedtime ends up being between 10 and 10:30. As long as you can sleep in, this can be done. But when you have to be ready to be off the ship by 7:15am, this gets complicated. We picked sleep over breakfast and woke both kids up at 7 so we could throw our pjs in the suitcase and be ready to go when they called our deck.  They didn’t call our deck until 8:30, so we had time to kill while we waited. Gabe found half a bag of bunny crackers in his backpack, so he had a little snack. When they called our deck, we joined the masses of people trying to get of...

Today did not go as planned. At all... Today we stopped in Nassau, The Bahamas. We decided that we would go to Atlantis for the day. It was pretty expensive, but how could we skip the biggest water park in the world? (I think it’s the biggest. I read it on a sign down here...) Since our swim diaper explosion in Naples, I was a little concerned about having Gabe in a swim diaper all day. He and I had long chat about filling his diaper before we got to the park. Apparently he listened as he filled it while we were sitting in the theater waiting to head to Atlantis. Sweet, one less thing to worry about today! However, we didn’t have time to change his diaper before leaving. No big deal, we’ll just change it when we get there. Unfortunately, it did not smell pretty. We got off the ship and I carried him all the way down the dock to the van. As we were waiting in line for the van, I realized that his diaper was failing him. Lovely. We got on the van and I felt the need to apolog...