beach trip, day 3

Sunday morning, it was back in the car for yet another road trip!

Jonathan just chilled after being plopped back in his car seat...yet again. :)

While Michael insisted that on our 2 hour drive he saw an armadillo, an aligator, and a heard of pigs off on the side of the road. Do you see any of those? Yeah, that's what I thought. None of the rest of us saw any of them either.... :}

Our plan for the day, since I was flying out of Orlando later that afternoon, was to check out Downtown Disney - a taste of Disney without the crazy price of a ticket!

Our first stop was for an early lunch (the early meal thing works great when on vacation - less crowded that way!) at Captain Jack's. Shannon and Jonathan wait patiently for their food. :)

Next, Jonathan got to have his first ride on a carousel. He wasn't quite sure what to think, but finally we got a smile out of him.

The boys wanted to go in this store next. It's an "interactive" store and the first thing you see upon entering is a huge station with all kinds of Mr. Potato Head parts where you can create your own potato head. Very cool! :)

We tried to hop from store to store fairly quickly due to the fact that it was approximately 500 degrees outside! Ok...maybe not quite that hot...but it was HOT! After leaving the toy store, Jonathan found a perfect spot.

The water fountains! Splashing up from Mickey Mouse shaped holes in the ground, the water followed various patterns around the large Mickey Mouse head on the ground. Jonathan had a hard time "catching" the water at first, but still thought it was great fun.

Determined to catch that water!

Caught it!! Or, rather, the water caught him! :)

So much fun! And at least one of us was cooler now. Actually the water itself was not cold at all (kind of like the rest of the water in FL!), but I think it cooled him off as he walked around in wet clothes after that.

Next, it was on to Lego Land!

A Lego sea monster!

Michael, the geography and history teacher, thought these window decorations were especially cool and grabbed my camera to take a few pics:

London

Syndey, Austraila

Russia. I liked this one the best. :)

France

Lego play place!

We saved a visit to the Ghirardelli Chocolate Soda Shop for the end. It was very yummy, although our ice cream was

more like soup in about two minutes after finding a table in the shade outside!

(Ok, I don't know why the font in this section is so much bigger than the rest! I've tried to fix it but

sometimes you just can't argue with blogger! :-p )

Jonathan in his Mickey Mouse hat Aunt Kiki bought for him. :)

It was a quick trip, and I was sad to leave, but I was so thankful to get to go! I had a blast and who knows? Maybe we'll all get to go again sometime!

beach trip, day 2

Saturday morning, I woke up to the sounds of Jonathan's sweet little voice talking out in the living room. I lay there for a while just listening to him before getting up myself. After breakfast and getting ready, we headed to the car.

Jonathan always had someone to chat with in the car. Every time he saw my camera he would take his passy out of his mouth to say "cheese!!"

We headed up to Melbourne Beach, which is where Michael's grandmom's house is. Along the way, we started seeing some interesting mailboxes. So of course I had to take pictures...!

Seahorse

Sea turtle coming out of it's egg.

Dolphin.

Pellican. (It's a little hard sometimes to take a picture in a moving car...!)

Once up at Melbourne, we stopped in a shell shop that has been a traditional stop for Michael's family since he was a child. While Jonathan didn't appreciate being taken in a store completely filled with "no no's", I enjoyed looking around and even found the same kind of souvenir that Michael had once brought back for me - about 20 years ago! :)

After that it was off to an early lunch at the New England Eatery, a restaraunt Michael wanted to take us to. It had great food and a really cool atmosphere. There was a "regular" inside part to it but we chose to sit in the semi-outdoor section, which was a lot of fun. Kept with the feeling of being on vacation at the beach!

Upon sitting down at the table, Dave immediately realized there was a tv turned to a sports channel directly behind me and in his perfect line of viewing....! :}

Jonathan enjoyed getting to drink out of a "big kid cup". It went better than it did later that night...which you'll see a little later.... :)

He would say "mmmmmmm!" after every sip and drank about half of daddy's pink lemonade! :)

Um....ok! Heehee!

Michael thought this ginormous fishing lure was incredibly awesome and would have gladly taken it home with him!

This is Michael (in the orange UT hat...) attempting to take a picture of the bar by holding the camera over his head. Instead he managed to get a perfectly centered picture of the couple sitting at the table behind us! Ha! He considered offering to send them a copy of it for a mere $50! Lol.

After a delicious lunch, we headed over to Grandmom's house (she was up here and was coming down this week, so her house was empty when we were there...and also had no AC...yikes.) While Jonathan took a nap, we cooled off in the pool in the backyard. Evidently this duck had decided the pool was its own private lake but moved away when we took over.

Getting to see grandmom's house was neat for me because I have grown up my whole life hearing about it and seeing pictures of it. It was fun to walk in and have a lot of it be pretty close to the way I have it pictured in my head. :)

After Jonathan woke up, we headed over to the private beach just across from Grandmom's neighborhood. Michael had told us all morning, "The great thing about this beach is that it's a private beach so that NO ONE is EVER there!" .........

HA! We walked over the bridge to the stairs that led down to the beach and this is what we saw! There was an entire party going on - with tents, bar-b-que, and lots of people! Michael said in the 30 years he's been going here he had never seen it like this. It was really fine though because pretty much all the people were in that clump right there so we just walked further down the beach to our own quiet spot.

The Tracey family. :)

The only proof that I was actually there this weekend! :-p I would like to go on record as saying that even though I don't usually like being IN pictures, I DID suggest several times that we get someone to take a group picture of all of us - but no one would ever do it! :-p

With shoulders that felt like they were a bit fried, we stopped back by Grandmom's to dunk in the pool and get a bit of the sand off us and change clothes, then it was back in the car to head back towards the house we were staying at. Here are a few more of the mailboxes we saw... a seashell.

A...headless...turtle??

A flamingo.

We discussed the idea of cooking dinner again that night and it sounded like a rather tiring idea to all of us, so we ended up going to Mulligan's, a restaraunt that Dave had wanted to take us to anyways. The food was great and we all agreed it was an excellent choice. The restaurant itself was pretty warm inside and I was kinda sweaty by the time we left, although everyone agreed it might have had something to do with my sunburn..... :} (Which actually turned out to not be that bad - and I did use sunblock...and still got burned a bit.)

Jonathan got to have a strawberry slushie drink.

He tried several different methods of drinking it. This particular one...

...didn't turn out that well! :} But at least it cooled him off a little.

Next he tried a fork. It worked a little bit better...until he found a much more fun way to do things.

Blowing bubbles with a straw! :) Mommy didn't like that way so much though.

Again Saturday night we played a GREAT game called Bolivia. It was girls against guys...and the girls won!! Wahoo! :) I think the sun had gotten to us a bit by the end of the day though because we kept saying things that weren't all that funny and yet we cracked up until we couldn't breathe and had tears running down our cheeks! It was a great evening!

Mostly for the four of us, here are the quotes from the evening:

S: It changed the whole outlook of the game - like a butterfly!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

M: Oh, I'm just talking out loud.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

D: I hurt my shoulder. Would you like to know why my shoulder hurts? Because I hit my head!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So Dave hit his head, which hurt his shoulder, which made Kathryn's forehead hurt - and THAT'S called a fuzzy!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

M: Do you have 7's?

D: Yes, yes I do.

K: I have 7's, how about you?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Whew! That was a long post! One more to go! :)

beach trip, day 1

Ok, a quick disclaimer...I am writing about my trip as sort of a journal for myself to remember some of the things we said and did on this trip, so if there are a few things here and there in this and the next couple posts that don't make sense or sound like an inside story...they probably are so don't worry if you don't get it! :)

This past weekend I got an invitation from Shannon and Dave to come down to Florida for the weekend! They were staying at Shannon's aunt's house in Sebastian on the east coast and said there were a couple extra bedrooms and that Michael and I should come down. Amazingly, Michael was headed down to Florida anyways to stay with his grandmom for two weeks and it turned out that her house was only about half an hour from the house we stayed at so it worked out perfectly for him to just drive down a few days early.

My "little sister", Lauren, offered to babysit for me on friday so I could have an entire extra day for the trip, which I appreciated SOO MUCH!!! :) I flew from here to Atlanta and then down to Orlando early, early Friday morning. The flight went very smoothly. I was a tiny bit worried and prayed about finding my next gate after getting into Atlanta due to the large size of the airport in general and the fact that a friend in college had almost missed a flight out of Atlanta due to getting thoroughly lost! As it turned out though, I landed at gate A32 and my next flight flew out of gate A34 - a whole two gates away and in the very same seating area!! :) I also prayed that I would get to sit next to someone friendly and kind - not next to someone who totally resented you sitting so close to them in those small airplane seats! Sure enough, on the flight from Atlanta to Orlando, I sat next to a very chatty guy (somewhere in his late 40s, I think) and we talked for at least half of the flight! I love being reminded that God cares about even the small details of things! :)

After arriving in Orlando, Shannon, Dave, and Jonathan picked me up and we headed back to their house.

Ok, so I totally get why people retire to Florida! (Although Shannon's aunt and uncle are not old enough to retire...) This house was in a little gated community and all the lawns were perfectly manicured and the whole place felt beachy and completely relaxed.

This was taken in the living room looking out to the great screened in porch and on into the back yard. Florida grass is so different from grass here! Each blade is a lot thicker and it totally crunches under your feet when you walk on it! And the typical animals that you see are different too. For example, around here at home we usually see lots of squirrels.

In FL, there are all kinds of lizards! :)

After we got to the house, Jonathan went down for a nap while we waited for Michael to finish his drive down. After Jonathan woke up and Michael arrived, we headed on over to the beach for a swim!

We took turns playing in the water and jumping the waves. While two of us were in the water...

...two of us were usually hanging out on the sand with Jonathan. :) He loves the beach - every thing about it, but as he is two years old and wants to do everything himself, playing in the ocean gets frustrating because he wants to walk in by himself and not hold someone's hand...which of course could get him dunked right under a wave! :) He was pretty content playing and letting the waves come up and wash over his legs a little bit.

He did keep tabs on who was in the water though. While Mommy and Daddy were out playing in the waves...

...and Michael was building a sand castle (all by himself..... ;), Jonathan would call out "Hi Mama!!" and wave, just to be sure they knew he was still there.

After a couple hours of fun at the beach, we were all properly tired out and ready to head back to get all the sand and shells cleaned off. The beach we were at on Friday (I don't remember the name....) was nice, but the sand had tons and tons of broken shells just the right size that they hurt to walk on and when the wave came and hit against your leg, it was basically throwing broken glass at you - and we have the scratch marks to prove it! We had to laugh at all the sand and shells we brought home with us in our bathingsuits and landed on the floor of the tub!

After getting cleaned off and putting Jonathan to bed, we ate a delicous group-effort dinner of tacos, corn on the cob, and chips and salsa out on the screened in porch, followed by a great new card game Dave had found.

After a long day of traveling and having a blast together, we were all happy to head for bed. And you will have to keep reading for the rest of the story. :)