holidays: round 2 part 2

early in the morning, the day after christmas we piled into the car (with dog) to head to florida to visit with matt's family. no sooner had we gotten the dog in the car did she decide to flip out. high pitched squealing (this is actually pretty normal when she is anxious or excited), and she was just spazzing. she was trying to jump over the seat which would have landed her smack on top of bea. not a good situation with a 65 pound dog. she's getting old and she just doesn't travel well anymore. we can't board her, we never have. thankfully we have a great friend, mariann (THANK YOU!), that we were able to call and ask her to watch mason for us. if she hadn't been so obliging, this would have been the car trip from hell.

but because of mariann, two complying children, and a wonderful husband who drove the entire way so i could finish my last knit gift, the trip went off without a hitch. bea and henry travelled great, though bea did cry the last 20 minutes out of hunger, poor thing.

we had a great time in florida. a little swimming here and there, soaking in the hot tub, picking fresh grapefruit from the yard (and lemon limes for our beers), chasing ali the dog around the house. all the good stuff.

we visited the crazy but always good christmas house one night. then another day we took a boat trip to sarasota for lunch and a walk in the park. on another day we went to snook haven on the myakka river for lunch and live music. and a couple days at the beach combing for shells. it was a full and relaxing trip. and it went quick.





the only downer was everyone came down with some 24 hour bug and henry got his the night before we planned on leaving at 4 am. so terrible seeing your little one feeling so crappy and not being able to do anything about it. though it still amazes me that i can handle the vomit like a pro.
so, we ended up letting henry sleep as long as he could and waited to see how he was feeling. he seemed okay so we packed finished packing up the car and said our goodbyes. we hit the road back to home around 9 am and our 8 hour trip turned into a 12 hour trip. thank you college bowl games that were apparently all played in florida. (what do i know?) we sat in bumper to bumper traffic on a 3 lane highway for i don't know how many hours. so we had a kid that felt like crap (but wasn't puking) and a baby who hadn't been held most of the day. it wasn't pretty, but we were so glad to be home when we got there.

more to come . . .