Surviving vacation

I wish that I could say our vacation was awesome. That it was relaxing and fun and recharged our batteries. But I can not say that. Our vacation was stressful and draining and almost every single day we talked about cutting our trip short and coming home. Our kids were CRANKY. We thought Charlotte was teething for the first couple days because she was irritable, drooly, not eating and waking numerous times at night....turns out she had a wicked canker sore on her tounge......which she gave to Maddie because we were not being on top of the sippy cup sharing. So then we had two girls who were cranksters, not eating, not sleeping and complaining the entire time. Add to that a horrible rash on Charlotte's diaper area that started spreading and an urgent care visit to discover she had a fungal infection.......all of this does not equal family vacation bliss. Dan slept in one room with Charlotte, I slept in the other with Maddie and no one really slept all that much during the week. There were tolerable and even happy moments scattered throughout the vacation, but most of those were preceded and followed by bad attitudes, temper tantrums and overwhelmed parents.

But that's life right?!?!? Things don't go as planned. Kids get sick at the least opportune times and we have to deal with it. It gave me a glimpse at what our future will be like.....if we plan to have a big family we will have to deal with the inevitable ups and downs of life with many different personalities and coping abilities. And once our kids are older and are better able to handle canker sores, diaper rashes and fungal infections we'll have to deal with teenager 'tude. Joy. I don't think this bad experience has tainted us from future vacations, but I definitely don't feel the need to go anywhere in the near future. We've been home 5 days and Maddie has just started eating solid foods and both girls are just starting to sleep through the night again. We're still recovering from our beach vacation.

Other than the obvious difficulties, the weather at Myrtle beach was lovely, the ocean was beautiful, the pool was warm and we spent most of our time there. We ate good food, did a little bit of sight seeing and went to an awesome carnival and rode a gazillion rides. I didn't take many pictures because really....what fun is taking pictures of children that look like this:

But I did get a few good shots in between the insanity and so I have those to share below. One thing I really appreciated about this vacation/learning experience was Dan! His patience amazes me and his ability to make lemonade out of lemons is very handy. I have the best husband around, and even if they don't realize it now, my girls are VERY lucky to have Dan as a daddy. Cheers to summer vacation!

Beach time

Barefoot Landing
the girls picked jelly beans from a candy shop

Had to include Charlotte and some of her famous faces!

Milkshakes

The pool
our second home

Carnival rides
We stayed there for 6 hours and rode SO many rides!
Maddie was tall enough to ride the big rides and seriously went on crazy fast carnival rides. She was only scared on the dragon swing and only when it was fully vertical.
Crazy thrill seeking child!! :o)