Florida Trip

On Sunday night, we arrived home from our 9-day trip to Florida to visit family and friends. We spent the first half of the week visiting the Wagner side of the family in Melbourne (and attending sister Wendi's graduation from PA school), and then the second half in Orlando vacationing with three other families.

This same group of families (originally friends from Campus Church in Gainesville) have been taking an annual vacation together for five years now. When we started out, there were three toddlers in the group. Now, the kids actually outnumber the adults! This time there were ten children (ages 1-6) and eight adults. To accommodate our crowd, we rented a gorgeous 6-bedroom/4 bath vacation house in a resort (we got a good deal on it). And despite the increasingly challenging ratios, we had a great time together. We enjoyed hours of swimming, watching the kids play together more creatively than every before, and of course lots of late-night visiting. Understandably, we were all exhausted after the fourth night, and ready to head back to our own homes.

Due to some difficulty in nailing down and coordinating plans, we ended up staying the night in four different places for the first four nights of our trip. All that loading and unloading of the car is the main reason why I forgot to take any pictures while we were in Melbourne...the camera just didn't get carried in most of the time. The highlight of our time with the Wagner's was meeting our newest little niece, Madelyn Belle McGough, Traci's firstborn. She was a little over a month old when we were there, and I was especially excited to be able to go with Traci for little Maddie's newborn pictures. We also enjoyed exploring the new addition to the Melbourne Zoo, a really amazing little lagoon and play area that impressed all four of us and delighted the kids. Another highlight for Marcus and Caleb was going to Disney with Uncle Mike and Cousin Chase for a day. They played hard all day (got back to the house after midnight) and the next day, Caleb slept in past 7 am for the first time in his entire life. (Unfortunately for me, Ethan was up at 5:20, so Caleb sleeping in didn't help me very much.)

All in all, our second trip to Florida this year was less challenging than the one we took in January, but I think I speak for all of us that we are very happy to be back home and in our own beds for a while.