Time With Family

We arrived in Melbourne (Marcus's hometown) early Monday evening. Our whole trip to Florida was actually planned around being in town for Marcus's mother's 60th birthday. To add to the celebration, we decided to surprise Mimi about our family coming to town. We pulled up at her house, let the boys out of the car, and sent them to ring the door bell by themselves. Mimi was expecting her son-in-law, Josh, and it took her a minute to process that it was really her only two out-of-town grandchildren. When she recovered and realized it was really us, there was much laughing and catching up.

Mimi had a great birthday week, complete with lots of time with her five grandchildren, a home-cooked meal of lasagna, and the best birthday present ever: all the kids worked together to compile a book of photos from her childhood on, as well as letters from all of her children and close friends. Needless to say, she loved it :) And to top it all off, we took all the grandkids for a (semi) professional photo shoot, and now Mimi has a framed picture of her five grandbabies on the wall :)

Other highlights of a our time with family were a morning at the Sebastian inlet tide pool (which the kids LOVED), an afternoon at the Melbourne Zoo lagoon, an adults-only dinner at the Melting Pot (thanks to Mimi both for paying and babysitting!), lots of swimming (both in Mike's pool and Mimi's pool), late night talks at Mike's house, and (for Marcus & Mike), lots and lots of PS3 time :)

All in all, the kids had a great week. They handled all the chaos really well. Caleb made us proud many times with his willingness to share and his cooperative attitude. Ethan made us proud by not having a potty training relapse during the nine days of travel. Even though he's been potty-trained for months, we thought we might have to put him in Pull-ups this week because of all the time in the car and the constantly-changing environments, but he ended up doing great! We did have to make a lot more potty stops than we are used to on the road, but it was totally worth it to get through the whole trip with dry underwear :)

As for the trip home, I will spare you the details. Let's just suffice it to say that I'm glad we don't have another road trip on the calendar until Christmas :)

(Mimi hugging Marcus after our surprise arrival.)