A Saturday in the car and a Sunday on the shore.

Due to a bunch of things out of our control, we got a 4 hour late start on our drive, and the kids and I ended up killing some time in walmart while Aaron ran into work to take care of a few quick things.  No worries for us, vacation is vacation! We hung out with Mr M&M, shopped for flip flops, sand toys and road trip snacks.  I think Aaron was motivated to work a lot faster knowing the kids and I were in walmart spending money.

The kids rocked the drive.
Photo proof from Transylvania. It's kind of a scary place. I kept the windows up and reminded the children to go to college.

We crossed the Mississippi river.

And finally arrived at our hotel 12 hrs later. We only had to make one stop on the way there. Awesome little travelers!  We had talked about renting a beach house in Seacrest or Seaside for the week, but couldn't decide if it was worth the money. Then a friend of mine called to tell me she had booked 2 rooms for a week in a Marriott hotel in Destin with her employee discount and had decided not to use it. Instead of canceling, she transferred the reservation to our name. We had 2 rooms 2 min from the beach for $39 each per night.  Totally worth the trip!  Thank you, friend!

The kids went straight to bed Sat. night and Quincy and Reese both threw up on Sunday morning, foiling our plans to go to church in Florida!  I was worried it would last all week and ruin our vacation, but everyone felt fine by noon.  We went for a drive.  The kids really wanted to get their suits on and go swimming. We decided to make it a teaching moment and told them that even though we couldn't go to church that morning, we could still observe the Sabbath and find an activity that would be a little more reverent, so we took a walk on the beach and ended up flying kites.  In the end, I'm not really sure how much more "reverent" it ended up being, but at least we made an effort to make Sunday feel different and more special than the our other vacation days, and that was the point.

The beach is the best place for flying kites. There is constant wind, so it requires no effort or skill to keep a kite in the air. When one of the kids would get tired of flying theirs, we just hooked the string to the end of a chair or my purse or Soren's bucket seat (that he slept in almost the entire time), and the kite would stay up in the air on it's own.

The sand is very white and the beaches are remarkably clean in Florida.

I am LOVING this little toothless smile, right now. It's like a cartoon.

I think Sunday ended up being my favorite day of our trip. It was just a magical day of, uninterrupted, happy, quality time together with my favorite people. Good day.

When we got back to our room, we discovered that leprechauns had followed us to Florida and left a box of Lucky Charms cereal bars in our room.  Those sneaky sneaky leprechauns...