Spring Break 2012

We spent the last week in our very favorite vacation spot- Pensacola Beach, Florida! The last few years, travelling the 16 + hours to Pensacola from our home in Iowa with 2 children under the age of 3 has been frustrating to say the least! I don't know if we were better prepared and more relaxed or the kids were just older and better able to entertain themselves, but this year's trip was so different. We left late in the afternoon after getting home from work. Randy had picked the kids up from daycare and kept them awake all afternoon, thinking that no nap would make them tired and likely to sleep for some of the trip. We started out and the kids stayed busy enough playing their video games that I started in on "The Hunger Games". Suprisingly I read until we made our first stop. We made it to our hotel with 2 potty stops and a stop for a quick dinner. The kids were kind of wound up at first, but we eventually settled into bed and got a good 6-7 hours of sleep. I got up first and showered and dressed. Then I dressed both kids and we went down to get breakfast while Randy got ready and repacked our overnight bags into the car. We left from our hotel around 7 am. The kids played and watched movies in the car while I picked up my reading. Except for passing out the occassional snack, they kept themselves entertained for the first few hours. They started to get a little restless, but were satisfied when I started playing car games with them. Aidan fell asleep late in the morning and stayed asleep until about the time we stopped for lunch. The afternoon went pretty much the same, with the kids entertaining themselves for the most part with me putting my book away to play occassional car games with them. We finally pulled into our hotel on Pensacola Beach around 4 in the afternoon. We unloaded the car and dropped everything in our hotel room. We found our swimsuits and rushed down to the pool! The kids swam and played for a few hours. When the sun began to go down, we finally returned to our room to get some dinner. Thankfully there was a Subway across the street, so we picked up sandwiches to eat in our room and then put our stuff away. We finally called it a night around 10pm. The next morning after breakfast we went to town to get groceries for the week. When we returned, the kids put on their suits and ran to the pool!

The next few days we bounced back and forth between the pools and the beach.

We also took walks to the park.

After long days in the sun, we cleaned up and went out to dinner.

Randy had to leave us for two days to go to New York for meetings. We took advantage of that time to do something new: mini golf!

Reese even made a hole-in-one!

The next night, we enjoyed some shopping, exploring the boardwalk, feeding the birds and an ice cream snack. We spent the last few days building sandcastles on the beach and playing in the pools.

Unfortunately, I did not get any family pictures this year, but I did get a few shots with my favorite kids on our last night.

On the ride home, we left our hotel just before 7 am and drove straight home. We stopped occassionally for meals and potty breaks and made it home just after 10 pm. Though we were sad that our vacation was over so quickly, we were very glad to finally be home and back to our own confortable beds!