Vacation!

The Go-Go's song keeps running through my mind as I begin to type this!  It already seems like so long ago and yet it was just last month.  Makes the next 6 months seem long with no more vacation weeks to look forward to.  We went to Grayton Beach, Florida just outside of Destin and rented a house with our friends Tom and Kelly and their 3 kids, Molly, Lucy and Tag.  I was really hoping for a week where Gavin just attached himself to those kids and wanted to do everything they wanted to do and go everywhere they were, but it was not to be.  They got along pretty well, but the girls really didn't want/need to play with another little boy and Tag and Gavin didn't really start to play together until the last day.  But it was a good week overall and our families were similar in tastes so it made the week easy with decisions about what to eat and what to do.  The house was nice and perfect amount of space for 2 families and was only a short walk to the beach and only 2 houses down from the pool.  We took 2 days to drive there and 2 days to drive home and the kids were awesome travelers - the only problem was trying to keep Harper's bottom dry and not soaking through everything she owned.  I don't know if it was the position of the seat or what, but we literally never drove more than 2 hours without stopping and yet every time, Harper had to change her clothes because she had soaked through - even when I put a nighttime extra duty one on!!  On the way home I just put a clean open diaper as a liner in her seat so at least if she soaked through, she still had a dry seat!  We basically just ate and swam the whole week, so the pictures are pretty self explanatory.  It was definitely a kid friendly vacation and about as relaxing as you're gonna get with 2 kids.  We would go back though, so that tells you something. 

These are from my iPhone so they are a bit small, but it's all we had with us at times!

Oh and one thing that made the trip even better?  Gavin somehow realized that Harper was a living, breathing person sometime on the trip and has been 90% better to her since then (and from where he started, that's a huge improvement) - he even told her he LOVED her one night.  I about fell down when he said it and I did start to cry.  It has been such a long year of him either ignoring her or growling at her - never anything else - that anything other than that reduces me to tears.  He even came up with a nickname for her on the trip "little cherry" and he still calls her that to this day.  Don't get me wrong, she still bugs him and he yells at her for getting in his stuff, but I LOVE that he CARES that she's in his stuff.  He is a boy after all and she is a baby, but I can see now the beginning of a real sibling relationship and that alone is a huge weight off my shoulders.  It really is like something clicked or maybe just the fact that she can interact with him now, I'm not sure, but I'm not complaining because anything is better than where we were.  I guess we won't have to get rid of him after all....I'm kidding people, seriously!!!