Vacation?

We have returned. You wouldn't believe our week if I told you, which of course I will. But you won't believe it. You will think I'm making it up. But I'm not. I am, however, so exhausted at the moment that I can hardly form coherent thoughts so I may have to do this in a series. Let's start with Vacation Part I.

We left last Sunday to travel a whole hour away to the sandy white beaches South(east?) of Mayberry. Remember I told you how much stuff I had packed? Well we managed to cram it into the van. We arrived, checked in to our lovely condo, parked in the garage and managed to load up two carts and schlep up the elevator with all kids, the stroller, and both carts in tow. We opened the door to our very beautiful, albeit very warm home away from home. Hmmm....must have had the A/C turned way up since no one was here. We'll just crank it down to 60, unload EVERYTHING....notice I said EVERYTHING....and head down to the pool for a couple of hours. When we return it will be nice and cool.

WRONG! When we returned it was still a balmy 78 degrees in the condo, although this time we had three starving, screaming, whining children. I was grabbing food out of the pantry and throwing it to them like peanuts to the elephants at the zoo. Chips, yogos, anything I could find to keep them calm while the maintenance men checked out our "little" problem. Sorry folks, Brutus said. We're going to have to move you to another condo because we can't get this thing up and running tonight. He might as well have said "I'll have to throw a pot of boiling water on you, Ma'am. Hope that will be alright with you." Ok. Fine. Regroup. Get a plan. Feed the kids. Grab some clothes and head to the other condo until they can get this thing fixed tomorrow.

So we, along with just a portion of our transport, headed up 7 stories to sleep in a cool condo. Where sleep was nothing more than a tease when we were awakened at 2 am to Catherine "barking" from her bedroom. Anyone who has ever been through the croup knows what I mean by barking. Of course as soon as we awoke, so did William, then so did Stuart. And of course Stuart was looking for the milkman so I sent Andy to sit with Catherine in a steamed up bathroom while I fed the baby. We then spent the next few hours listening to Catherine wheeze and cough, wondering if we were going to have to get this child with only one good lung to the hospital. We made it through the night though, so first thing the next morning I loaded up the two littlest ones, including the sick one, to head back to our Dr.

Turns out she had a lung infection. Five hours, a chest x-ray, and 10 days worth of antibiotics later the three of us were headed back to the beach to resume our vacation. Got a call from Andy just before we left telling me the A/C was not fixed, so he was loading up a few more items to move from the hot to the cool condo and would meet me there. And....since I was at home...could I bring our cast iron skillet and some steak seasoning, along with some zip loc bags for snacks for the kids at the pool? Oh...some chip clips too.

I can't believe I had forgotten the cast iron skillet.

To be continued.