Pleasantly surprised

Most of Mark’s family lives up in northern Ohio, thus we rarely get to spend time with them. Sometime last year, we drew up the idea to take a family vacation to the beach. Mark’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousins live in New Smyrna Beach, Florida so this seemed like the logical place to go.

Noah has never been to the beach and Tay has not been since she was younger than 1. Mark’s parents generously offered to pay for the majority of a beach house, so we graciously accepted the opportunity to go :) Last Saturday, we packed up my parent’s minivan, headed out at midnight, and spent 11 hours in the car.

Enter “family vacation” week. I am not going to lie, at first, I was a little concerned. We were on vacation for ONE week with Mark’s entire family in ONE house. Don’t get me wrong, I love Mark’s family. But when you put 20 people in a house for one week, personalities are bound to collide, right?
However, I was pleasantly surprised.

We laughed, the kids played well together, we stayed up late, and the beach was amazing!

Memorable moments from our trip
• On the trip down, both kids were awake at 2:30am laughing hysterically at one another, slap happy?
• Noah loved the beach! He would run straight for it and laugh the entire way
• Tay on the other hand, not a huge fan. It “hurt her eyes”, so she stuck to building sand castles.
• Both kids are NOT afraid of the pool. We had to “rescue” both more than one time. Made me quite nervous
• Our 4th anniversary was Thursday, so we had a “date night” at one of the local restaurants
• Tay jumping in the pool yelling “cannonball”!
• Karaoke, need I say more?
• Nascar baby!! My father-in-law is a HUGE Nascar fan. We went to Daytona Speedway where he was able to ride in a race car.
• The quote of the week, “where’s Noah?”
• On the way home, Noah decided to pull an “all nighter”, meaning from midnight til we got home at 11am, he DID NOT SLEEP. Still recovering from that one.