ITS OVER...BOOHOO

The first Haynes Family Vacation is officially seeing its last day! I’m actually sitting in the car typing in Word, hoping that I will be able to just copy and paste this into the blog. This morning we began our day at 6:54 when Micah cried from his pack n play that we had set up in our bathroom…we put him in there so he could sleep and we could sleep and he did great sleeping this week! In fact, we are gonna try to find some kind of room darkening shades for both of the boys rooms. Packing up to go home is never as fun as packing to leave for your trip…but we somehow managed to have plenty of room again for all of our stuff…however I do need to keep looking up at the cartop carrier to make sure it dosent fly open (we lost our bungee cord driving down the road, I’m sure we will stop to get another one) Right now Micah is snoozing, clutching his little yellow duck that really needs a bath while sucking his clear paci, which by the way is a horrible invention…if that thing falls on the ground its extremely difficult to find, and Mason is watching his DVD of Curious George, and its quite fun to watch Mason watch anything on tv…he makes the most hilarious facial expressions, sometimes laughs or even talks back to the show as if he is actually in the movie…he gets so wrapped up in it! Chris is just driving…there are no sounds really loud, just the “white noise” of the tires on the road. As I sit listening to the tires drive on the road I’m trying to go back through the week and think of the memories we made and they are so fresh in my mind that I can even hear sounds with the images that I see. I Loved how Mason and Micah responded to their first look at the ocean…the sound of the wind is so strong that it causes you to take a deep breath and squint your eyes. I love how Micah started to kick his legs every time he’d see the ocean and flash one of his wide silent- laugh smiles. I guess its safe to say that we all loved our beach experience! We are discovering that from now on what vacations will consist of is trying our best to provide opportunities for our boys to have the most fun possible. Doing things we know they will smile and laugh at…thankfully the giant sandbox we had in our backyard was a hit! We had awesome weather and our beach tent was another great investment for the Haynes family! We had one day where our tent was in the middle of two families. To our left was a Brazilian family and there was a little five year old boy that Mason mustered up the courage to ask if he wanted to come play with him…the boy was very excited to have some new toys to play with and so was Mason…the boy built a castle while Mason played with his new friends trucks. Not much time went by when the boy to the right, Conner, 2 yrs old, came to play too. Chris and I looked at each other as we were now able to relax in our chairs and look at the ocean and said, “well we always say we want our house to be the fun house that the kids wanna come play at” and that day it was! Vacation or not, I hope that Mason and Micah will always want to be with us the way we want to be with them, that other friends that they have will also want to be with us, that we will be the “fun” family with the “cool” parents! I’m not sure where next years vacation will take us but I am certain that it will be something that I look forward to every year. An opportunity to get away as a family and focus on each other and just enjoy spending time together!
As the trip home has progressed we have had to make several stops…not for the nursing 6 month old, not for the 3 year old needing to go potty, not for gas or coffee…for that lovely broken car top carrier that caused us to sing the theme song of Samford and Son! Two stops …no bungees or rope or tie downs, third stop a bungee but not as big as we needed, fourth stop to adjust the bungee, 5th stop to adjust the bungee, 6th stop duck tape and Chris was pleased to take my advice since I had “more redneck experience” He’s right I had thought about using duck tape back at stop 2 but figured he must be trying to think ahead and want bungees or tie downs so we could reuse them or something? We laughed as I looked back at my child hood and could recall the use of duck tape on just about anything! And the many “redneck” moments too. Oh the fun and wonder what our boys will laugh at us about? Redneck or not, the duck tape held, we made it home. Back to life back to reality…go ahead, sing it out loud…you know you want to!