Epic road trip, day 1

Well day 1 is finished. My kids were amazing! I was seriously worried but we didn't start to get the whining and hate of the car until the last 45 min or so. We brought Austin's Nintendo DS, my DS, and Stephanie brought hers. Austin was so excited. We played the multiplayer Mario kart for oh about 1.5 hrs. I made up little lunch boxes for all 3 of the 'kids' and also had a gift bag for each day with books and stuff to entertain them. I didn't even have to bust out our day 1 bags! Austin was content with the lunch box!

Border crossing was super quick. No lineup, no other cars, just a few transport trucks waiting to cross. It's so funny though, being from Ontario and crossing usually into Buffalo from Niagara Falls, this border crossing was so different. I mean, there are signs and lights and big huge security gates. Not so much here. When we cross into the states in Ontario, there is a big "welcome to the US" sign today there was nothing. Again, the lack of vehicles.... A small lineup in Ontario is a wait of less then 20 min. So weird.

But, we did break the van. Lol. About 15 min before we reached the hotel a duck like bird (it really didn't look like a duck but that's about the size it was) flew out onto the road. I let out a little scream involuntarily as we hit it. The thump! oh man. It then went under the van and we kept going. As we were driving down the road I had visions of the front of our van covered in blood and guts. Thankfully when we checked at the hotel we had a few feathers and a broken van. It cracked a piece of the grill and broke off some of the smaller grill pieces. Stupid bird.

We got in the hotel room and of course Mackenzie fell asleep about 15 min before we got to the hotel and woke up, so she wasn't ready for bed, we ended up doing 2 full laps around the hotel trying to tire her out. I had to put her in the playpen and just let her babble to herself for a while with all the lights off. Eventually she fell asleep. It's now 11pm and everyone is drifted off to sleep around me. Off to catch up on some sleep for day 2!!!

Planning planning planning!

We are going to Califonia!

We have a wedding coming up. For a friend I have known all my life. (No really, Our parents were friends before we were born, and we have been friends ever since) She's having a destination wedding in California! Since I am a bridesmaid in the wedding obviously we were going.

The way Dave's work schedule works, he is flown to and from work, but only on his scheduled days. If he needs extra time off, he can take the entire 2 weeks off or pay for his own flight back up to work. So, he has his scheduled week off, his 2 weeks of work off, then another scheduled week off. So, 4 weeks off.

The wedding fell in the middle of his work weeks, so we just figured, hey, if we have 4 weeks off we may as well do Disneyland while we are right there. (the wedding is just outside San Diego) So...... We are making the trip a big huge shebang. Our current plan is to be gone for 19 days. 19 days on the road. Yes, we might be insane.

There is a lot of planning involved in pretty much taking 3 vacations and putting them into 1. I mean, if we have to drive right through Las Vegas, Why not spend a few days there, right? So we have our Vegas vacation, our Wedding Vacation, and our Disney vacation. I mean, where do you even start?

Well, you have to start with somewhere to stay. The bride rented a vacation house near the wedding. Asked us if we wanted to stay there as well. One thing down. Then, I looked into Vegas hotels. Holy smokes. So many options and places! I found a cheap price on one hotel. I booked it, and yay!!! But then I heard from many many people that the hotel has gone downhill and it wouldn't be a very good idea. So, we cancelled it. back to the drawing board. Found another one, stalled on booking, prices went up, I kicked myself. lol. But, it's been booked. Finally we have Disney. In Walt Disney World there are all sorts of hotel choices on the resort. I grew up with Disneyworld being the place to go. I knew nothing about Disneyland. They have 3 hotel options. And yeah, they're pretty expensive. But they have good neighbour hotels there. So we booked into a good neighbour hotel with a pretty cool water park attached.

So yay for somewhere to stay. Then we also had to look at airfare. Yeah, it's expensive. Plus, we're being super awesome and bringing our babysitter to watch the kids during the wedding, the bachelor/bachelorette parties, any other wedding activities, etc. So by the time we bought 4 full priced air fares... it gets expensive. So we're driving. If we drive straight through, it only takes 29 hours. So we needed a few more places to stay. We had to figure out how much we were going to drive each day, where we were going to stay.

It has been a long planning process but we are now in the home stretch. We are driving for 2 days, doing 2 days in vegas, 6 days in the vacation house, a random night we still have no idea where we are staying, then 6 days at Disneyland and drive back home. Stay tuned for a trip recap, because I'm sure there will be quite a few of them and they are going to be awesome.

Stand Back

I'm setting all the damn germs in this house on fire.  If one more person gets some sort of illness, you may find me in the corner crying in the fetal position.

First, Austin got a Cold. Then he passed it onto me. Yay!

Tuesday I dropped Austin off at school, then went to the gym. I was just finishing at the gym when I got a text from Dave. Mackenzie just threw up. Everywhere. UGH!!!!

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were filled with her throwing up and blowing out her diapers. Every.single.time. We had to bust out the next size up pj's just to keep up with the speed at which we were blowing through clothes.

While dealing with her, Austin snuck under the radar. He had a very mild fever, complained of a headache, then wednesday had super red cheeks. I thought maybe it was really dry in our house since his skin is usually my first indicator of needing to crank up the humidifier. Thursday I went to get him into his pj's and BAM, head to toe rash. Yeah, that's  fun. Off to the dr's. Sidenote - Even more fun, our town doesn't have a freaking walk in clinic. Unless I wanted to wait and take him in after 5:30 pm.

3 hours later and we're done in the dr's. Austin has Fifth Disease. Ooh double yay! Thankfully, once he breaks out in the rash he's no longer contagious. But anywhere from 4-28 days previous he was. oh man. I let the schools know, I let our friends and neighbours know.

Friday? Despite still puking, Mackenzie now also has the cold and is sneezing and stuffed up. By the way, unlike her brother, she has none of it when I try to remove the goopy snot from her face. Screaming and yelling. Sigh.

And then we get to Saturday. In the morning Austin filled me in that he didn't feel good, and spent all day puking, pooping, and sleeping. The furthest he's gotten from his bed has been the bathroom. Let me tell you this, Austin is starting young with the man sick. Oh my. He could not do anything for himself yesterday. Despite getting to the bathroom, he asked me (in the saddest most pathetic voice) to carry him back to bed.  Also, every time he puked he was convinced he needed me to rub his back to help it get out.  This is the point that I publicly apologize to my mom. I was also that kid. If I was throwing up I wanted her there with me. I don't know why, moral support? No idea. But if I ever threw up, the first words out of my mouth were "Mooooommmmmmmmmmm" Even after moving out, I would call my mom and complain I was sick. Yeah. I have the female version of the Man sick. That Nyquill ( I think) commercial where the sick guy says "Pam, can you call my mom?" Cracks me up so much. Because I have uttered those words to my husband. "Dave, Can you call my mom?" I'm in so much trouble with Austin.

Also Saturday, Dave called from work to let me know that he was up at 1am puking non stop.


Have I mentioned, we are going on a road trip? Vegas, San Diego, LA, Disneyland.  Yeah, we are. In only a few short weeks. This sickness crap, it needs to stop.

A totally kid centered day

You guys will never believe this. But today, I spent just shy of 6 hours in chuck e cheese. I honestly can't believe it.

My husband took the baby to Ontario to visit for a few days. (she flies free, and thanks to airmiles, so did he) I'll be honest, with my husband's work schedule one on one time with Austin doesn't happen often. Ok, it happens very rarely.

So, since he seemed a little bummed that he couldn't go with daddy to see all his grandparents, I told him we were going to have a super special mommy Austin day.

So we pulled up to chuck e cheese about noon. Went in, got a table. Ordered our pizza, ordered my all you can eat salad bar, ended up with 125 tokens.

I gave Austin 20 or so tokens then have him sit to eat. 20 more, 20 more etc. We finally make it through all our tokens around 3/3:30. It's still not busy there and I was having fun playing games. So I went and bought another 115 tokens. We played, he went and played in the jungle gym a bit. 4:30, he starts digging into the left over pizza, I go up and get another round from the salad bar and think, perfect, now I don't have to worry about what to make for dinner! Score!

By the time we get all the tokens spent, all the tickets added, and all the prizes oh so carefully chosen, it's 5:45 when we walk out that door. 5 hours and 45 minutes spent at Chuck E Cheese. And I will be honest with you? It really didn't seem like that long! I felt like there have been other times that I've been there and the day just drags on and it feels like it's been about 12 hours when it's only been 30 minutes.

After we left, we stopped to visit a friend of mine who works at a Starbucks by Chuck E Cheese. I then thought, if we drive home now, Austin is going to fall asleep, have a 30 min nap, then be wide awake when we get home. Or I can keep him up, and we can go play with the trains in chapters.

My kid played with the trains, the legos, the plasma car, and anything else left out for kids. He played nonstop and was happy about it. We ended up leaving Chapters around 8pm. perfect. he fell asleep in the car and I put him right to bed when we got home. I suspect he had an awesome day, because really. If you were 4, would that not be a perfect day?

I found it on Pinterest!

I vaguely remembered a pin, this pin in fact, about putting a glow stick in bubbles and having glow in the dark bubbles.

 

 

We had some left over bubbles from Mackenzie's birthday party, and I figured why not. In the summer it doesn't start to get dark here until about 11pm or later, so it's really not the best time to test this out with Austin. Even though it was kind of cold tonight and about 40 minutes past his bed time I figured what the hell.

 

I busted out the glow stick tube I bought at Michaels. I didn't have high hopes for these glow sticks. The other tube I bought and pulled out when we lost power during a storm to light the way through our house for Austin didn't glow very much at all. They were sad and pathetic. I wish I had known that before buying 2 tubes, but anyways.

 

I decide on yellow glow sticks since they seemed to be glowing the brightest out of all of them (and glowing is an understatement) Take them to the kitchen and cut off an end and try to dump it in. Nothing came out. I tried wiggling the glow stick, nothing. So, I figured out I had to cut it into small pieces (I cut them into 3 pieces) and blow through the one end to get everything out.(without my lips touching!) Now, I will note, I think these glow sticks suck because they don't have enough glowing liquid in them. A good glow stick will probably pour out much easier. Anyways, I emptied 3 glow sticks out into the bubbles, had Austin get his coat and boots on.

 

I shook up the bottle and had high hopes since our bottle looked like this one but yellow.

 

 

We got outside and could barely see the bubbles I was blowing. I let Austin blow a few bubbles then we came inside.

 

Then, I went to clean up.

 

Holy shit. That glow stick crap goes everywhere! My hands were covered in it. I didn't have the forethought to get my good camera out so I took some cell phone pictures.

 

 

This is what my garbage pail looked like.

 

But then, I thought I would take a picture of the garbage pail with the light off.

 

 

So I did. But once I shut the light off...... Oh.My.God.

 

There were splatters of glowing alllll over my kitchen. In places I didn't think would have reached. Austin laughed and said I had to clean that up. Everything on the counter and sink were splattered, my skin, my clothes, and my feet were covered. And my floor. All over the floor. Again, no forethought to get out the good camera (which seeing this mess makes me a little happy as I'm sure my camera would have been covered too) so this is from my cell phone and kind of hard to see. But that is my floor, the garbage pail, and on the top right that is the inside of the cupboard that my garbage pail was in  before I started. Yes, that shit ended up in the cupboard.

 

I told Austin we would try again with a better glow stick. But I think next time will be in the summer and I will cut apart the glow sticks outside. My kitchen doesn't need that kind of mess.

Disney Weekend

Growing up, I LOVED Disney movies. Once I moved out on my own, even though we didn't have kids I told my husband, I really want to start collecting my own Disney movies. I can't even begin to guess how many Disney movies we owned as a kid.

(True story, I've told my mom I'm claiming the Disney movies when she dies. Yes, we're kind of morbid, whatever. What I'm going to do with them now since they are all VHS, I have no idea. But, they have been claimed.)

So, we have a great Disney collection. And, we have this super magical thing coming up called a trip to Disneyland.  Yes, Disneyland!!! Squee!

Of course I am being irrational that we are going to get there and Austin won't know who everyone is (let's be honest, Mackenzie probably won't know) and I want him to get the full magic of meeting
people from the movies. So I thought we should start watching the movies.

It started Friday night. We watched Beauty and the Beast. Then Saturday I was still nursing my injury from Friday so we hung out and watched some more movies. We started with the Lion King, then Cinderella, rounded off the night with Tangled. Sunday we started with the Little Mermaid, finding Nemo, then moved onto Cars and Cars 2. Finished off our night with Lilo and Stitch.


Now, I am SO looking forward to seeing Carsland. I have heard it's an amazing view and it's like stepping into the movie. Watching Austin watch Cars this weekend, I was thinking about Disneyland and the magic he's going to encounter in just a few short weeks. The inevitable excitement when he gets to meet a real size Lightning McQueen and Mater. I mean, he loves seeing books or cars of those 2. Meeting them IRL? I'm thinking mind=blown. And I'm going to be the mom taking a million pics and being sappy.

Since having kids, anything can make me cry. It's ridiculous and kind of embarrassing. I'm betting it will be about 2 minutes inside the park before I start to cry, if I even make it that long.  Seeing the park and the magic and excitement from Austin...... Tears, there will be tears.  I can't wait.

Photo dump

I am pretty sure I said I was going to start doing these photo dumps around Christmastime and I didn't do any. oops. But, I figured I would do a dump now.

 

Baby playing with some Toca boca band on the iPad

 

My most favorite picture eva!!! I love it!

 

The pottery pieces from Mackenzie's first birthday party

 

 

We got our passes to the West Edmonton Mall again! So to celebrate we spent an afternoon riding rides.

 

 

The Easter Bunny came to visit Austin at school

 

To celebrate the start of Spring Break we made a car out of a diaper box

 

 

And someone was just too tuckered out to stay awake any longer.

 

As she fell deeper into sleep she was sliding off the pillow and smooshing her face. Poor baby.