Tuesday, July 27, 2010

When 4 days feels like a week...in a good way

We hightailed it outta here on Friday.  I'm not mincing words here when I say that we needed some time off.  Between Mike not working to finding a job he's super excited about, to me going from SAHM to Working Mom in a few weeks to Jenna starting full time daycare in two weeks and lots of house guests coming and going the next few weeks...We took a well-deserved break.  I'm not going to call it a vacation (if you're a loyal follower you know this already) because I believe once you travel with kids, it's not really a vacation, but more a change of scenery. 
We drove up to Mystic, Ct., which is normally a 2 hour drive, but the traffic on Friday was RIDICULOUS, so we stopped off at Norwich for the Aquarium and dinner.  Jenna LOVED it! she was running around, touching animals, and playing with everything.

It was a great spur of the moment car decision to pull off the traffic-ridden road and try out a new place.  We got to hang there, grab some dinner and hit the road again (thank god the traffic died down) and got up to Mystic in time for bed.  Mystic was awesome.  We hit up the seaport and did a boat ride (Jenna's first), went to the aquarium there, and went to Ocean Beach Park
Loving the spray park!

Thing is, it wasn't what we did that was so good for us.  It was so nice to just be the three of us for four days straight.  We're big family people, so we're always seeing family and friends and sometimes our weekends feel like we don't get a minute to breathe.  So it was amazing for us to just be together, with no real plan of action.  We took family baths in our room jacuzzi...laughed all the way home from dinner one night just from making raspberries with our mouths...touched sting rays, starfish and shells...played in a spray park for what felt like hours...and realized that Jenna is in fact afraid of carousels. 

Jenna does not like carousels

It was great to just stop and enjoy ourselves.  It didn't matter that we ate dinner on the early side so Jenna could go to bed at a normal hour, or that we ate at family-friendly restaurants, as opposed to some fancier places (they have liquor and beer at the family friendly ones too), that we didn't get to read all about the seaport and it's history, or that we couldn't spend all day laying out at the beach.  It was great to be away.

And despite my feelings on these things, it actually felt like a vacation...

3 comments:

  1. Those are the best type of vacations - the ones where you just get to enjoy your family. Sounds wonderful!

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  2. I have a pic of me as a starfish from the Norwalk Aquarium, too! Sounds like you had a nice trip :)

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