Travel with Tots...Beware!

Last week, Hubby and I had the opportunity to spend a few days in Gatlinburg, TN for his company safety meeting. We decided to make a long weekend of it and stayed on a couple of nights at the Wyndham Smoky Mountains resort (which was gorgeous, by the way).

Little did I know the weekend was going to be such an eye opener!

For the most part, Zeke was well behaved and thoroughly enjoyed himself on this trip. He appreciated the trip to the Ripley's Aquarium and the dinosaur museum. He enjoyed dinner at Mama's Farmhouse, where I believe I had THE best peach cobbler in my entire life, not to mention some pretty darn good fried chicken, country fried steak, turkey and dressing...oh, it was fabulous! Anyway, the grub was good. *grin* He also had a blast walking up and down through the streets of downtown Gatlinburg in the rain and didn't complain once!

Gabe, however, was a different story.

I can appreciate that vacations mean kids get off their regular schedules and routines. I'm aware that bedtimes might come later than usual. And I totally get it that sometimes, new places and people just cause little ones to be fussy. I GET THAT!! But what the Hubs and I experienced with our beautiful little baby boy was nothing short of a National Lampoons disaster!

Crawling around on hands and knees in public places is not good for children. The carpets in hotels alone proved that little hands and feet need to stay properly covered (although a comment to the hotel manager at the place we stayed before Wyndham scored us free breakfast and some complementary tickets to the aquarium...cha-ching!)

The daily excursions we had planned were peppered with messy diaper changes, bottle feedings, entertaining the baby when he had had enough of the stroller and car seat, and occasionally toting 20-something pounds of baby when all else failed.

And on the drive home, he decided he'd had all he could take and pitched the fit of all fits! I'm talking screaming until you could hear ringing in your ears. I'm talking sobbing so hard, he almost made himself sick more than once.

Oh yes. You know what I'm talking about.

It's a wonder Hubby and I hadn't gotten into a big argument by the end of the trip just because we were so stressed out! Marry that mess with a lack of sleep (I slept less on this trip than I do during a regular work week, if that's actually possible), and you're asking for a meltdown in more ways than one.

But anyway, when all was said and done, the Hubs and I have decided that we will need to make time for not one, but TWO trips during the year: one for us and the kids, and one just for us. I know a lot of people do things that way, and I see why. It's not a good idea to put your marital happiness on the back burner all the time; you really do need to give even a great marriage time to rejuvenate and rekindle the spark.

So next time, perhaps he and I can find time for a long weekend sans kiddos. It doesn't mean we love them any less--they are the most important things in our lives! But we do value our marriage, too, and that's equally important.

(Wow...that totally felt like a Dr. Phil moment. LOL!!)

Spring Has Sprung!

This is a little late in posting, but better late than never, I guess. Actually the title of this post might be wrong because we sort of skipped over spring and went from 20-degree weather to 80-degree weather in the blink of an eye! (For my friends reading this in Europe, that would be about -7 degrees to about 27 degrees.)

Anyhoo, the Hubs and I decided to get our gardening underway, since last year things were a little messed up with the upcoming birth of Gabe and subsequent hospitalization for a very looonnngggg month on my part.

The date was set for Easter weekend. DH was such a sweetheart and tilled the garden and planted the seeds and plants all by himself! Zeke and I did the herb garden as seen in this picture. It only took 3 days for little spikes of green to show up in the window box, and now, almost 2 weeks later, I have dill already reaching about 3" in height! My chives and basil are coming along nicely, too, but my rosemary hasn't done a lot as of yet. I'll have to trim that one constantly, as the package says it can grow as tall as 6 feet!

This year, our vegetable garden consists of: cherry tomatoes, Better Boy tomatoes, green and red bell peppers, jalapeno peppers, banana peppers (I think), runner green beans (half white), pole beans, eggplant (aubergine), zucchini (courgette), straight-neck yellow summer squash, carrots, and soon will also include okra, thanks to seeds from a co-worker of mine. We'd thought about asparagus, but there's way more work involved with that, and it takes a couple of years until you can harvest anything. I'd thought about including spinach and broccoli, two of Zeke's favorites (yeah I know, he's weird, right?), but that might have been too much for the space we had assigned. I'd even thought about cabbage for my chow-chow canning later in the summer, but again, too much stuff in too little space. If things go well this year, we may expand next year.

I'll post pictures of the garden in various stages of growth. As of right now, the beans and squash/zucchini are about 2" tall, and there is a mass of green spikes where the carrots are starting to come up. The tomatoes and peppers we bought as plants from the store, but everything else is from seed. I get such a kick out of knowing the vegetables we harvest came from seeds we planted ourselves.

And that's one more thing for me to blog about later...my canning adventures! Last year, I made chow-chow, hot and sweet pepper jelly, and cantaloupe jelly. We didn't make any of our squash bread-and-butter pickles because we still had some left over from the previous year, but we might do that again this year. They make great gifts, and people like this stuff!

I guess I can put my Ball canning book to good use this year. *grin* More on that to follow.

Wow, it's getting late. I'd better get to bed...just as soon as I go through my FB games real quick. LOL Goodnight, all!