The Long Drive Home ....

This is the day hubs and I dreaded the most. We drove to Florida during the evening so the girls could sleep. Coming home, we left the condo at 10:00 Florida time. But we weren't able to head straight home. We had to stop at one of those souvenir stores to replace the crab that "has been sleeping so much" ... I don't like lying to the girls, although, I'm just not ready to explain death to them. One of the crabs had died. They off and on the day before and that morning, they would has me why she sleeps so much. I told them that I thought her shell was too small and it made her sleepy. I told them before we headed back home, I would take her into a store and let her pick out a new shell and I really thought that was going to fix the problem.

I headed into the first store with our crabs... they were totally out of crabs! To get back in the van and tell hubs he had to drive the opposite way that were needing to go because we had to go to a different store, I knew I was going to get the, "ARE YOU KIDDING ME LOOK"... but it helped as I sat back in my seat, the girls were excited to see "what shell she picked and if it worked and woke her up"... In and out of the next store with SUCCESS!! The girls were so excited to see Cece walking around in her soccer ball shell. They were saying, "We like soccer! Did she know we like soccer?" By the way, their names are Bebe and Cece!

We headed home! The gps says this is going to be a nine hour drive. The girls did an awesome job! In the beginning, there seemed to be lots of potty breaks. But we actually only stopped 6 times total. The drive wasn't bad at all. Especially considering they were only asleep maybe 5 hours the whole drive! They took about an hour and a half nap sometime in the afternoon and didn't go to sleep until about 9 that night. We got home around midnight. (we left at 11 our time, it took us 13 hours)

They did ask a lot of questions and a lot of the questions were the same over and over. But it was alright! They were happy and having fun! The worst part of it was late afternoon, L threw up ( a lot). We stopped at a MacDonald's to go in, get her cleaned up, change her clothes and let them stretch their legs. We were walking around in the grass and all of a sudden M starts screaming, I looked down and saw ants on her foot! ABOUT 40 OF THEM! They were fire ants! Biting and biting her... Daddy got them all off, I got her settled, we looked everyone over to make sure we weren't bringing them back in the van with us... and off we went. We decided this was a good time to break out the dvd player. They watched some Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and some Tinkerbell and eventually they were asleep again!

One more slightly rough part was what kind of restrooms we were going to come across on all of our potty breaks! Early in our trip (The first time we went to Fudpucker's) we were in the restroom at the restaurant, M was sitting on the toilet; it was one that automatically flushes. It flushed while she was sitting on it, BUT at the same time, about 4 other toilets flushed at the same time. For some reason, this scared the heck out of her! You could see it in her face how scared she was! For the rest of the week, if we went into a restroom that had a toilet like that she wouldn't sit on it. She NEVER had an accident, but it was quite stressful! During this drive, we literally had a couple stops where we had to talk to her about being a brave girl! (this involved some slight bribery)... but we were desperate and didn't want to have to go from one place to another to find a toilet I could flush! (We've been working on this, and it is getting much better!)

Hubs drove the entire way home. He said the frequent stops helped him. I joked and said he just didn't want to hold the crabs. LOL All in all it was also a great day and everyone was happy to be home in the end!