I've honestly NEVER taken a vacation in the middle of January. Being a teacher, it doesn't really work so swell. Vacation usually falls in the summer when I'm off, and Aaron claims I'm on vacation everyday then! Thanks to a very cooperative superintendent, I was able to escape for an amazing 8 day cruise with my entire side of the family to celebrate my parents' 40th anniversary and their special "big" birthdays from last year!
We left the mighty chilly, okay it was downright frigid, Iowa temps and headed to Fort Lauderdale to set sail. The boys had never flown before, so this was BIG stuff for them. They were both quite nervous a couple nights before we left, sure that our plane was going to crash, but once we got to the airport, their eyes were as big as saucers and full of excitement. They kept jumping up and down and telling us how excited they were. It was so fun to soak up their excitement. Despite being a little jittery on the initial takeoff, they both thought flying was pretty darn cool. Austin couldn't get enough of looking out the window at the clouds and ground below.
We spent the night in Fort Lauderdale before boarding the ship the next morning. Grabbing a quick bite to eat at the McDonalds next to our hotel turned out to be quite a memorable experience. Bless my mama's heart...she's definitely a midwestern girl. Give her four boys to corral and a man with an accent and she gets a bit flustered. Mom was trying to order a couple of yogurt parfaits for her and Papa and the guy taking our order was giving her a hard time and said, "No hablo ingles!" with a sly little smile on his face as he knew she was a bit overwhelmed. All of this while she's been ordering and he's been speaking to her in English for about 2-3 minutes already! Mom was already flustered trying to keep track of ordering correctly for Drake and Braden and misunderstood what the man said. She was appalled as she thought he said, "We don't have parfaits." She held out her hands saying "You don't have parfaits? How can you not have parfaits? All McDonald's have parfaits!" The man was giggling while grabbing the parfaits and winking at me as I knew what he had said. Mom was so flustered as she kept saying to the man, "How can you not have parfaits?" not even noticing he had two parfaits in his hands. Finally, she turned around to me and said, "You talk and I'll pay!"as she stepped away from the counter. The man and I definitely got a good chuckle out of mom's misunderstanding!
The next morning was fairly smooth getting ready to board the boat. Can you tell these guys think they are big stuff and are pumped up and ready to go?
The boys were in awe by the size of the ship and everything that was on board. Carter said, "This is like Heaven, only better!" They definitely were in the height of their glory!
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