day 7 - leaving orlando and day 8 - HOME!

saturday brought another sloooow day. we thought we had set a realistic goal to be on the road by 10, but that time came and went and we hadn't left yet. then right before we did, addie threw up the apple i had forced her to eat. (i felt sooo bad!) then when we drove up to the registration office to turn in keys, we found that we had left a movie in the dvd player at the apartment and then addie started throwing up agian. by the time the car had stopped and i'd gotten back to her, her eyes had rolled up in her head and she was limp.so, so thankful that i saw her when i did! we got her cleaned up and changed, went back to the apartment for the movie and then off to fill the tires that matt had noticed were low. while we were dealing with addie vomit, mindy was dealing with jack's sunburn and blisters. you gotta love traveling with kids!!! addie threw up again at the gas station, so we got to fish another new outfit out of our suitcases since we had already used the spare from the diaper bag. it's so hard to see your baby sick and not be able to hold and cuddle her! but we had no choice and she fell asleep by the time we'd made it to the knock-off disney store. i stayed with addie while everyone went in and was taking sicky-poo pictures of her on my phone to send to auntie henna. here was the first one.

we had given her a bucket to use in case she felt sick. so after the first picture i took of her she held up the bucket like this. i thought she was playing with me, you know like "no more pictures!" i even said to her, "oh you're done with me taking pictures of you?" it took me a few seconds to realize that she wasn't playing, she was throwing up again! i felt so, so bad! and she is such a good girl, she got it all in her bucket!

 she took a long nap after that, and when she woke up she felt better. and thankfully that was the end of the throw-up. that was also the end of the pictures that i took that first travel day. we ended up leaving orlando at 1. we drove pretty fast all day, until about 8 that night when we hit traffic. we had talked about getting up early to try to beat the north carolina/virginia traffic, so that's what we did. i called choice hotels and found a good priced room and we got to our hotel by 8:30. the kids went swimming and i ordered food. 

the next morning we were up by 5 and on the road, with breakfast, by 5:45. we made suuuuuch good time! everyone slept and we were able to drive for a long time with no interruptions.

the way we roll.

i hurt my neck before we had left for the trip and i felt stiff and a little bit sore all week. then that morning i woke up and was in some serious pain. i couldn't even really lay down without severe pain. so i made myself a neck brace so i could sleep without pain.

gheeeeto.

and north carolina has some awesome wig billboards. some day i want to stop and check out those there wigs!

we were making such good time that when mindy asked if we'd like to get some cracker barrell before heading home, we said yes! i had ulterior motives though. we never did have a nice birthday dinner for matt, so i made sure to get the message to our servers that it was his birthday. only a week late, but whatever. :)

the 2-year-olds were restless while we waited, so someone showed them how to get sugar out of the packets. 

yay! more sugar!

frankie was itching to get down, so while i was ordering (and not really thinking about it) i let her down and she crawled underneath the table and over to brytana. when she picked her up, frankie had something in her mouth. it was a piece of food from under the table!!!

eewwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

these friends got along the whole trip! they did a lot better than i thought they would. :)

the whole gang.

and finally, a little birthday celebration!

we got home at 5 o'clock and it was such a beautiful day! we unloaded the car and went for a walk. we got everyone to bed early and tried to be ready for the next day.

we had a super fun vacation! on a scale of 1-10, we both rate our vacation an 8.
you can't get much better than that, right?