heads above water

Mr Renn and I are back from our Anniversary trip.  Being there was amazing, though the work that went into getting out the door and then into coming back through it again were rather ludicrous.



(Turtle Farm in Grand Cayman.  Also - I really hate Flickr's new embedding format.  A LOT.)



(Coyaba Gardens in Jamaica)

I did my best to be thorough and prepared and to assuage my parenting guilt over being unreachable for a week.  We made freezer meals and cleaned, and organized, and wrote a novel on our kids' routines, and cleaned, and made videos of ourselves for the kids to watch each night we'd be gone.  We were trying to make things easy on our babysitters and on our kids, and a lot of it was overkill, but it's hard to leave your kids for a week when you're in the trenches.

Getting back home again was worse, though. We were in the Fort Lauderdale Airport by 9am, and were not allowed to check in until 4 hours before our 3pm flight.  Then, our 3pm flight got delayed after everybody was on the plane, then delayed some more, until they made everyone deplane, told us everyone would certainly be missing their connecting flights, and set to work rebooking almost the entire flight.  The earliest we could get out was the next day at 2pm, so we resigned ourselves to a shifty 1 star hotel for the night, bought ourselves toothbrushes in a gift shop, and I cried my eyes out while we attempted to sleep through crazy noises via paper thin walls and tile floors.  After a week I was just ready to be home again, and not in a shifty motel without any of my belongings.  So that was a rather devolved, anticlimactic way to end an otherwise nice trip.

Once we landed at home, utterly exhausted, Bunny and Sir O got sick and took turns keeping me up all night.  I'm trying frantically to get caught up in my schoolwork again, and watching the house fall to pieces after I had worked so hard to get it unembarassingly neat and clean.  Coming back to the world of mealplanning and doing dishes is rather painful after a week of indulgent dining out.  But there you have it - I'm back to my middle class reality, ever so slightly sunburned, and rather missing my housekeepers, waiters, chefs, dishwashers, drivers, and babysitters.

 I know it looks like I was on this trip by myself, we weren't very good about getting our picture taken together and I'm saving a few we did get for a vacation recap once I finish reading about 400 pages of authorship theory.