Vacation continues

So far our vacation has been great! We have spent several days at the beach, just hanging out...only about 100 feet from our beach house! On Tuesday, Alex's sister and her family arrived. You would have thought that Caleb was counting the minutes until his cousins, Isabella and Nicholas, arrived. Even though they are much older and in elementary school - he adores them. He chases them around the house, plays with them - and they totally oblige him. Nicholas carries him and wrestles with him - which is just the best thing in the world to Caleb. He has been having a blast - he must get so bored with mommy and daddy. This makes me really excited for when Grace gets to be old enough that they can play together, because Caleb will clearly enjoy it.

I definitely feel relaxed, but not necessarily rested. I am not sleeping well at night. I've reached the point that it is very difficult to find a comfortable position when laying down. And after much tossing and turning, when I do find that position, I generally have to get up to use the bathroom. So annoying. The house has really soft beds, which isn't really great for me right now, and has made getting comfortable a little more difficult and made my back hurt. I will be visiting my chiropractor when I get home! Also, we've been sharing a room with Caleb...this is not how we usually do things. Caleb has slept in his own room since he was about 5 months old - so this arrangement is not ideal. Several nights he woke up and saw us (read, me) there and screamed for an hour for me. Nothing is wrong w/ him, he just wants to be picked up. After a couple of nights of doing that and having to sit in a chair until he fell asleep - we decided we would do a same-room cry it out method. The first night was about an 40 minutes of crying, and then Alex just laid him down and showed him that we weren't going to pick him up, and finally he went to sleep. Last night, he woke up once around 1:30 and Alex got up, laid him down and did that twice and he fell back to sleep. So that was much improved.

In case you didn't remember - we are in fact vacationing on an island that is only accessible by boat or charter plane. And, there is in fact a tropical storm here around South Florida. So what to do with an 8-month pregnant woman? Tomorrow is our check out day, anyway, but we are juggling the storm trackers to determine when best to leave. We thought about leaving today, but it looked fairly certain that we would end up driving in the storm across the state - not a good idea w/ 40 mph winds. So we are going to leave at our predetermined time - tomorrow morning and hope that the predictions remain accurate with the storm passing us this evening, so that it is in the Gulf by tomorrow morning. Either way, we will have a rough boat ride - it won't be fun. In good weather the ride to the mainland is about 15 minutes - so it will take longer. Hopefully it won't be raining too much that we and our stuff get wet on the way.

I will be happy to be home close to my OB. He has actually been popping up in my dreams somewhat frequently, so on some level I must have some anxiety about being so far from him at 35 weeks pregnant.

Holy cow - 1 month blog lag

Yikes - well let's just skip over the past month, I bullet point the highlights:

• Caleb got sick (as usual), then he stayed sick, then he was hospitalized, then they finally pinpointed some potential causes for his constant illnesses, then they prescribed a bunch of meds for 'silent' reflux (read, no other symptoms) and RAD (reactive airway disease, a way of saying he may develop asthma).
• Since getting out of the hospital about 3 weeks ago he hasn't been the slightest bit sick, no runny nose, no cough, no nothing.
• Caleb is eating like it's going out of style. He's back into a bunch of the foods that he dropped from his repertoire. The other day he ate an entire pint of blueberries by himself in 2 days!
  

We are on vacation now. Alex and I got to pick this one and all of his family (parents, sister and her fam) are in North Captiva Island. It is only accessible by boat or charter plane. The house is gorgeous. There is truly nothing to do here except hang out, go to the nearly private beach or go to the pool. There are no paved roads here and no cars - everyone gets around by golf cart. There are only 300 houses on the island and this is almost off-season, so it's pretty quiet. Alex and I are loving it. It feels really indulgent to have so little to do.

On Sunday, Alex, Caleb and I checked out the 'island' church service. I was expecting something pretty non-specific in terms of worship style. How wrong I was. It was just us and the couple who do the service each week. I would say they are 70 or so. They used to be missionaries in the Brazilian amazon back in the day. The service was in their living room, and they set out chairs, each containing a Bible and a hymnal. The living room contains a little electric organ. The service was very Presbyterian in nature, a prelude on the organ, a hymn, responsive reading, a scripture reading, a hymn, and then a brief sermon, this one was on Mary and Martha. Caleb was pretty good, playing by himself for the first half, but then he got tired and hot as they had all of their windows open for a light breeze, but by 11-ish it was getting warm. That was really Caleb's first official church service. At our church, he stays in the CF (Christ Fellowship) Kids area, not the service.

I'll post more as the vacation continues and when we get home, I'll post some pics of the vacation.