I was pretty quiet on the blog front throughout the summer. Until mid June, there wasn't a whole lot interesting going on in our lives...unless you count not sleeping, staying indoors and a few trips to the doctor. My normally pretty healthy kids took turns back and forth for about 2 months being sick. Cade had pneumonia, Dylan had an ear infection and strep, Cade then got a cold and Dylan got yet another ear infection. It was a rough couple of months and it felt like we'd never be well again. We had a reprieve from the sickness for a few weeks (enough time to squeeze in the events of this blog post) then Dylan had strep again and Cade had a couple more trips to the doctor for urgent issues. And that was just the humans. The many critters of our household have also had their share of issues.
Timing was on our side for the break in sickness in June because the boys ended up both being healthy (with Dylan still finishing up a round of antibiotics) for their big trip....to Mimaw and Pipaw Camp! My parents' have hosted this camp for several years for my oldest brothers' kids. Last year Dylan was invited and went. This year, Cade was "eligible" for camp since he has been recently potty trained. Something clicked when we told him on our St. John trip that he would start going in the potty when we got home. That worked for him. It's been messy but he's been mostly successful (though he had a bit of a regression since coming back from camp). In any case, we flew the boys to Dallas to "drop them off" at camp. They joined their cousins - Presley, Ryker and Payton for the week. My oldest nephew, Reece, was off at his college freshman orientation (gulp!) and my youngest nephew didn't quite make the potty training eligibility. My parents were going to have their hands full with 5 grandkids! And we weren't invited. Boo!
But not really sad because we got to have our first kid free vacation! I've wanted to go to Belize for years but flight times and other travel issues just didn't work out. So, we did as similar a trip to Belize as possible and went to the Mayan Rivera in Mexico for the week. After passing the boys off to my parents at the Dallas airport, we spent our long layover having a leisurely lunch, getting treatments at the spa in the terminal and exchanging some money. Then we were off for our flight to Cancun!
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| Cheers to the Beach! |
While it was amazing in ways to be kid free it was also fairly anti climactic. We were pretty boring. There was lots of eating, drinking and sleeping. But we did get to do wild and crazy things like sit across from each other at dinner every night and have real conversations.
We also got off the resort a few times to take in the local scenery. One of the big things I wanted to do was see Mayan ruins. The first one we went to see was Tulum, which is right on the ocean. Due to storms passing through, we weren't able to snorkle there as hoped, so we just took in the structures and the scenery.
A couple of days later, we went on another adventure off resort. This one was a half day bus tour. The first part of the trip was a tour around another Mayan ruin,
Coba. Coba is even larger in acreage than the more famous Chichen Itza and you are still allowed to climb one of the pyramids, which has been banned in most other sites. We had a fun day riding bikes around the grounds, going up the pyramid steps as quickly as possible and walking easily by all the chickens (people not birds) going down on their rear ends.
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| From The Bottom |
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| From The Top |
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The Yucatan Pennisula is VERY flat at you can see from
this panoramic taken from the top of the pyramid. |
There was a long lecture from our tour guide at the above rock. I heard almost nothing of it because apparently my bright colored back pack was of particular interest to about 4 bees and I spent about 10 minutes trying to circle around the tour group to simultaneously hear the historical info and to run away from the bees.
The second part of the day trip was to a
Cenote, which is a natural limestone sinkhole. There are a lot of them in the Yucatan and are now a draw as glorious swimming pools. The one we went to was unique in that it was almost completely enclosed in a dome. It was so beautiful and a seriously awesome experience to swim in.
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| The Only Source of Outside Light in the Cenote |
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Crystal Blue Water
Those rocks that look like you could touch from the surface were really about 30 feet away! |
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Roots Coming Through From Up Above Trying to Reach Water
(That's me standing at the entrance\exit.) |
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| Entrance to the Cenote |
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| Map Of It |
The day ended with a performance of Mayan music and a recreation of a Mayan ball game (we had seen the remains of the court used for that game at Coba).
On resort, it was like summer camp. There were always activities going on. For the most part, we opted for a lot of laziness, but we did do some arts and crafts as well as activities.
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| Iguana Watching |
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| Painting Ceramics |
Our last day there, we also rented jet skis and had a TON of fun on the rough water. The stormy weather prevented us from snorkeling that week (bummer) but we had done plenty to make it a memorable and relaxing kid free time. Not pictured here was our fun day in an underground river. I have to find the disc they gave us of pictures and will hopefully post them here. It was another seriously cool experience.
Then it was time to get back to my babies. We stopped over in Dallas for a short 24 hours to get these sweet faces (who had a great week themselves at camp).....
.....and for one more fun experience before heading home. More on the below picture another day.
