Vacation

We returned home from vacation yesterday, and I really feel like I need a vacation from the vacation.  It was a great time, but traveling with a one year old really changes everything.  We started by going to my mom's for an evening, then to my dad's family reunion for a day, a day of driving, five days in Boston, another day driving, evening/morning with the in-laws, and a final day of driving and unpacking.  That makes me even more exhausted reading that!  But Troy and I love to travel, and it's important to us that Kera has the opportunity to love traveling as well.

She actually did amazingly well during the travel days.  She slept, watched DVDs, played with her toys, and maybe fussed for a total of an hour over all of the days of travel combined.  We had minimal stops (just a little longer at each stop) and I don't think she cried once when we put her back in her car seat.  I had hoped that we could turn her around and upgrade to a forward facing carseat, but she's still too light.  Luckily, she didn't seem to care!

We spent our week in Boston with Troy's parents and cousins.  His cousins have a daughter pretty close to Kera's age, so they got to play together!  And she got lots of attention all week, which she always loves.

We packed most of the Boston days with sightseeing, and had one full day of fun stuff for her.  We went to the aquarium, which she absolutely loved, then on a boat ride, played in the park, and then to the Children's Museum.  She had a great day, but we must have overdone it, because the next day she was really fussy and revolted against the JFK Presidential Library and Fenway.  But we made it through the day, got to see most of what we wanted to see, and she slept well that night.

As I mentioned, she loved the aquarium.  We had been to the small aquarium at the zoo, and we've taken her to the pet store several times to look at the fish, and she always gets so excited.  So, I knew that it would be worth it to take her.  It was a pretty nice aquarium, and she got to see everything up close.  She had the chance to touch a manta ray, but she was too busy splashing around in the water for them to come close enough.  But she didn't care!   There was an otter tank that she could stand up against, and the otters would swim right up to her.  She was so excited and it was hard to get her to leave.

We have started a tradition to find a book about whatever city we're in.  Earlier this year we got a Good Night Charleston book, and now we found a Good Night Boston book.  It's neat because it gives a good overview of all of the things we saw/did when we visited, and it'll last a lot longer than a tshirt that she outgrows in two months.  Her favorite page in the Good Night Boston book is, of course, the aquarium page, where she babbles on about the "pishies."

Troy took most of the pictures from vacation, but here are a few I was able to get.