Vacation!!!!

So far, our vaca has been a blast! Very few meltdowns for either kid- woohoo!!! Our trip her was pretty good- the traffic reports were terrible, so we took a roundabout route and it paid off. Baz started getting a little restless by the end, but a little car bribery (ie candy) calmed him down for the remainder of the trip. Saturday evening was fine- some fun in the hot tub tired the kids out enough that bedtime wasn't even an issue. ANya has been a TERRIBLE sleeper when we travel anywhere, so this is a source of angst for me, but she has been wonderful every night, even for my parents. Baz has been an absolute DREAM....he goes up to his PNP and asks to go in!!! This is for naps and bed....I about fall over each time it happens. I've been so conditioned by 3 years of Anya's fighting sleep at any cost that I can't adjust to a kid who LIKES to sleep. He's still been on a 5am wakeup, but this morning I put him back in his PNP at 5:45 and he went back down until 8!!! Maybe this is a solution, but I'm not sure how it will affect his am nap, but I'll take it for now! I was hoping that skipping an afternoon nap would solve the early wakeup, but no such luck. I really hope this isn't his way of getting rid of the am nap and moving to just a pm nap- I do so love 2 naps!

Enough sleep talk....what have we been up to..... Sunday was a lovely day...had a couple of trips to the hot tub- I'm so glad the kids love it as much as I do! If we even get our own, we'll be a family with some pruny digits!!! Anya got adventurous and tried jumping in many times and Baz was happy to stand on the side and play with his toys. Uncle Donovan was there when we arrived on Sat and the kids had fun playing with him. Aunt Liza came up Sunday afternoon and joined in the festivities as well.

We headed over to our resort and went bowling. Luckily, the bowling lanes were next to the arcade, so when Anya "had enough bowling" after a few rounds, she and Baz were entertained there while the rest of us finished up. She did ask to go back the next day, but I think we'll wait until she's a little older for that! We then spent a little time in the kiddie pool upstairs- the kids wanted nothing to do with the regular pool after spending so much time in the hot tub, so that was a lost cause!

Sunday night was "date night" for mommy and daddy as both kids stayed with Grandma and Pap-Pap. It sounds like they behaved and Baz mostly slept all night (except for his 5am wakeup). We enjoyed a ful night's sleep (dreams and all!!!) and a quiet breaky out. We spent the afternoon with Pap-Pap (poor grandma had to work again) and visited one of the lakes in their development. The kids came to the condo with us that evening and once again had a prett smooth bedtime. Can you tell vacations revolve around getting the kids to bed?

Yesterday was a fun-packed day. We started out driving to central PA to pick up an ebay auction item for George. Given the number of variables (traffic/construction, getting lost, meltdowns, etc), it went perfectly. On the way back, we stopped at Bucknell and I had a chance to reminisce a bit. It was very cool showing Anya the Bison and giving her the quick tour- oh how I'd love for her to go to school there. Of course, she'd hate it because I'd be there all the time, but that's a long way away. After a trip to the bookstore and a few photo ops (I'll add pics later- they're still on the camera), we packed back up to go to the Stroudsburg Fair.

The Stroudsburg fair is THE county (might even be the state fair) of PA. It's nothing like the little carnivals we go to on Long Island. This on has a tremendously huge fairgrounds and more livestock and plants than you can imagine. We picked out the most interesting things for the kids and saw the barns and barns of goats, pigs, sheep, cows, and a few horses. Baz thoroughly enjoyed using his animal sounds and loved loved LOVED the tractors and trucks. In fact, they have tractor-pulled trams transporting people from the parking lot to the fair and he must have shouted tractor a hundred times!

Anya liked the animals as well, but her fave were the rides. They had 2 different areas of rides, so she had a lot of options. The only really new ride was the Tilt-A-Whirl. We've never checked the height requirement for that one (probably because it would involve a parent riding with her), and when we walked up to read the sign, the attendant just waved us on. Crap.....this meant that I had to get on with her. (Have you ever tried to tell a 3 year old that she can't ride something???). Luckily, it was a long time since lunch, but I felt mine trying to make a reappearance. I'll have to check the camera for the pics, but I saw George on the sidelines giggling at my situation and trying to capture my plight on disk. The last ride was the spinning dragons. We've ridden this ride at every carnival this year, so I wasn't too concerned since it was jsut Anya and I and I control the speed of the spinning. Well, that ended when Maya and Hannah joined us. They were 2 cute and chatty girls who were all about spinning. Cheered on by George and my dad, they had us going at some super-high rpm's. This time, I almost did toss my cookies, so that was the end of the rides! We had another tractor ride on the way out and Anya tried some homemade pumpkin ice cream- yummy!!!

Last night, Anya insisted on sleeping at Gram-Pap-pap's, so we packed her up and Baz stayed with us and we caught up after a busy day. Today we're heading to the Great Wolf Lodge- I think it will be a blast..I'm sure I'll have lots of pics to share later!