Vacation Countdown

I'm happy to report that we survived the daycare bug!  Thank you for your well wishes and prayers for a speedy recovery.  It's funny how a 24 hour bug lasts for pretty much exactly 24 hours.  By Wednesday afternoon, I was feeling like my normal self again.

And thank God that we got it out of our systems before our vacation!  I made reference to our upcoming trip in my previous post, but didn't really share details.  We leave on Friday for 10 days with my family in Hawaii!

After my sister-in-law and I experienced our losses in Fall 2008, it gave my whole family a new appreciation for what we have and what we had lost and what matters to us.  That Christmas, instead of spending money on exchanging gifts, we all took a family vacation together.  And really--it was more of a "vacation adventure" since we camped...in December...in Yosemite...in tent cabins...in the snow.  It was an amazing experience, but we all decided that we wanted to do something a little more tropical for the next family vacation two years down the road when it would again be my turn to celebrate Christmas with my family.  Well, by Christmas 2010 we were blessed with Ella and my brother and sister-in-law were expecting my niece in February, so our winter vacation became a summer vacation. 

It will be my whole immediate family--my parents, my brothers, my sister-in-law, my niece (who I will meet for the first time!), and of course my husband and Ella.  We will be on Kauai, and we look forward to visiting a lot of the places that we explored on our last family vacation to the island ten years ago when it was just the five of us, before the spouses and babies.  We leave early Friday morning...so let the vacation countdown begin!

Todays' blessing was the chance to visit the local farmers market with the mom of the other little girl at Ella's daycare.  The girls are just three days apart, started at daycare on the same day, and she also works at the University, so we have a lot in common.  We've had a couple of lunch dates with the girls, and she's turning into a really good friend.