Beach Vacation 2011: The bad parts

I decided that I would break the story of our vacation into a few posts.  This first post will be my vent about all the "not-so-fun parts."  I think that if I post about it first, then I can move on and focus on the fun parts!  So, here we go.  Fasten your seat belts.  It's sure to be a bumpy ride!

When we arrived, everything started off fine.  Around the second day, Ryan started to get fussy and developed a cold.  He was already waking up early, and by early I mean 5:30 in the morning!!  The cold made things way worse.  Several nights he was up every hour, and one night he was up about every 30 minutes.  Considering he was sleeping in a pack and play in our master bedroom's closet which was adjacent to where my sister and brother-in-law were sleeping, I could not let him cry all night long!  If anyone knows me well, I do not do well without sufficient sleep.  I get really grumpy.  I think that part of the sleeping problem was his cold, but I also think my kids hate our pack and play.  I remember Tyler not sleeping well in it when he was little.  Ryan apparently hates it too.  Honestly, I can't blame them because the "mattress" is hard as a rock!  Whenever we go visit my parents, we use their pack and play and Ryan never has issues.  But ours must be harder than others.  I did everything I could to make it softer, but you can only do so much.  Next year, we will be trying a bed!

So, considering I was up at 5:30 (sometimes 5:15) each morning, I would put him back down to sleep as early as 7:30 or 8:00 am.  The first couple of days, I would not sleep when he slept.  After Tuesday, you better believe I started to!  And by Thursday, Josh would get up with Ryan after his morning nap and let me sleep until around 10 am.  As a side note, he goes to bed late by nature due to his work schedules.  So, it was only fair that I get up with Ryan in the mornings since I was going to bed at 9 or 10 pm.  I live the wild life, ya know! ;)

Friday, I finally took Ryan to the urgent care nervous he might have an ear infection or strep.  Both were not the case, but he did have a lot of looseness in his chest.  So, we were prescribed a z pack.  It was cleared up within 24 hours.  Just in time for us to leave our beach vacation...

Apart from the lack of sleep, Tyler, who has always LOVED the ocean and been fearless since Ryan's age, decided he was terrified this year.  He would not even go near it.  This was a major source of frustration especially for Josh because he wants to be able to do these things with Tyler.  We spent days trying to get him even near the edge of the ocean, but he simply would not do it.  Ryan did not like the ocean either although the first day we were lucky to find a small "natural pool" near the edge of the ocean where the boys did agree to play.  The other days, we spent the majority of our BEACH week at the pool.  Ryan did not want a thing to do with sitting in the baby float for the pool.  Good thing I only spent $5 for it at a thrift store.  He would much rather be held while in there.

Speaking of being held, Mr. Ryan wanted his mamma the entire week.  Granted, my boys have always been mamma's boys especially at a young age, but Ryan stepped it up a notch last week.  He would not let anyone else near him.  Josh sometimes could step in, but he literally was attached to my hip all week long.  While it's sweet, I seriously could not do much of anything.  If I put him down, he would scream.  If I picked him up, he was magically fine.  I actually started to hide from my child...behind counters, in locked rooms, down the beach... I chalk a lot of it up to him not feeling well though.  It was tons of fun dropping him off at preschool this morning...

Let's see...next on the list and later in the week was my sun poisoning and the return of the dreaded RASH from last year.   It's definitely somehow related to sun-exposure and/or pools!

So without going into detail, I was waiting for news all week long and got a disappointing answer Friday evening.  It was what I thought was the icing on the cake from a roller coaster week at the beach.  But the luck continued to get bad when we came home.

We turned off our air conditioning while we were gone to save money and set it to come on Friday afternoon before we arrived the next day.  Well, we walked in to a severely hot house.  Josh walked over and noticed that hot air was blowing out of the vents.  Our thermastat was so high that it read "Hi."  This means it was over 99 degrees in our house.  I cannot explain to you how hot it was!!  This had happened about a month ago to us, but after turning it off for three hours, it started to work again.  We should have asked someone to come out then but we didn't.  This time, our method did not work.  Josh made a remark about waiting until Monday to call someone out since the rates are double on the weekend.  I must have given him the look of death...and I'm pretty sure I said some choice words too.  We had a repair man out within 30 minutes.  He had to come out twice because the first time didn't take after he left.  Finally, around 6pm the air started to come on.  To give you an indication of the intense heat, around 9pm our thermastat got down to 89 degrees.  That was with three huge fans blowing in our house as well as the air pumping.  We still have to have a part ordered to fix the unit.  I see $$$$ signs!

So, there you have it.  Whew, I feel so much better with that vent :)  While I didn't expect our vacation to be a walk in the park especially with a 14 month old, I didn't expect all that happened! I promise we had some really fun times though!  I'll post about those in the next days!