George family adventures: Florida trip

Here are some random adorable pictures from before we left for Florida. Hunter LOVES getting dressed up for church these days. He insists on wearing a tie, just like Daddy. On this particular day he also insisted on wearing his "Engineer hat".

Landon all dressed up for church too.

The boys in bed.

My sweet little man

Is this the cutest shirt you've ever seen? A friend got it for us. I just love it.

Ok, so Florida. It was an adventure. We took a red eye which went pretty well. Hunter got on the plane, curled up in a ball and went to sleep. Landon decided that he didn't want to sleep and was awake for almost the entire flight. Talk about rough! At least he was quiet though - just active and curious.

When we got there we checked into a cheap hotel so we could sleep for a few hours. Then we moved to a hotel where we were staying for 1 night. Then we moved to Key Largo where we were staying in a timeshare. We had traded 2 of our weeks at the Four Seasons for this timeshare so we thought it would be twice as good as Four Seasons. This is what we found:

When we got there, there is no lobby. Always a bad sign as I am accustomed to being welcomed to our timeshare with fresh popcorn, apples, arnold palmer and water. Not only that but the guy wasn't even on site and sent us to a restaurant to get our key. Then there was no one to help us with our bags, so Brian had to bring all bazillion of our bags up the stairs. Not exactly luxury yet.

The place was beautiful. 2400 square feet and beautifully decorated. No complaints there. We didn't start to get upset until the next morning. We went down to the pool which technically didn't open until 12. We went in anyways. There were no towels by the pool so you had to bring towels down from your room. We came to find out that there wasn't maid service either, so you had to constantly do towel laundry if you wanted dry/clean towels. This irks me. When I am on vacation I don't mind washing my clothes or the boys' clothes, but I don't want to launder my own towels. Anyhow, when we were in the pool someone from "upstairs" came down and told us that kids under 3 were not allowed in the pool. Really? No diapers in the pool. Brian had called the manager to be sure this was a family friendly property. Obviously the manager forgot that kids aren't allowed in the pool. I told him that we weren't getting out of the pool. Swim diapers are good enough for the 4 Seasons so they would be good enough for Jimmy Johnson's. He left.

That afternoon we discovered another LOVELY characteristic of this place. They rent out the pool for a $10 cover charge. Every person with $10 and the desire to get COMPLETELY drunk was allowed to come to our pool. So much for family friendly. It was so crowded that you couldn't have gone swimming if you had wanted to. We were pretty disgusted. The next day we went back to the pool in the morning. On Sunday afternoon the owner of the bar/pool came over and kicked us out of the pool. I said I would be happy to leave if she would be happy to refund my money. She said it wasn't up to here and I needed to call management. I did. He told me to go back to the pool. At this point I was pretty irritated. I wrote a letter to the company responsible for exchanging timeshares - the Registry Collection. I told them how bad the place was, how disappointed we were, etc. Meanwhile, where we were staying they didn't even bother apologizing or comping us anything.

On Monday morning we went back to the pool. Or tried, I should say. It was SO murky that you couldn't see the bottom in the shallow end. After all the people who were in it over the weekend, they hadn't even shocked the pool. Seriously, an alligator could have been living in the bottom of the pool and we wouldn't have seen it. We were disgusted and decided to go to Key West for the day. By that night we decided to move to a hotel. We were just done with the place where we were staying. My favorite part of the story, however, comes that night. There was a big rain storm. I was laying in bed about to fall asleep when water starts dripping on my foot (and one on my head). Oh yes, the roof was leaking. I'm being serious. I started laughing as I exclaimed to Brian "It's RAINING on me!!!". We were so happy to move hotels the next morning. We had a great time bonding as a family regardless of how awful this place was. The hotel we went to was gorgeous and wonderful in South Beach (Miami).

Hunter is really comfortable swimming in the water now, so long as his feet can touch the ground. He loves being underwater and jumping off the side.

Landon thinks that he is as big as his brother and that he can do anything his brother can do. This is a recipe for disaster.

Before the pool at the first hotel.

Pool time!

The hotel had this delivered to our room as a welcome. Strawberry cupcakes strawberry cookies, Strawberry jellies. Mmmm.

Snuggling with Hunter before naptime.

Dinner at the hotel

Someone loves blackberries.

And someone else loves strawberry smoothies.

Bedtime!

Landon started walking, resulting in him falling and skinning his eye. So sad. I spent the rest of the vacation putting Neosporin on it constantly.

Arriving at Jimmy Johnson's for dinner.

The beautiful timeshare

The beautiful view

Watching the boats in the morning

Daddy and Landon snuggling in bed

Our little Cubano

At this cute little restaurant where we could watch boats.

Hunter is obsessed with goggles. Unfortunately he does not like to wear them on his eyes and instead puts them on his head.

This is serious business.

Colluding brothers

Yes, yes, I went in the water. I'm more of a pool girl, for sure.

Hunter doing jumps into a murky pool.

Landon is so proud of his climbing ability. He climbs on everything. He thinks he can swim and will decide to go underwater with no notice, flapping his arms as he sees his brother do. He also took a dive off of the bed one day, so he has a wonderful gash in his forehead. This child is 100% daredevil.

But he's also the biggest snuggle in the whole wide world and he loves his mama.

We went to the Butterfly farm in Key West. Hunter is obsessed with the Very Hungry Caterpillar and I have been thinking of ordering him a set of caterpillars that turn into butterflies. As you can see fro his expression, he was pretty excited to be here. Landon thought it was neat too.

Oh WOOOOW!

Family photo with the butterflies.

I'm showing the boys the big blue butterflies.

Hunter insisted that this was a rocket ship and was so disappointed that he couldn't ride it.

Then we got Haagen Dazs. Landon preferred to climb the stairs.

And this was his absolute favorite place to ride.

Ready for the pool!

At the new hotel we were all a lot happier. See that smile? That's a happy boy.

And Landon is pretty happy too!

And Landon was always more interested in food than just about anything else.

We went down to the beach for a bit and Landon helped me make sandcastles

The last night we indulged ourselves with some Ghirardelli scoop shop ice cream. This has been one of my favorite treats since I was a little girl. We always get the same thing. As soon as it came...