Return from vacay

Greetings folks! KD here, and I've returned from vacation eager to get back to the real world. And by "eager", I really mean "not at all eager".

So, the trip was good, I'll try to keep this post short and to the point. No longer than 20-25 paragraphs tops.

We left at close to our targeted time last Friday and things did not start well. Thanks to not one but TWO tractor trailers on fire, it took us an hour to get out of St. Louis. My dad was calling other drivers "buttheads" and declaring vacation officially over. Once out of that mess, it was fairly smooth sailing....until the crying began. My poor little niece cried for HOURS, including all night long in the hotel we stopped at somewhere in BFE Tennessee. After a trip to a Myrtle Beach Urgent Care a couple of days later we would discover the poor little munchkin was sick, but once we got some antibiotics in her, she was a different kid-happy and, well, wild.

Like all good vacations, ours had no particular agenda. There were hours spent lounging on the beach and watching miss Kendall play in the sand-one of her favorite games was to gather a handful of sand and put it on us...or in our chairs if we happened to get up. Kiddo laughed and laughed at this little game. It was good times. We did a lot of cooking in (ok, my mom cooked...but we all helped clean up and stuff), and drinking of Bud Lite Lime....and I made a mean sweet tea vodka and lemonade drink-I'm fairly certain my dad got buzzed off of one. We are not a drinking people.

One of my favorite moments was the night my brother, sister, brother-in-law and I decided to play the Dog the Bounty Hunter drinking game. Every time they either showed Leland, said "Baby Lisa", or said the words "wedding" or "reception", we had to drink....and drink we did. I won't even mention my sister eating Doritos off the floor...oh wait, I just did. :) It was such a fun night and after six beers in a rapid amount of time, I suddenly decided it was time for bed, got up and left and to bed I went.

We had professional family portraits taken on Wednesday night. The mix of my hair, humidity and the sea is not a good one, but I went ahead and straightened my hair anyway......mistake. My sister and I both had product in our hair in the hopes that the frizzies would stay away, but sadly, they did not. I guess the only good news is is that it was really windy that day, so we all had the wind blown look going on.....can't wait to see how those pics turned out. Yikes.

Entertaining a 16 month old was priority #1 for everyone....so one day we went to this skanktastic zoo and another day we went to the aquarium (which was cool, but pricey-$20 a person). Kendall loved it though, never mind the incident where she smacked another kid while going down a slide.......I'd show you all pics but my home computer has decided to die. Perhaps I'll go to my parents in a couple of weeks and try to upload some pics then. My sibs and I also went and saw that new Will Ferrell movie "The Other Guys" while in SC----it was HILARIOUS! Side note-St. Louis won some contest to have one of the red carpet premieres for this movie be here. Right before I left town, my friend Michele (you know her as Harry Caray's daughter) got a phone call from a local radio station asking her to walk the red carpet with Will Ferrell...you know, because he is infamous for his Harry Caray impression. So, Michele made an urgent appointment with her hair dresser (I mean, duh!) and attended the red carpet event. She got Will Ferrell to do his impression of her dad (she says Will is one of the nicest people she's ever met. Mark Walberg? Not so much. And he's short, apparently.) and the next day there was an article about her on stltoday.com and they were talking about it on the local radio station. I'm now teasing Michele that she is a local celebrity. She just laughs. :)

Anyway, back to the trip. I know I talk about Kendall a lot, but, well, she's fascinating. I just love watching her learn new things and trying to understand how her little mind works. She apparently became quite vocal this past week. We heard her say "paw paw" (which you know my dad LOVED), and she can tell us what a dog says ("oof"), what a monkey says ("oo oo ah ah") and what a cow says ("moo", of course). She also got all of us to sing many, many, MANY rounds of "Row row row your boat", her version goes a little like this-woah woah woah woah....gibberish, gibberish......meri...gibberish.....YAY! (with clapping). She also got us to sing Itsty Bitsy Spider while she did the hand motions (SO cute). She said hi and bye to EVERY plane and helicopter that flew by and waved to nearly every person that walked by. One night we walked the boardwalk and came across a one man band (he was actually pretty good) and miss Kendall started shakin her thang out there on the boardwalk, cracking us all up....and getting us to join her. So much fun! I have an awesome video I took of her trying to get her to eat her vegetables....she cocks her head and gives you this big grin as if to say "aunt Kerri, see how cute I am? I don't need to eat my veggies...". How can I resist that????

On Friday, our last night, we went out to dinner at this great place, Liberty, which is located in this way cool area known as Boardwalk by the Beach (this area has lots of cool shops, restaurants, a carnival area for kiddos and the aquarium). The dinner was great (including fried pickles-YUM!), and Kendall was entertaining as usual. Saturday morning we were up early enough to see the sunrise over the ocean (pretty cool) and then began our trek back home. We made it to somewhere in Kentucky before deciding to call it a night and continued the trek on Sunday morning.

I started my return to the real world by walking into the gates of hell (aka, my job), worked late on Monday night and realized.....vacation is over and I now have to be back to the daily grind. Icky.