Fleeing February

We took a family holiday at the beginning of the month to escape the February Blahs.  It can get pretty cold and grey in Toronto at this time of year and when my dad invited us to join him and my step mother  and their daughter - my sister - Laetitia in Florida, we RSVPed with a resounding "yes please!"

SIDE NOTE.  I don't think I've written about my new little sister on the blog before.  She was born about four months before Elly, in November of 2009.  I'm still getting used to the idea of having a sibling who is thirty-one years younger than me, of not being my father's only daughter, of the boys being four years older than their Aunt, but I suppose this is the new modern family, right?  Anyway, she's awfully cute - takes after me, clearly - so that kind of eases the strangeness of the situation.  END OF SIDE NOTE.

We went down to Captiva Island on the South-West coast of Florida, to the South Seas Island Resort.  What a great family resort!  Clearly run by people who have young children.  I felt like they'd thought of everything.  Our condo had not only been equipped with all the necessary child safety devices needed to keep an 11 month old safe, but also had a bath seat for Elly, a crib with pink sheets (they could have just gone with unisex, but I liked the fact that they made the effort to make them gender-specific, you know?), a change table and a high chair.  The boys got their own room with twin beds and a TV (you cannot imagine their joy) and my dad arranged for tshirts and hats with the hotel logo to be laid out for them, as well as some candy (gah! I hid most of it and ate all the Jelly Bellies, but did save them the gummy shish-kabobs), pirate journals and colouring books.

Since we arrived quite late on a foggy night, Mark and I couldn't see anything from our room.  We were delighted when we woke up the next morning and opened our shutters to take in our view:

 

We got ourselves organised and then went for a walk to get our bearings.  Two minutes from our condo and it was wildlife-a-palooza!

 

We saw dolphins in the water

pelicans giving us the stink-eye on the rocks by the path,

 

lizards bathing in the sunshine on the curb,

 

  

and the heron from our cottage on holiday down here! We also saw Manatees in the marina, but I didn't get a photo, and Osprey flying past our window with fish or snakes in their talons.  It was all pretty spectacular stuff.

We found the pool, where we spent most afternoons if the weather was warm enough - the boys loved swimming and Elly really got into it too.  The pool was what is known as zero-entry, meaning that it gradually sloped into the water from the deck, getting slightly deeper with each step.  So El could quite happily sit in the shallowest part and splash about whilst the boys put on floaties and, well floatied about in the deeper end.

  Of course, I didn't get any photos of the kids swimming.  But I did get one of the boys chillaxing:

 

Its hard being four.

 

 And here's the pool, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico.

 We spent a lot of time on exploratory walks, soaking up the sun when it was sunny, admiring the views and the sunbleached colours around us,

 or else heading the beach to look for shells, chase - and be chased - by the waves and happily digging away in the sand. 

 

Happy William making sandcastles.  I think playing on the beach was by far their favorite part of the holiday.

and probably mine too!

 

Laetitia and her niece and nephews got along really well - She would follow Elly everywhere saying "bebe, bebe" with a little French accent, as though she herself wasn't still just a wee thing.  I wonder if they'll be friends when they grow up?

 Elly did a pretty good job of not eating the entire beach.  She was quite bemused by all the gritty stuff around her, and definitely did taste it a couple of times, but it wasn't quite as bad as I'd feared when I first plopped her down.

The boys loved winding "May-tee-see-ah" up (we're still working on the pronunciation of Ls).  I think she was pretty happy to have some playmates for the week.

 And this is one of my favorite photos from the holiday.  It was a gorgeous day at the beach and the boys just played and played and played.  All the happiness of being a kid at the beach...its contagious.

We had plenty of ups (boys being absolutely wonderful and rather blase during their first flight on an airplane) and downs on the holiday (car ride from hell on the way back to the airport, with both boys throwing up in the rental car and Elly screaming her head off), but all in all it was a really nice family vacation, and perhaps one we'll be able to do again next year.