Florida – September 2008

Day 5 – Jax – taking care of the kids on my own

Friday 26th September

Floridians might call the weather we’ve had since we arrived ‘bad’. By this I suppose they would be referring to the absence of the penetrating sunshine and the light breeze that have conspired to take the edge off the temperature a bit. We, on the other hand, have found it to be just about perfect. The temperature has been into the mid twenties (upper seventies) with just a few clouds. OK, it has been windy on occasion but I’ve personally found this to be a bit of a bonus. The forecast for the next week down in Orlando is the upper twenties and lower thirties with bright sunshine and just a few whispers of cloud – it couldn’t really get much better than that for our purposes.

Seeing no reason to break with tradition, we ventured out this morning to the nearby Waffle House for our usual breakfast. The kids seem to like it there and picked a few bits and pieces from our many plates so we were happy with that. The weather was good enough in the early hours of the morning to warrant a stroll along the beach. It’s actually about the same distance from the car to the beach as it is from the car to the lobby of our twelve-story condo apartment. Joey seems to love the beach and enjoyed playing in the water. Jennifer, on the other hand, is still to get comfortable with the water and prefers to have cuddles rather than walk barefoot on the sand. I predict she’ll be difficult to drag away from the sand by the end of the trip.

The kids took their late morning nap as usual and Sandy took the opportunity today to go out shopping with Kristen whilst I stayed at home to watch over the little ones. In the event, they ended up spending most of the day out and about whilst I enjoyed some quality time with the nippers. We all enjoyed ourselves playing around the house, doing arts and crafts and just generally chilling out. Its nice to get to spend some quality time with the kids – if a little exhausting at times.

Jennifer (the big one) stayed for dinner with us this evening, which eventually turned out to be take-out from Ruby Tuesdays. Dave was home from work at a reasonable time and came up after dinner to spend an hour or two chilling out.

Tomorrow is the day we go down to Orlando. Hopefully, there won’t be any drama with the holiday rental owners but we’ll just have to see. Kristen and Dillon are going down there with us for a couple of days. We’re hoping that the theme park tickets will arrive as promised at noon so that we can take them down there with us. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed.