What we've been up to!

Saturday April 12, we headed up to Chattanooga to see Papa Gary and Patricia. We had planned on doing this, and then we were told that there would be a 50th anniversary party for Glenda and Don, so we got to attend that also. Everyone there really enjoyed getting to see Kendall for the first time. I think some of his great aunts made a lasting impression on him to as all he does is talk about "Connie" Before we went to the the party though we stopped at the Chattanooga Railroad Museum and rode the train. Of course we forgot our camera, so we didn't get to get any pictures. The train went through a tunnel though and then we got off and watched them turn it around on the turn table. Kendall was in awe and to this day if you ask him if he went on a train, he will tell you that a train goes Choo Choo and that the train went through the tunnel. He was very excited and still is about that train!

On Thursday April 17, Kendall had his Spring program at his Mothers Morning Out program at Asbury United Methodist Church. They did one of these programs at Christmas time and of course my child who never ever cries froze and cried during his Christmas Program, so we were excited to see such a change during his spring program. It is put on by the entire CDC program ages 12mths-5yrs, so you can only imagine! Each age group always has their one child that stands out in some way whether it be singing loud or dancing, etc. Well lets just say that the 12-18mth class it was Kendall. He was in the center and just laughing, smiling and even yelling DADDY during his part of the program. It was classic. They sang 10 little indians, or at least were supposed to. Here are some pictures:

As you saw in the post before this one, Kendall used the potty for the first and last so far time on Wednesday April 16. He was so proud of himself. So far it has not happened again.

Saturday April 19, we headed over to the square in Athens, AL for their annual Dogwood Festival. There was not a lot going on there, but we enjoyed walking around and then headed over to the park for a bit with Nana and Poppie before we headed to eat at Lawler's BBQ for lunch. Kendall started running a fever this day that lasted until about Wednesday and now has turned into a runny nose and cough. I think we are on the downhill side of this mess though. He is feeling better now though. He didn't eat for a couple days and now is eating again and I can't keep up with him eating actually. He is making up for what he didn't eat last week. This morning he had 2 full size waffles, mandarin oranges and his milk for breakfast.

At 22 months Kendall really is all boy! I'm having to give him two baths a day on the weekend and a bath every weekday because he gets so DIRTY and will tell you that he has dirt between his toes. I think he has a new bruise, cut, scrape, or bump on him every single day. His legs are pretty much bruised all the way up and his newest from just today-both knees scraped and bleeding from sliding in the driveway. He loves the outdoors and will cry until he can go outside. Rainy days are rough in the Brown house because he can't go outside and he does not like that. He is enjoying his music class that is on each Friday until June. He starts swim lessons at the end of May. We plan on taking a short road trip towards the end of May to North Carolina. We may even ride the train. He can say his alphabet to G and then W. He can count to about 4. He remembers everything! All his mispronounced words are now becoming the real word like motorcycle is not daduke(not sure where that one came from anyway) anymore. Milk is still muk, but other than that words are really becoming clear finally.

I've been busy in my gardens the past couple of weekends. I've gotten all my flowers planted except a few flower boxes. If it does not rain tomorrow, it will be spent mulching. I went to the plant show at the Botanical Garden last weekend and was able to get seven more kinds of lily's for my lily garden. We got some tomato plants and pepper plants last weekend at the Lacon Flea Market. Everything is looking really good this year, and my hanging baskets look wonderful. Hopefully they will stay that way with the heat of the summer.

Kasey is busy with racing season. He is in Talladega today and should hopefully be heading home by now or at least soon. We miss him when he is gone, but he loves racing and what he is getting to do is awsome. I'm sure it is a lot of guys dreams to be able to work on a pit crew in a Nascar event and Kasey is so lucky to be one of those actual guys.

That is about all that is going on with us. I'll leave you with a couple of pictures of Kendall playing outside.

Exciting News!

Kendall Peed in the potty for the very first time tonight. He was so proud of himself too. He started clapping and saying YAY!

Hopefully this is the beginning to potty training him.

Results!

Well Kendall had his allergy testing yesterday and the verdict is:

Allergic to Penacillian
Allergic to Cockroach poop(nice huh!)
Allergic to dust/dustmites
Allergic to Household Molds/mildews
Somewhat allergic to Cats/Dogs


Now for me, I had my follow up endoscopy and my Ulcer is HEALED! Praise the Lord!! No more medicine for me.....

If you have not gotten to look at our trip to Mexico, we have created a new blog just for our travels. Be sure to check it out

http://thebackseatdriversguidetothegalaxy.blogspot.com/

Mexican Riviera, Mexico March 29-April 5(Actually April 6)

Saturday March 29, 2008

5:00 a.m.-Rise and shine! It's finally time to get up to start our trip to Mexico that we have been anticipating for 2 months since booking it. We had to get up to make sure we could be ready to leave the house for a 6 a.m. arrival to the airport for a 7 a.m. flight.

5:45 a.m.-We departed for the airport. There was a fine mist of rain coming down. We just hoped that we had no delay getting out.

6:15 a.m.-We are all checked in and ready to depart. Our flight is to leave at 7 a.m. We had our fingers crossed that it would leave ontime or even a little early since we were to arrive in Atlanta at 9:00 a.m. with a very short connection time for our 9:48 a.m. departure out of Atlanta to Cancun.

7:00 a.m.-We are all boarded and ready to take off when Atlanta Air Traffic Patrol decided they were going to delay us from departing. This is oh so wonderful seems how we already knew we would be practically be running to catch our flight to Cancun. It is what it is though right!

7:30 a.m.-Atlanta gives us the go ahead and we are ready to go. We were able to make up some time in the air only causing us to be about 10 minutes late. We got to the airport with 20 minutes to catch our next flight. Kasey and I were running full force through the Atlanta airport weaving through people left and right.

10:30 a.m.-We have landed safely in Cancun! Now time for customs. Wow! We got down to the customs area and all we see is a "sea" of people. No lines, no direction, just a sea of people. After spending about an hour in what we thought was a line weaving back and forth, we ended up in the back of the line. It took us 2 hours to get through customs!

12:30 p.m.-Now the true test of if our luggage made it to Cancun with such a short connection from Atlanta. That would be a big fat NEGATIVE! Well we can't leave the airport without our luggage since we still have to go through immigration and it is a foreign country, so we asked a Delta agent and another Delta flight had landed during the time we were in customs and our luggage was on that flight. The only problem was a lot of flights had landed and they do one at a time on the belt. Well all those people were still in customs, so we had to wait for the airport guys to take all that luggage off the belt until they would start a new flight. Oh and by the way it is now about 1:30,and we have not eaten anything all day.

2:00 p.m.-We finally have all our luggage, money exchanged to pesos, ground transportation set up and we are on our way to the hotel. It is a good 1 1/2 hr drive at that time during the day due to traffic in Playa del Carmen.

3:30 p.m.-We have arrived our destination that we set out for so early in the morning-Aventura Spa Palace in hopes to what would be a great relaxing week. We were immediatly greeted upon arrival to the friendly staff at the ASP. I was given a red carnation. We got all checked in and a bell man took us to our room on a golf cart. Upon arrival we had two double beds(supposed to be King) that we ended up just pushing together. At this point we did not even care or need to bother. We made one big bed. After we got changed into some shorts because it was 90 degrees we went and found some food and had a very late lunch and explored the area that we would call home for the next week.

Below are some pictures from the view from our room and also some around the grounds of Aventura Spa Palace.

We had dinner at the Mexican Restaurant that evening and then watched a Mayan Show. We were tired, so went to bed pretty early that evening.

Sunday March 30, 2008

Sunday morning we got up and ate breakfast. We then listened to a 90 minute orientation about the Palace Resorts. We had no intention on buying into anything, but they said if we listened, we would get $200 spa credit, so we went ahead and listened. That afternoon we wanted to go ahead and use our swim with the dolphins promotion, but we learned that it really wasn't for 2. You had to buy one ticket and then the other person swam for free. We decided not to do it. We went over to Puerto Aventura for the afternoon and walked around. It was a fishing villiage with shops and high dollar rentals, and restaurants. They have a marina over there that you can swim with dolphins, manatees, etc. They also had some sea lions, etc. Below are some pictures from there. We enjoyed dinner at the Italian Restaurant that evening.

Monday March 31, 2008

We spent the day at Xel-Ha on Monday. It is an area where you can snorkle, rent bikes, float down the river on tubes, walk the nature trails, etc. It was a really fun day. We saw lots of neat fish including a ray. We saw crabs. We walked across the floating bridge. We saw some cenotes(underwater caves) We got to see some wildlife. There are iguana's everywhere in Mexico, so we saw plenty of them! We had dinner at the Asian restaurant that evening.

Tuesday April 1, 2008

We spent the morning at the Tulum Ruins. They were beautiful and they are near the ocean too, so the pictures below will reflect the beautiful water as well as the ruins. After we returned, we took a taxi into Playa Del Carmen and did some bartering with the shops. We ate at the Meditteranian restaurant this day.

Wednesday April 2, 2008

Today was my day at the spa and what a fabulous day it was. We ended up paying a $100 on top of the $200 voucher we received, so I could have a day at the spa. My morning started out at 10 a.m. when I went to hydrotherapy for an hour. In there I spent time in the sauna, steam room, cold shower, hot tub and a hot tub for your feet. At 11 my spa package began. I had a 25 minute body scrub, 50 minute holistic massage, 25 minute facial, 25 minute manicure and a 50 minute pedicure. It was a very relaxing time. While I was having my day at the spa, Kasey went and visited another one of the palace resorts-Xpu-Ha. It is a very secluded resort that has a nature trail and an animal observatory. He got some great pictures there. I went back with him to see the animals once my spa day was over. We spent some time on the beach and in the pool there too. While Kasey was there it sprinkled on him and he saw a tornado in the distance and got some pictures of it.

Thursday April 3, 2008

We went to visit the Coba Ruins today. They were about 2 hrs away. They were located in the jungle, so what beautiful scenery we saw. We got to climb to the top of the pyramid. It had 120 steps. I kind of froze half way up. I turned around and looked down and realized that if I go any higher I still had to come down and it looked pretty scary from half way up. I went on though and I'm glad I did. It was pretty scary coming down. I actually scooted down on my butt one step at a time. I made it though-all 4 limbs still attached and all. Ha ha! When we got done with the pyramid, we got an a cart that was attached to a bike and the guy peddled us back to the front of the park. Man you should have heard that guy huffing and puffing.

Friday April 4, 2008

We went on the Paradise Snorkeling tour today. It was really windy so the water was very choppy and the visibility was not the best. We did see some beautiful fish, coral and reef though. We took some underwater pictures, but we have not developed them yet, so I can't scan to add them to here. We did get to spend some time at the beach after we snorkled.

Saturday April 5, 2006

We were up at 5:00 a.m. to catch our 6:20 a.m. shuttle to the airport. We arrived at the airport at 7:30 a.m. and immediatly got into the ticket line. It was long, but we were still inside the roped off area. A flight before ours was delayed, so they were busy booking all of them on other flights. It took us an hour to get through the line. We arrived upstairs at 9:00 to go through immigration. Our flight was to leave at 11:05 a.m. Once we got upstairs we looked at the board and our flight had been delayed until 1:40 p.m., so we decided to go ahead and eat a burger at Bubba Gumps. 1:40 came and went and our flight was now scheduled to leave at 4:30 p.m. We knew we would not be making it home, since our flight out of Orlando was scheduled for 5:30. Finally we boarded and our flight left at 5:30 p.m. We got into Orlando at 9:30 p.m. Delta put us up in the Crowne Plaza and gave us each $14 in meal vouchers. We got checked into the hotel at 10:30 and we still needed to eat dinner. We walked a couple of blocks to Denny's and while we were in there it started pouring down rain, so yes you guessed it, we walked back in the pouring rain. We got to bed a midnight and had to be up at 5:00 a.m. again (3 a.m. Cancun time) for a 6 a.m. departure from the hotel to the airport. Our flight was to leave at 8 a.m. and because of Disney the airport gets pretty crowded.

We really did leave ontime from Orlando and finally got home at 9 a.m. on Saturday
April 6, 2008. We had a fantastic time overall and we were so glad to finally see Kendall. It had been 10 days after it was all said and done. We would love to go back, but NEVER on a Saturday again.

Well that is our trip in a nutshell.

Below is a slideshow of pictures:
(Hint-If you click on the picture below, the slideshow will come up full size.)