facebook updates that never came to be

last week, my little sister sarah got married on a beach in florida. she was born when i was ten and i've always thought of her as my little baby/toy/practice child/protege. seeing her get married was happy and exciting for me.

the day after the wedding, 26 of us from the wedding group of family and friends all piled onto a cruise ship and headed to key west, florida and cozumel, mexico for four days.

since i don't have internet on my phone and we were in the ocean or in a foreign country for several days, i had no way of getting online. i kept thinking of things that would have made good status updates, but i couldn't post them, so i decided to do a blog post where i share my great vacation through the updates that never came to be.

if we've got to do an 11 hr drive, this is the way to go about it. and why would anyone want the non-drowsy version of dramamine during a car ride? bring on the sleepies!

the hotel and beach are beautiful and will be perfect for the wedding tonight!

you know you've arrived at the beach when you've got a butt full of rocks and sand. let vacation begin!

how did i get selected to be in charge of the flowers for the wedding? so not my thing, but with my mom and sister-in-law's help, we managed to come up with some pretty things. those boutonnieres were tricky little wastards.

sarah made a beautiful bride and rich is a lucky man.

hmm, do you think she's a paid lady of the night or just some chick doing the walk of shame at the bus stop?

boarding the ship! this is all very exciting, even if brooke is starting to come apart at the seams a bit with all the crowds and chaos and line-standing.

this room is soo tiny and windowless for the three of us. anyone else feeling claustrophobic yet?

omg, we just had to wait for 45 min through the safety briefing at our muster station. no air conditioning, hundreds of people packed into one tiny, airless space, excessively loud speaker overhead, and a child who was letting her autism show.

thank God for this tiny, windowless room where we can take brooke. it's like a cocoon where she can burrow down in and get herself restarted as often as she gets overloaded. the towel animals help too.

cruises must be really great if you're traveling with no kids and lots of money.

"i thought cruises were supposed to be fun," noah, age 8.

"i had 5 ice creams, cheesecake and lucky charms for breakfast. and orange soda and chocolate milk. can i have a pizza now?" sure, kid, go get yourself a pizza. maybe this cruise is looking up for the kids after all.

we just dropped the kids off at a nightclub on the ship for a kids only dance. they say they're just going for the free soda. looks like we finally get some adult time!

while trying to decide where to go on our free evening, we were spying on brooke through the club window. we saw her walk to the door and saw a child care employee let her right out into the hallway alone, beside the casino that was filled with hundreds of adults, many of whom were drunk. holy crap, i think i'm going to puke.

after a few choice words with the kids staff, we let brooke go back in after using the restroom. but then we sat directly outside the door and didn't move until it was time to retrieve her. so much for a parents only night of fun.

if you accidentally use a family member's toothbrush, are you obligated to tell them about it or can you just let it be your own little secret?

is that really the ocean we're in or did we enter neverland and we're sailing in a sea of blue gatorade?

no matter how huge this ship seems, it's very insignificant compared to the ocean. God makes some massive stuff.

we got off the boat in cozumel and we're in a back alley with some mexican guys in hopes that they'll give us a great deal on snorkeling. fingers crossed that we don't get sold into human slavery.

no slavery, just fun. other than the multiple stings by jellyfish, my first time snorkeling was really fantastic!

how many times can i apply sunblock in one day before my skin starts boycotting it?

you know how sometimes you'll see a toilet brush hanging from the bottom of a gas station bathroom sink? well i just saw a sink that had salad tongs hanging from the bottom instead. i wish i'd had my camera handy!

you know you're home from vacation when you've got three suitcases filled with wet, nasty laundry, you're cleaning up cat puke off the rug and all you can think about is how happy you are that you're going to be able to use your own toilet again.

and with that, my friends, i bid you farewell. the laundry is calling my name and i've got to get back to the salad diet and say goodbye to the potatoes and cheese.

so campy

for about a year, brooke has been talking about going to summer camp. she'd read about it in a book and seen some tv episodes about camping and she wanted to give it a try. it made me a little sick to my stomach when i first started considering actually letting her go. she's always been explosive when things got too loud or overwhelming. she likes to know what to expect all the time and she needs time to transition more slowly than most kids from one activity to the next. these are all things that would likely be aggravated by a typical camp environment.

there's a place i went as a kid, every summer, called word of life ranch. it's a wonderful, beautiful place in the adirondack mountains where college students who have done a year at their bible institute work as counselors during the summer. i have tons of happy memories of being there and i felt like, if brooke was going to camp, that's where it would need to be.

i got over my anguishy belly and signed her up for a week. i decided she would only go as a day camper rather than overnight every day for a week so as to have a chance to detox and calm down in my presence if things got too overwhelming for her. i was anticipating at least one SOS call from camp admin asking me to come get her because she was freaking out and inconsolable.

well, as it turns out, brooke was incredibly ready for camp. we drove to new york (15 hr drive) and for a couple nights we just went to the evening camper meetings and walked around the property. she had a chance to absorb the noises and smells and chaos and yelling with me at her side before i dropped her off for a whole day. she met her counselors and the kids who would share her cabin for the week. she was more than ready when i left her at 7:30 monday morning.

all day long, i waited for the phone call of distress. nothing. i enjoyed my day with family and when i picked her up in the evening, she was happy and full of sugary joy.

she got to take a horsemanship class that allowed her to spend a total of six hours with the horses over the course of the week and that was definitely her favorite part.

brooke functioned happily through so many various new things all week long. she had to learn how to go through a food line and pick her own meal choices three times a day. she had to sit still and quiet through bible meetings. she had to always keep track of at least one of her counselors and she had to stay calm even when things got super loud.

each night when i picked her up, she didn't want to sit quietly with me to cool down after a hectic day. she wanted to play and squeal with her cousins and practice her newfound trick of armpit farts.

all in all, it was a fantastical week, better than i'd even dared to hope. she can't wait to go back next year and she wants to sleep over in 2013 now that she knows what to expect.

it's amazing to see my little aspie girl absorbing and applying all the coping skills she's learned so that she can go new places and try new things without becoming overwhelmed or freaking anyone out in the process. my soul is a happy place.

living the island life

last week i went on vacation with my family to a little island a few hours from here called kiawah. it's close to charleston, sc. chris couldn't go cuz he was busy being a good employee, but i had a blast with my family. my 3 siblings were there along with all three of brooke's cousins on my side of the family. with all of our schedules being super busy and us living in different states, it's rare that we get to all hang out for more than just a few hours at christmas some years. my parents rented a huge, gorgeous house for the week, including a nice in-ground pool out back & a yard that dropped into a lagoon.




i felt like we were spending a week inside the lifestyles of the rich & the famous, only we were driving a 12 passenger van rather than a rolls royce.

one of the most exciting parts of the trip was all the alligators that live on the island. and there aren't any fences, just open spaces with marshes, swamps, lagoons and ponds where the gators are free to roam about as they wish. there aren't any restaurants or shops on the island, and you can't get in without overnight accommodations, so if you're there, it's probably mainly to go to the beach or lay around in your big ritzy house. the main mode of transportation is bike, so we rode our bikes everywhere, including into the ocean on the beach.

on our first morning i stopped to take this picture and moments after that, i resumed my little ride along the path that went right between 2 lagoons. as i was passing through, i saw a line of bubbles approaching the shore only a few feet away from me. brooke was ahead & my mom was behind me when suddenly there was a huge growling roar coming from the water right where i'd just seen the bubbles. the roar came three times as we zoomed along the path & raced for home & since there was no place for machinery or other large things that could have made the noise, we could only conclude that it was a gator growing at us for getting too close to its space. it was pretty intense.


we saw several swimming through waterways and under bridges we were standing on & i was able to get a couple decent pictures. thankfully we didn't have any bad encounters with the gators, even riding through alligator alley beside our house every day.





we also had some pretty fun encounters with crabs. there were lots of different types of crabs to watch & play with, the biggest being a horseshoe crab. my brother was the crab harasser & he kept chasing & catching lives ones so we could get good looks at them. the kids spent about an hour with one horseshoe crab giving it sand massages, singing it songs & rolling it over to watch how it's stomach muscles flapped around when it moved.

the beach was huge and clean and mostly empty. there were tons of things to see and collect and examine. the waves weren't too rough and no one got too hurt. all in all, it was about a perfect vacation.

it was a little bit sad to come home and get back to real life after a wonderful week soaking up sun, laughing with kids, riding bikes down interestingly murky paths, and eating wonderful food. but at least i can look back at my pictures and remember it all with a smile.