Happy Birthday to the Three Year Old

 

Presents!!

Untitled from Dorene on Vimeo.

Happy Birthday Sean!

Wordless Wednesday – Fruity With An Umbrella In It

Turks & Caicos: Part 4

 
Sesame Friends
Beaches partners with Sesame Street so there are shows, parades and activities with the Sesame friends.  Last time Meghan was still unsure of the giant Elmo and huge Cookie Monster walking around.  This time, she was much more comfortable around them.  In fact she cried when she didn’t get a huge one day. 
We did not do any of the activities this time but they got plenty of Sesame time with the shows and the character walking around the resort.

Turks & Caicos: Part 3

 

The Beach

Oh, the beach.  If you’ve never been, imagine soft sand and crystal clear, calm water.  Or, the opposite of the Jersey Shore.  Yup, that’s it.

We love this beach.  We can let the kids can play in the sand and run up and down to fill their water buckets without worrying about them getting sucked into the ocean by a monster wave.  There were a few days where the water was a little wavy, possibly due to a storm further out.  Those days the beach become much more narrow.  We just headed to the pool when that happened.

 

 

The ocean was calm enough for the kids to use floaties and swim around with us.  Plus you could just look down and see fish swimming by.  They loved it!

 

Wordless Wednesday – It’s Cookie!

 

Turks & Caicos: Part 2

 

The food

This was my biggest worry.  Not the food itself, I knew that it was good and there was plenty of it, but food for Sean.  This was the first time he would be eating at a restaurant.  Every meal at a restaurant.  How would it work?

About a month before the trip I contacted the resort.  The Executive Chef responded to my email and we sent a few messages back and forth.  He described the process and asked what type of food Sean like to eat.  I sent the details.  He seemed to be pretty knowledgeable on the subject and asked the right questions (like, is he allergic to milk protein) so I felt a little better.

Once we arrived, I met with him again and he described how each meal would work.  I was to fill out a form one meal in advance (lunch form at breakfast, dinner form at lunch, etc.) and hand it to the chef.  We needed to know where we would be eating, at what time and request the food he wanted. 

This process wasn’t difficult.  There were a few complications.  At least one time the restaurant didn’t get the form.  Not all the hostesses were as helpful when returning the next meals form.  For example, if we were currently in one village and our next meal was to be in a different one, they wouldn’t take the form.  This only happened a few times.  Overall, everyone was very helpful.  The chefs would come out and meet us.  Some started to recognize Sean as the week went on.  Not every place was able to accommodate our food requests.  No soy milk here, no dairy-free ice cream there, but nothing too bad.  They stocked the fridge in the room with soy milk so if we couldn’t get some we could always go back and fill up his cup. 

This was our third time at the resort but the first where Sean was eating prepared food.  It was nice that they had a system and was probably less complicated than a vacation where you are dining at someplace completely different each meal.  I will say that you do miss out on a bit of the experience of the resort.  One thing I enjoyed on previous trips was not having to decided when or where we wanted to eat until that meal.  Or being able to just pop into a place for a snack or some ice cream.  Everything had to be preplanned.  I suppose this is the reason I didn’t gain 10 lbs while there.

Even though Sean had food available to him at every meal, I think he survived the week on mostly fruit and french fries.  Sometimes he would eat the chicken nuggets, other times he would not touch them.  He is a picky eater anyway so this was not a big surprise. And sometimes he was just way to tired to even think about eating.

Lunch at Cricketer’s

Turks & Caicos: Part 1 of ?

 

I am going to try to do my best to give a recap of our trip.  But, considering I have trouble remembering what I ate a day later, this will not be easy.

We will call this Part 1 of I-have-no-idea-how-long-this-will-take.

Destination:  Beaches Turks & Caicos. Woo Hoo!

This was our third visit there.  We absolutely LOVE it.  However, this was the first time we would be completely dependent on them for Sean’s meals.  My biggest worry was how difficult it would be to get him milk-free food.

It was the last Saturday of January.  We were all packed up and headed to the airport.  We had 3 bags to check, which I thought was reasonable for 2 adults, 2 kids, and a week’s worth of diapers and swim diapers.  But it was a very tight fit.  Diapers were squeezed everywhere.  I was worried they would want to do a security check on our bags.  I had this vision of a TSA official opening a bag and diapers flying everywhere like one of those snakes in a can things.

The plane ride could have been much worse than it was considering (1) the kids stayed awake the whole time even with a healthy dose of Benadryl, (2) there was no soy milk to be found past security, (3) Sean refused to drink the powdered soy milk and (4) our DVD player refused to work.

We arrived to wonderfully warm, sunny weather.  We were placed on the first available shuttle and headed to the resort.

There was a little snag.  Once there, the resort delivers your bags right to your room.  Nice, if they tag it correctly.  Only 2 of our three suitcases were waiting for us.  The one containing Sean and my clothes had gone missing.  No immediate problem for Sean because diapers were spread around in everything and I had his swim suit in the carry on bag.  But I had to walk around the resort in my long pants for awhile.  Very. Hot.  But, I won’t complain too much because It was freezing back home.  The bag finally arrived after 2 phone calls and a trip to the office.  Now we were all ready for the vacation to begin.

 

Wordless Wednesday – Tropical Sunset

 

 

I have an excuse

 

I know posting has been, um, lacking recently.  But, it’s not because I forgot about this blog.  It’s because I was here:

 

I’ll post details as soon as I finish unpacking.