Liki Tiki, Here We Come!!!!

Well, the countdown has finally reached a crescendo. We leave in just a few short days for our annual family vacation to the coolest place on earth (at least to us). We own a time share in a fabulous resort near Orlando called Liki Tiki Village (www.likitiki.com) and go each year. My almost three year old is chanting her usual, "Liki Tiki, here we come!!!!" and asking me every day where we are on our calendar.

This year we are taking our "fourth child" a college student I have known since she was very young and who helps a great deal caring for our children, often for no payment at all. So we are taking her with us on our trip (our girls don't know this). We leave Friday night (today is Monday). In effort to get myself ready, I am basically doing all the laundry in our entire household and washing every dish (I hate coming home to dirty laundry or ants). As of right now, I have load #3 folded on the table, load #4 sitting in a basket next to that ready to fold, load #5 in the dryer and load #6 in the washer. Of course, there are still loads #7, #8, #9 to deal with, but I will get them all done. (I really need to do laundry more often!)

 (my little helper "washed out")

So, in effort to make our trip as pleasant as possible (6 people in a van for 10 hours overnight and pleasant don't exactly go together) I have been scouring the web for ideas. I have found some good ideas and I will list them in another post when I share what we are going to do for us.

The first thing we do to make our trips more pleasurable is that we will be leaving around 11 p.m. Daddy gets a nap in the middle of the day while Divamommy gets everything ready to go and packs the car. Daddy works a swing shift where he does two weeks on days and two weeks on nights, so he is a little used to the idea of sleeping at weird hours. This helps with one very important thing...we have pukers. Oh yes. Get in the car, get it all packed up, head down the road, you're 15 minutes from where you just left and someone pukes. Nayners is a sympathetic puker so then we have two pukers. On our last trip, Kadoodle waited till our food arrived at our first restaurant stop and puked all over herself, our table and Grandma. Yay. (insert sarcasm here) For this reason, we travel at night whenever we can. (traveling at night limits optical stimulation and has the added benefit of not having to stop for multiple meals because everyone is asleep) So, they who are old enough get their dose of dramamine and they who are not, Benadryl (except me, of course because I will probably have to drive some).

Since we don't travel during the day, we don't have to prepare "busy body" kits for the girls, but we do have to entertain them once we get to the resort. Because we travel at night, we are not usually able to get into our townhouse until later in the day. Because we are owners, we cannot check in until the Owner's Office is open (usually around 10:30 a.m. whereas we arrive around 8:45 a.m.) So, I am working on getting our stuff ready to go and when I have something ready, I will post that too.

However, before I can do any of that, we have to pack and THAT requires that I finish all of that laundry. So, how does one pack for five people in two suitcases so that everything fits in the cargo space of an eight passenger van? Well...THAT is a whole other post as well!

Well, dang! There went my buzzer. Load 5 is done in the dryer, load 6 is done in the washer, time to switch. I'm gonna be folding laundry all night.