So this weekend, we drove to Tampa for the semi-finals of the NCAA Women’s Final Four. We actually drove to Gulfport, Florida, about half an hour or so south of Tampa. Gulfport was great, and the cottage we stayed in was a cute little 2BR house a block from the beach.
It was a wild roller-coaster of a trip.
Friday we drove all day, and Noah did surprisingly well in the ~8 hour car trip. But he was tired and cranky by the time we arrived, and it was almost bedtime but we hadn’t eaten dinner yet. I was also carsick and had a splitting headache. So I declared that dinner was going to be frozen dinners from Walgreens.
Noah got sick.
He vomited 3 different times in the night. Once in bed, then into the mercifully large book that he and Jill were reading, and then again on his pjs. This all involved Noah’s being awake from roughly 3 – 5 am, but falling asleep again — with me, on the couch, until close to 8:30 am.
The next day, he didn’t eat or drink much, but was generally otherwise cheerful and ok. We went up to Tampa to see the aquarium there with Mikki & Claire, and Noah loved seeing all the fish and birds.
After the aquarium, we came home and hung out for awhile, playing with choo-choos at the house and chatting with Mikki & Claire.
It turned out that the beach a block from our house was home to the Gulfport Womyn’s Festival on Saturday, so of course we wandered down there in the late afternoon. We had fun people-watching, listening to the lesbian rock band, and eating. Noah even got his appetite somewhat back and sucked down half of my fruit smoothie.
Mostly, though, we enjoyed the beach and playground.
It was a little windy.
Saturday night was quiet. Thankfully.
On Sunday morning, Noah and I got up early and took a long walk around Gulfport, even finding a little coffee & pastry shop and getting breakfast. After we all got going, we went to Hoop City, one of the family oriented events around the Final Four.
Noah preferred baseball to basketball. And by “playing baseball” I mean 1) being coached by the non-ball-playing mommy to stand in the wrong place, 2) swinging vaguely at the whiffle ball, 3) immediately starting to run towards first base, and 4) running to second base and then out of the baseball play area.
Mostly Noah preferred running around the convention center.
We headed back to Gulfport after about an hour and a half, so Jill could meet Mikki to actually go to the basketball game. That part went very well, as the team she was rooting against lost, and the team she was rooting for won, plus Jill and Mikki got to catch up.
Noah and I didn’t have quite as much fun.
The evening went fine. But about 40 minutes after he fell asleep, Noah started puking again. He barely even woke up, which made getting him cleaned up, into a clean t-shirt, and getting the top layer of his bedding out from under him all the more challenging.
Lucky for me, it was pouring rain, so after all of that, I shook the puke-covered fleece blanket into the bushes by the door and left it hanging over the stair railing to get rinsed by the rain. Same with his t-shirt. Yes, yuck. But it is cruel and unusual punishment to force pregnant people suffering from supernose to deal with toddler vomit.
Also lucky for me, Noah didn’t vomit again. Please let him skip the vomiting tonight.
The trip home was mercifully uneventful, except for stopping in the dirtiest McD’s ever, in Macon. It also possessed the most badly designed indoor playground imaginable. All the way around, ick, and in spite of having been dying to get out of his carseat, where he’d been trapped for nearly 7 hours, Noah cried pitifully that we should “go home now” after very little time in the craptastic playground.
It was great fun seeing Mikki & Claire, playing at the beach with Noah, and for Jill, getting to see some great basketball. But we’re happy we’re home.
Oh yeah, and Netflix, thanks very much for the Thomas DVDs — and they are going back to you first thing in the morning because I cannot tell you how sick of them I am.
