Well, the day arrived for us to depart on our vacation. Our once every four year Stuve/Wiser/Maners/Kelly/Faul vacation. We were headed to Williamsburg, Virginia. We had been planning this trip for well over a year. The condo had been paid for, time had been taken off of work, it was written on everyone’s calendars…..we were off!
Well, let me tell you what happened before that though…….
Events leading up to this day were crazy and we weren’t sure if there was going to be a vacation for some of us. The first in unfortunate events was Linda and Terry getting in a car accident. It was obvious that they would not be able to go on vacation. Then, it was unclear if Grandma and Grandpa were going to be able to go with everyone else or if they would need to stay behind to take care of Linda and Terry. The day after the accident, Chris came down with the flu. This was not a good sign. We were dreading what was going to happen next. Flashbacks of two New Years’ ago were in everyone’s minds. A New Years’ celebration gone wrong when Mason came down with the flu. He then passed it on to me, who then passed it on to Cole, who then passed it on to Chris. He was the last one in our family to have it and he happened to come down with it at Cole’s birthday party. Well, it was a domino effect and everyone else in the family came down with the flu. One by one they all dropped liked flies. It was comical. So, everyone was fearing another flu epidemic in the family. This was not a good sign! After Chris got better on Monday morning, Cole got the flu that night. Cole got better and on Tuesday night, Mason came down with the flu. The house was disgusting! Vomit and buckets and old towels and sheets were everywhere. I had to make beds for the kids to sleep in on the floor by the bathroom. Their sheets and blankets were washed in the middle of the night, of course. They couldn’t just throw up on their pillow or on one sheet, no – they had to get it on both sheets, their pillows and their comforters!!! I had had enough of cleaning up vomit and smelling it and looking at it! I decided to get out of the house and do some last minute shopping for our trip. I couldn’t even get away from vomit while I was gone! Someone had thrown up at the store I was shopping at! It was following me everywhere!!! The worst was waiting for my turn to get sick with the flu. I knew it was coming, but I didn’t know when. I was hoping and praying it would hit me before we left on Friday afternoon so I wouldn’t have to worry about throwing up in the car.
Well, Friday morning appeared and we didn’t even know for sure if we were going. We were taking it one minute at a time. Both boys had had a second round of vomiting and I wasn’t sure if it was going to hit them again or not. I decided to pack everyone up just in case. Earlier on in the morning, we had found out that Kelly and Brian were not coming. All of their boys were sick with the flu. Theirs was worse though. They had very high fevers with their flu. They were hoping they could join us later on in the week, but for now, they were going to stay home. It was so depressing. This vacation was not turning out the way we thought it was going to. In the afternoon, we received news that they decided to come on the trip anyways! I was so happy! That’s what we were doing too. I wasn’t positive that we were all done with our flu, but we needed a vacation badly! Even if we all stayed in our condo for the week with the flu, at least we were “on vacation” and staying in a nice condo that was already paid for. 3:00 finally arrived and we packed up the car and left! It wasn’t too long after we got in the car and down the road that Chris passed out the garbage bags. Yes, I said garbage bags. He gave the boys their quick little lecture about “if you’re feeling sick and you think you’re going to throw up, do it in the bag!” Then after he gave the boys their garbage bag, he opened one up and gave me the same lecture. We were all set. We were headed towards Charleston, West Virginia, vomit bags and all! Because of the boys’ sensitive stomachs, we decided to play it safe and eat dinner at Bob Evans (one of Chris’s least favorite places to eat) so the boys could have pancakes with very little butter and syrup. We pulled into our Holiday Inn Express in Charleston about 11:45 p.m. Joe and Paulette and Kelly and Brian were meeting us there. We were sharing a suite with Joe and Paulette. We were so tired and exhausted when we got there that it didn’t take long for us all to fall asleep. We were going to sleep in, take our time in the morning, eat breakfast, get ready and then head to Williamsburg.
Saturday, June 13th, 2009
Our first morning of vacation didn’t go as smoothly as we had hoped. It started off with Paulette’s phone waking us up. I didn’t know what time it was. All I knew was that it was early because I was still tired, and that I could have possibly gone deaf from how loud her ring was! I think she had it set to the loudest volume setting available! It rang and rang and rang, and then it rang some more! I was afraid it was going to wake up the boys, especially Mason who is a very light sleeper. Finally, she answered her phone. Guess who it was? Linda! After Paulette told Linda we were all still sleeping and she’d call her back, we asked what time it was – 6:15 A.M.!!!!!! We were able to go back to sleep for another couple of hours after that before we had to get up. To add to our early morning wake up, we had one bathroom and shower to share for four adults. Well, the problem was that the drain in the shower didn’t work properly. So, after the first person took their shower, the other people who followed got to stand in about 3 inches of soapy, dirty water from the person before them. It was disgusting! Well, we were off! We were making a 6 hour trip to Williamsburg that day. So, the caravan of our three vehicles took off. We probably made it about an hour, if that, down the expressway when Brian darted across two lanes of traffic to pull of the side of the road. We watched Ethan jump out of the backseat, then we saw Kelly jump out of the front seat, then Haley popped out of the backseat and ran over to the grass and leaned over. This was great! Was it the flu? Was she car sick? Well, turned out she was car sick. So, after giving Kelly one of our garbage bags (a.k.a throw up bags), and watching her demonstrate to Haley how to use the vomit bag, we were off to find some Dramamine. After a few u-turns, a few potty breaks, and what seemed like FOREVER, we reached our condo in Williamsburg - The Powhatan Resort. We ended up waiting in the one condo that the front desk had a key to (all the other keys to the other condos were with Grandpa at dinner and we couldn’t get a hold of anyone to find out where they were or how much longer they would be). So, here we were. Our three families standing in one condo. One family with two kids who just got over the flu, and one family who had three people who were running high fevers. It was great! We couldn’t keep the kids from each other. They were so happy to be out of the car that they were running around the condo playing with each other. What were we going to do? We had all been exposed. If we were going to get it, there was no stopping it. After waiting for almost an hour for the other three families to get back from dinner, we finally got keys for everyone else to go to their respective condos. But that was after everyone had to stand outside on the sidewalk for an hour discussing who was going to stay where. Finally, Chris had had enough of waiting for everyone and we left to get our dinner. We were getting sick because we were so hungry. So, we finally got to eat our dinner at 8:45 p.m. While leaving the parking lot of Subway, it was so dark that we didn’t see there was a small cement divider between the lanes. Chris pulled out and started turning left, when we realized that there was a cement divider in our way. Luckily there were no cars coming. Slowly we drove over it and we were on our way. We got back to the condo and the sleeping arrangements were all set. Grandpa, Grandma, Danny, Patrick, and Michael were sharing one condo. Brian, Kelly and their kids were given one condo to themselves since they were all sick. Joe, Paulette, Dawson, Robin, and Rebekah shared one condo. And we shared a condo with Gordie and Sheila. They had the room with the king size bed in it, Chris and I had the room with the two twin beds (which we pushed together), and the boys slept on the pull out couch. The condo was not the best. There was one tub and one shower. So, us four adults had to share one shower. The Orange Lake Resort in Orlando was nicer, but we weren’t going to complain. The one nice thing that our condo had though was a hot tub! Chris was dying to get into the hut tub, but he had to go with Joe to pick up Danny from the airport. So, after I put the boys to bed, I stayed up talking to Gordie and Sheila while we waited for Chris to back. Shortly after midnight, we were in bed!
Sunday, June 14th, 2009
Sunday morning greeted me with Mason waking me up telling me he went poo poo. So, I got up and changed him. He had a little bit of diarrhea, but I didn’t worry about it too much. I pulled out some toys and had him play on the floor in my room so he wouldn’t wake up Cole or Gordie and Sheila. Not too much longer after I was done changing him, I heard strange and unsettling bodily noises coming from Mason. I lifted up my head and asked him if he was going poo poo again. He assured me that he was. So I waited until I thought he was done and until I could handle the smell no longer. So, I laid him down the floor and began to change him. Well, much to my surprise, he was not done going diarrhea! As I laid him down on the floor, little did I know that I was squishing his bodily fluids out and up his back and out onto the carpet! So, at 7 something in the morning, I was cleaning up diarrhea off of my child and off of the carpet in my room. Chris awoke to the sound of me scrubbing the carpet. He said, “Did he throw up?” and I replied, “No, it was diarrhea.”, to which Chris replied, “Well, at least it’s where the bed is supposed to go so it will cover it up.” I cleaned and scrubbed and scrubbed and cleaned and sprayed the carpet with perfume. Then I laid a garbage bag over the spot so we wouldn’t step on it. After that incident, I was not going to be getting any more sleep, so I decided to get up and get ready. We were pretty relaxed the rest of the morning. Service didn’t start until 11:00, and it was only 15 minutes away. Much different than the 10:00 service and 60 minute drive we were used to. So, we took our time getting ready, had breakfast at Burger King, and headed to church service. After lunch at Applebee’s, we headed back to the condo to discuss our plans for the week – who wanted to go where and on what days and so on and so forth. So it was all set – the rest of Sunday was to be spent playing putt putt golf at the resort and playing games, Monday and Tuesday were going to be at Colonial Williamsburg, Wednesday we were going to Virginia Beach and The Naval Museum, Thursday we were going to Jamestown and Yorktown, and Friday was a free day where everyone got to split up and do whatever they wanted. After playing games, the guys and some of the boys playing racquetball, and after everyone went back to their condos, Chris and I decided to end the night in the hot tub relaxing. Well, at least, that’s what we thought. We were sitting in the hot tub relaxing and practically falling asleep, when out went the light in the fan above us, and all we could see was a small ball of fire fall from the fan and land in the water we were sitting in. I jumped out the tub as fast as I could and yelled at Chris to jump out too! I had no idea what had just fallen in the water. Was it just a spark, or was it something electrical and were we going to be electrocuted?! I found my way to the door and got Gordie and Danny (who was over talking with Gordie and Sheila). They came out and checked on everything only to find out that there was a short in the circuit going to the fan. The light worked, but every time they flipped the switch to turn on the fan, it shorted out and we saw the same small ball of fire land in the hot tub. So after much reassurance that I was not going to get electrocuted, I reluctantly got back in the hot tub. First thing in the morning, maintenance was getting a phone call!
playing at the playground while we waited for daddy to pay for putt putt.
showing me his friendship bracelet he made :)
my most favorite picture ever!
chris insisted i get out from behind the camera and have some pictures taken of myself for proof that i was on vacation as well.
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