A week in review

1. Darcy's birthday party with the kids went off quite well.  I kind of got over the birthday parties when my kids hit double digits, but Darcy kept bugging me until I gave in.  We had eleven kids at our house for swimming and fondue.  The fondue was my idea after finding four sets while cleaning our garage.  It wasn't one of my better ideas as the kids would have been quite happy with pizza and soda.  Instead Kelly, Madison and I slaved for hours in the kitchen cutting up food, stirring up different cheeses and chocolates, and sweating in all the heat and stress of timing the food.  Then we didn't get to really enjoy the fondue.  Didn't matter in the end.  Darcy had a blast and so did the kids.
2. I have company.  My sis-in-law and niece arrived last Monday evening and it has been a whirlwind of suntanning, swimming with manatees, game playing, suntanning, coffee drinking, shopping, suntanning, pool time, eating, and suntanning.  Sleeping a full eight hours has been a bit lacking.  It is great to have them here, however, and they will soon be flying back to Indiana and we will have plenty of time to snooze.
3. I finally sent my camera off to Sony repair in Laredo, Texas.  I followed the instructions on the website which were very detailed:  go to the website (which I was on) or call this 800 number.  I called the 800 number and spoke to a nice Indian gentleman named Chris, who obviously was new on the job.  I had a hard time hearing him and he had to spell everything back to me using words that began with the letter.  Example:  "You live in Largo, that is L as in lettuce, A as in alligator, R as in ranch, G as in gas, O as in over.  He did this with everything.  I made a game of guessing what word he would use.  By the time the phone call ended he told me to do what I had already done which was box up the camera with a paper that had my name, address, phone number and the problem written on it.  A week later I received the camera back with a response that said the technician didn't find anything wrong with the camera.  I still can not hook the camera up to my computer and download pictures.  Don't know yet about the battery charging as the battery was charged upon arrival.  In the meantime I'm using my Iphone and old reliable Canon camera, which I really much prefer.  Hail to Canon!  Pfft to Sony.
4. Elliot loves my sis-in-law.  He follows her everywhere and sits outside whatever door she is behind waiting for her to come out.  He now has her routine down pat and today he whined and pawed her legs when she wasn't move fast enough to get outside by the pool with her morning coffee.  When she gets up and uses the bathroom in the middle of the night and then goes back to her room, shutting the door behind her, he howls.  It is like a mini vacation for me.
5. The first three days of our vacation were a tad hectic.  Madison worked full time babysitting three kids each day and Darcy had to attend a high school boot camp to prep her for next year.  It was three days of up early in the morning and going, going, going.  Madison would bring her charges down to our house for a break in the day, along with their large dog.  The dog ran through the house eating up all of Elliot's water and food.  She would mouth all of his toys, jump on the furniture, jump on Elliot, and lie in Elliot's bed.  Elliot was quite happy to see her go.  Maddy and the kids would come in, eat a ton of food, make some type of food whether it was cupcakes or Popsicle, and then leave behind a sticky kitchen floor.  I would chauffeur three kids back and forth to the boot camp, clean up Madison's mess, and sit with Susan by the pool when I had a free minute.  Everyone was quite happy when all of that came to an end.
6. Tom took the girls to swim with the manatees on Saturday so Susan, Kelly and I went to breakfast, the beach, and then out to lunch.  Susan has been walking three or more miles daily using an app called Runkeeper to monitor her progress.  She walked the first day she was here, but I felt guilty that she wasn't keeping it up so I suggested we walk to breakfast.  We left at 7:15 in the morning after Tom and the girls had driven off and hiked the mile and a half to my favorite breakfast spot.  Kelly drove there and took us home thankfully since I arrived at the restaurant looking like I had just gotten out of the gulf.  The day was overcast so Susan hauled us to the beach where Kelly and I did not put on sunscreen, thinking we would only be there for an hour.  Two hours later we went to lunch where I had to suck down two pina coladas just to cool off.  Needless to say, Kelly and I were fried to a crisp.
7. Connie spent a night in a sleep clinic to check for sleeping issues.  This was a recommended by a couple of doctors in her various hospital stays, the last one coming from the lung doctor who also is a sleeping specialist.  Susan and I took her to the clinic, which did not resemble the Holiday Inn, and left her there after watching a video on what to expect.  Connie half halfheartedly watched the video and apparently missed the part on how many wires would be attached to her head, face, and nose with sticky goop.  She was not the happiest person the next morning when we arrived to pick her up at 6:30 am, having had to sit through the removal of all the stuff, which took longer than normal due to her thin skin. She did, however, sleep through the night.  We will know the results of the study in ten days.
8. Back to the swimming with the manatees...the girls had a blast doing just that.  The three of them and Tom rode out on a boat with ten other people to a spring and got to observe and touch briefly several manatees.  They were very educated on respecting the animals and hopefully got quite a few good pictures.  The escapades after the swimming expedition made for the great stories that we have heard twice now through lots of giggling. 
9. I shall follow up soon with photos of this week.  If you can't wait for that, then check out my Instagram at cmkerwin.  It is much easier to post there when using the Iphone.