end of vacation

So it's after 10 pm eastern time, and we are still on the Florida Turnpike. Looks like it will be one very late night for us! We wanted to do so many things today, and to cram them all in, we delayed our leaving until 8 pm. We swam in 2 pools at our resort this morning, and then visited Gigi at her resort and swam in 2 pools there. And then we had to go to the Lego store again before packing, loading up, and hitting the road. Dennis was a little sad to leave, but he's coming home with a van full of souvenir Legos! Gigi gave him something special today: his very own child-sized Nintendo Wii remote and nunchuck, blue and green in color and oh-so-cute! He also has his own Wii game to play, Jump Start Pet Rescue.

At Gigi's resort, he played on the very nice playground. He grabbed a rope to climb up a wall and did a pretty great job, making it almost all the way up before jumping off and saying "boy, that was a lot trickier than I thought"! He's been full of fun chatter this evening, telling each one of us "you have to wear your seatbelt when the driver is driving, that's the rule!". And he's right! He also made up a new verse to "if you're happy and you know it" adding "honk your nose, honk honk". We are singing car songs to pass the miles, and now we're on the interstate finally! Dennis is sleepy and has several fire trucks and cars lined up across his lap tray, trying to stay awake to play with them.

We've had a wonderful vacation, way too short, but wonderful. We are so blessed to have been given the means to treat him to such a costly trip: free Disney tickets in exchange for our volunteer work (and one for Dennis for touring a timeshare), a gift of Sea World tickets from a very special person, lots of spoiling from Gigi and Gran and Pop. It was special for us as well in that we were able to take Dennis to the resort where we spent our honeymoon over 15 years ago, and to share his first Disney experience. It seems like a lifetime ago that we honeymooned there, and we've been back a number of times, but this felt so very special to us to share it all with him. We have never had a theme park experience or vacation like this one: it was all about Dennis, doing what he wanted to do, skipping big coasters to stand in lines to meet characters and get autographs, going where he wanted when he wanted. It was great to experience it all from his perspective, the parks, the shopping, the swimming, the restaurant choices (though we mostly ate in our suite). What a fabulous experience and what a great way to end our summer (because surely we can have some cooler weather now-- it was HOT on this trip)!