Family Vacation

We debated back and forth where we should go for our first family vacation and we always seemed to come back to the same location - Fort Myers Beach.  This beach is significant to Robert and myself for several reasons which played a big part in why we chose to vacation there.

Only a year after Robert and I started dating we decided we would pack up and move with Robert's job to Florida.  He was transferred to Fort Myers - a city neither of us had even heard of, much less knew anything about.  I had one condition for this move however, and that was if I was going to move to Florida then I wanted to live at the beach - so that's what we did.  We lived on Fort Myers Beach for two years and met wonderful people whom we still call our friends.  We moved off the island and lived in Fort Myers for three years where we purchased our first house and had our first child.  All of these nostalgic reasons brought us back for our first family vacation.

Amanda was kind enough to shoot a few pictures of us on the beach so we could remember our time as a family - we may have two pictures total of all four of us since Mattie was born.  Thank you again, Amanda.  I failed to mention that having one of my besties in Fort Myers was also an added bonus.  I miss you!

We didn't do anything extravagant on our trip.  Our main goal was to not have an agenda/itinerary and to move at a really slow pace so that our normally fast-paced lives could catch a break.  We beached it for the first couple of days - my absolute favorite thing to do.  Mattie Jane is actually pretty easy to handle, at least in comparison to what Evan was like at her age (surprise, surprise).  She simply played in the sand while Evan bounced back and forth between the water and his sand castles.

We did the "sting ray shuffle" to avoid stepping on any sting rays and getting stung - and it's a good thing we remembered the season...

When we weren't at the beach, we hung out by our pool.  Evan and Mattie preferred to skinny dip - actually, if it we weren't in broad daylight we may have all been skinny dipping :)

Robert took advantage of the naked situation and decided to have a father and son moment.  To discourage Evan from peeing in the pool, he proudly taught him how to pee off the dock.  Classic.

We did spend one touristy day at the Shell factory where we experienced a really sad petting farm - if you can even call a few goats a farm, but the kids enjoyed it.  We observed several neglected animals, played on an extremely dilapidated playground and took some amazingly cheesy photos.  All in all, we had a ball.

This trip made me happy.  We rented the perfect beach cottage, the weather was absolutely amazing and we all got to spend an entire week together - just us.  We will be returning, hopefully on an annual basis.

Fort Myers Beach...

 
And just a quick note - we may have sold ourselves on the whole van idea.  After renting one to make our trip, we realized just how valuable they can be...

More pictures in the gallery.