Super-Relaxing Week 7

Preface: I just realized this reads TOTALLY like a "product placement" blog post. This is hilarious because it's been nearly 10 years since I stopped receiving products to review in the blog. The truth is that I'm willing to share links instead of writing down names of places and brands here. 

I'll do weeks 5-6 later, too bad they're pretty stressful/productive. ;-P

Week 7/14 ends today and it was a good week, yay! Some well-deserved R&R.

Sunday was a super-busy day of working on the yard (an extension of our week 6, more on that later), but early on Monday morning we drove down to Florida and... were welcome by a truly fearsome thunderstorm. :-(

We stayed at dear friends' house and left the next morning for Orlando where my mother-in-law had an appointment at a Brazilian bank to open an account (after closing the joint account she had with my father-in-law who passed away last August). We did some shopping after that and had lunch at one of our favorite buffet restaurants before checking into our hotel (we had an offer we couldn't refuse: 3 nights for 100 to go to a time-share presentation) and guess what happened the moment we pulled into the hotel?

Yes, a massive thunderstorm started, massive! This would be the pattern for most of the week and we learned to enjoy the morning and early afternoon at the pool and prepare for the rain later. It was a glorious week, the only downside was sharing a room with the kids, if you know what I mean. I never say that kind of stuff here, but I just read dooce's latest post (should I link? Nah... if you read her you'll understand, if you don't you won't, so it's moot), so I've been "badly influenced." ;-)

I thought I'd have more to say, but apparently not... the time-share presentation (that family members who went through different ones were all joking about and saying they would twist our arms into buying) was painless enough and, because we had a commitment on the next to last morning, we decided not to go to any (ridiculously expensive) parks and it was the best decision ever because the pool and lazy river at the hotel were amazing and we got to fully enjoy them. We grocery shopped and ate two meals (breakfast and either lunch or dinner) at our room and went out to eat once a day.

On Wednesday one of my husband's friends posted a great review of this pizza place on Facebook and lots of other friends commented enthusiastically, so we had to go there! And on Thursday we took the boys for Häagen-Dazs ice cream and some of us ended up eating at Panera (for the second time -- dinner on Monday was there too) -- see, I don't mind mentioning some brands, places, just not all of them! ;-P

I had a couple of outings with my mother-in-law to the grocery store and also the mall and outlet -- the men wanted nothing to do with those places (they did go once, but only because Kelvin needed swim trunks -- he forgot his at home!!) -- and we had a good time, very productive on Thursday, shopping for my sister-in-law M (married to "K4").

My youngest brother-in-law (K4) who lives in Montreal arrived in Orlando late on Thursday night with his two boys. Yesterday, after a last time at the pool and lazy river we drove Northwest to the Florida panhandle where we will spend a week at the beach with my husband's whole family (except one sister-in-law, M). We are already together at a hotel now, having met up with K2 and family (who were at our house and drove down) and K3 who arrived from Qatar with his family on Thursday (they teach at the American school in Doha).

It's lovely to be together, we just miss my father-in-law a lot. More later, hopefully...