We have arrived!

I decided a few weeks ago to take my three children to Pensacola, Florida to visit my dad. You do the math - 1 adult, 2 preschoolers, 1 toddler, 3 airplanes, 12 hours and 4 missing pieces of baggage. Yep that's right - the answer is 1 giant headache.

We set out for the airport at 5:30am. The flight to Denver was a breeze. The flight to Atlanta wasn't too bad. Emmarsyn screamed for about 5 minutes as we descended. A sympathetic flight attendant came and talked to her. She relaxed both of us and Emmarsyn fell asleep. I looked over at the boys and they were drifting off too. So for about 30 minutes on the way into Atlanta, I enjoyed my flight. The flight to Pensacola - now that was a different story. After a long wait on the runway we finally took off into storms kicked up by Hurricane Dolly. Fortunately for our luggage, it was on another plane with a pilot that had the sense to return to Atlanta. Lucky luggage. However, that left me with very little with which to accommodate my three children on our first night in Pensacola. After getting a loner car seat and a promise from Delta to have our luggage within the next 12 hours, we were off. We made a brief stop at Walmart for diapers and headed to grandpa's house. After a restless night getting kicked by Emmarsyn (her bed was of course one of the lost pieces of luggage), a day of thunderstorms that is mostly a blur, and 800 mg of Advil, I finally got a good night's sleep Wednesday and the headache went away.

So I consider today to be the first day of our vacation. We started with a little shopping, spent a few hours in the pool, played with some new Star Wars toys, and had a nice birthday dinner complete with cake and ice cream for grandpa. All the kids (and the birthday boy) have gone to bed and I am blogging and watching the Food Network. Who could ask for more?