Well yup, that’s about what it felt like! I know, not a very flattering photo of myself, but its funny now. And it truly did sum up the inward thoughts of my life back then! I say inward, because I tried my best to be joyful, even when it was hard. But as you can see there were moments when my overwhelm and exasperation showed! Overwhelming yes, but looking back, funny times.

This trip feels like forever ago, but really it was only three years. A LOT has happened in our lives in three years. I am very thankful to be where we are now. Truly this season of life was so so incredibly BUSY that if we hadn’t taken these photos I honestly might have forgotten that we even did this crazy trip.

Three years ago, when we had (only) five children, two of them being only one year old, we DROVE to Florida. This is normal right? LOL I’m not sure what we were thinking other then, let’s do this! I have family in Florida and we really wanted to visit them, so we made up our minds to do it.

The kids actually traveled amazingly! We said lots of prayers and God was gracious. Twenty plus hours of crying children would have been miserable.

We were very blessed to have a friend who was available to come be a nanny for us. We paid for her to have a small house to herself. She’d come over in the mornings and spend the day. She had friends in Florida as well so most evenings she was able to spend time with them. This arrangement enabled us to have some time to get away with just the three older boys every now and then.

My parents were also down in Florida over the same time so that was a huge help in the department of childcare. We did a lot of “divide and conquering” between the 5 adults.

One evening we hit the beach to take all these family photos. Our “nanny” so kindly took them for us. As you can see we are a normal family when it comes to taking photos with little children. It was actually really hilarious!

There were more photos from this session but I think you get the point. Thankfully my husband and I were able to sneak a few shots of just the two of us in, despite the kids’ shenanigans.

Speaking of shenanigans, did you ever look up the word to see what it actually means? Well I did. It means silly or high-spirited behavior; mischief. That pretty much sums up our photo shoot with five kids, on the beach, 2 of them being only a year old. Good times!

Vacationing with young children is what you make it. I already knew before we went down that it wouldn’t be easy. We went anyways because we wanted to visit family. We also wanted to push forward with making memories as a family despite having two babies. I am so thankful for these photos, they remind me of a time in my life that was so amazingly busy that I truly forgot most of it! But we survived, we survived enough to be at a place eight months later, a very unexpected and unplanned place!

About eight months after this vacation found us welcoming another baby into our family. But that is a different story altogether. Want to read about how that happened? Click here for our foster care to adoption journey.

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