Cruise Vacation - Day 7 (SAT)

Today is the day we go home. We got up at 6:30 am to get to breakfast at 7am. This would be our only meal of the day, so we filled up! Got back to the room and finished packing up. We had been told to meet a group of people at 8:30am, but because we didn't have any bags that we checked, we could leave whenever we wanted. When I found that out, I was DYING to get off the boat and go home to see my babies! I had not really thought about them all week, and that morning, I turned on my phone and was looking at pictures of them and my heart started to ache for them! It was going to be a LONG day! I told Tim that we should get to the airport early and maybe they could get us on another flight earlier. Our original flight didn't leave Miami until 2pm, so I figured they HAD to have one earlier. We discussed it round and round and Tim's point was that yes, we could get to the airport earlier (as it was we had to wait there for 5 hours), but say they didn't get us on an earlier flight, we could be waiting another 1-2 hours on top of that. So I finally gave in and said that was fine. (After we got there, we did find out that they had a flight that left around 10:45am, so had we gone early, we may have had a chance...o well ) Around 8:30am we went down and got off the ship. Then we met the Napa staff who put us on a bus to take us to the airport. When we got there, it was super busy, so we had to wait in line over 30 min. to check in. We didn't have any bags to check, so it went fast once we got up there. Then we got in a line to go thru security. They saw that I had 3 bags (because Napa gave us so many gifts, we ended up having an extra bag) and they made us get out of line and told us we needed to check a bag. We didn't want to do that, so we got out of line and spent some time cramming and we got all the stuff in the 2 bags each that we went with! So then we got to our gate and we waited and we waited and we waited. I made some phone calls and walked around to pass the time. Then we had our first flight that was pretty long! It was almost 6 hours from the time we got on/off the plane. Then our flight from LA to Fresno was super short, less then 45 min.! When we got off the plane, I was practically running to the car. Tim asked me if I was more excited coming home or going, and I told him it was pretty close! I couldn't wait to get home to see all my babies! We got to Tim's parents house (who watched our kids for the week) around 9pm and I ran into the house and woke up Emma first. She was SO sweet. After she was good and awake, she realized that it was Mama and Papa who were there and she looked at me and got tears in her eyes and said "Mama, I missed you so much, my heart was sad when you were gone". I lost it. It was so good to be back and holding her. Then we woke up Joy and Lucas and sat and held them for a bit before loading them in our car and driving home. Joy couldn't stop talking to us on the way home, it was so cute. We told them how we brought them stick horses back and they wanted to see them as soon as we got home.

Here are the girls in the necklaces we brought back for them:


It was such a wonderful trip and I feel that our marriage really needed that time to reconnect. With life that happens every day, it's hard to find time for each other. I am very thankful for the time I had with my love and I could not have done it with out his parents and his sister that took that week to care and love my children. I feel very blessed.