Madison's Blessing and a very long drive....

Last Sunday we had Madison's blessing which was a little crazy since after we scheduled it, we found out that we had to leave the very next morning to drive out to VA for the summer! The blessing went very well and we really appreciate all the friends and family that came to support us...I think we had about 50 people there and it was wonderful to be able to see everyone before we had to leave for the summer! Madison continues to be such a fabulous baby....the last few nights she has slept 8+ hours at night without waking and she still takes really long naps during the day too...when she is awake she is generally content just to sit and watch all the craziness around her! In the last couple of weeks she has really started to smile a lot which is so fun and the other girls love to try to get her to smile. And, just like her big sisters, Madison is filling out pretty nicely these days...no surprise there! I'm curious to see what her weight is at her 2 month check up next week...I don't think she is quite as big as Paris was at that age, but she's pretty chunky!

Our drive to VA was very, very long....but I suppose it could have been much worse. We had to make the drive in 3 days, but we did end up all going in one car which was so wonderful. If Bubba and I had been in 2 different cars, I'm sure I would have had the kids most of the way and it would have been very difficult to be driving and entertaining 2 kids while reinserting a binky a thousand times for the baby! Savannah and Paris did really well and hardly complained at all about being stuck in the car for so long, but they also hardly slept at all which wasn't a huge surprise since my kids have never been great car sleepers. However, after spending 3 days in the car for about 17-18 hours a day and getting only about 6-7 hours of sleep in a hotel each night, I think they only slept for about 2 hours total while driving! Madison, on the other hand, slept amazingly well during the whole drive, and even more amazingly, she still slept great at night once we got to the hotels, even though she had slept all day too! On day #2, everything was going fine until after dinner when Paris told us her tummy hurt. We ended up having to stop 12 times within about 2 hours while the poor thing had a horrible bout (rather 12 bouts) of diarrhea. That was really not fun and did not help our progress on the road....but it finally ended and the next day she was just fine. I guess we had to have something exciting happen....oh, the joys! Anyways, we arrived safely in VA Beach and our apartment is really nice...there are lots of fun parks, pools, stores, etc. that are all really close to where we live so we are excited to explore while we are here this summer!