The best ten days of my life

I'm back from 10 glorious days on vacation with my husband! To avoid the crushing depression of having to return to real life, I'm spending today uploading pictures to Facebook and writing this blog post. I spent a LOT of time fantasizing about this vacation, mainly while running, and it exceeded even my wildest expectations. 

I would really like to post the 325 pictures that I already put on Facebook, plus all the ones that didn't make it to Facebook, and spend 8 hours writing a detailed description of all our adventures over a series of 10 posts. But in the interest of maintaining readership on a public blog, I'll do my best to hit the highlights in an amusing manner.

I'm married to a huge Harry Potter fan, so when I found out we were cruising out of Port Canaveral, I knew we had to fly down early to see Harry Potter world. 

 I thought we'd spend the entire day in Harry's village or whatever. I really tried to read the first book (for my 3rd time!) but I only managed to get about 65% done before our visit. I figured it would be like when your friend invites you to their work happy hour, and then you spend the whole time nodding and smiling while they use acronyms you don't get and complain about people you don't know. Actually, teachers are the worst for this, don't ever hang out with them if you're in another profession.

Color me uninformed. Little did I know that Harry Potter was just one little section (out of 7!) of an entire amusement park in Universal Studios. Thank goodness my mom gave me a guidebook and I spent more time reading that then Harry Potter. We spent about 2 hours checking out the Wizarding World.

Whatever Butterbeer is, it's delicious.

 The next 10 hours were spent exploring the rest of Islands of Adventure. Despite the fact that I'd only seen one of the movies featured, it was freaking awesome. Eric said the rides were the best he'd ever been on, and that's coming from someone who grew up less than 30 minutes from Cedar Point.

We were actually IN Jurassic Park.

Saturday, it was time for our cruise. I had three goals.

1. Come back just as white

2. Come back ten pounds heavier

3. Eat soft serve no less than twice a day

I'm sad to report I failed on all three counts. I slathered on SPF50 every morning and reapplied all day, but by the end, I noticed that my skin was no longer the same color as this robe. Even Eric noticed.

Couples that spa together, stay together.

We did eat soft serve twice most days.

Ending a night with softserve cones on the deck - perfection.

The times we didn't we supplemented with brownies or other desserts, which should have made #2 a done deal. I only gained five pounds. Luckily though, I'd already gained a few before the trip, probably due in no small part to my adventures with buttercream. Don't bother looking for it in pictures, I've already sucked in/cropped/hit behind Eric/added an instagram filter as necessary.

Tiramisu and a bread pudding to share.  The waiter asked "May I pour hot vanilla sauce
on it?". Um, yes. 

Totally worth it. I'll gladly eat a salad for lunch for the first month of school in exchange for 7 days of unbelievable cuisine. 

Anyway, I think I know the problem. I went into the trip fully prepared to work out once and only once: a jog on the track so that my Garmin would show I was running in the middle of the ocean. I did that, and it was at a 2:45 minute mile pace, thank you very much. 

This amuses me way too much.

But Eric actually wanted to keep in shape or something. The first morning of our trip, we docked in Nassau at 8:30, and apparently Eric intended to hit the gym first. He ordered room service for 6am. I forgot room service was even an option, so when I woke up to a knock at the door, I was positive this was happening.

I don't have a program to capture video on my home computer and didn't feel like downloading one so you can enjoy that 4 second netflix clip captured on an iphone and uploaded to Youtube illegally. If you don't know what that is, it's the scene from Titanic when they wake the steerage passengers up after they hit the iceberg, but honestly if you don't know what that is I don't know if I can have you in my life anymore.

 I ran 5 miles with this view. 

Then, we did a circuit Eric created at the gym - yeah, I actually lifted weights. I was even still sore from lifting them with Eric in our hotel in Orlando 3 days earlier!

While working out, we met a guy who teaches Insanity classes in NYC. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this, but Eric did the whole Insanity program this spring. By the way, it works. I didn't think you could improve on perfection, but he somehow got even hotter and more chiseled.

So our new friend Sam taught us a private Insanity class Mon-Thu! Again, you can't argue with this view.

Speaking of sexy - you're welcome.

Insanity is one hard workout. I died. I also ran a few times, and did a yoga and a pilates class (because they were free with our room and the other plebians passengers had to pay $12 for them).

Being on a cruise, especially as it pulls away from the pier, is the best representation of humanity I have ever witnessed. Everyone is happy, dancing, cheering, polite, and ready to be best friends with everyone. It's like the polar opposite of being in a Walmart or DMV.

Mexican Fiesta deck party's 400 person conga line Thursday night.

Our cruise stopped in four ports. Once again, I'll try to hit the highlights. 

Sunday: Nassau, Bahamas.

We wandered around, and found a rum distillery with free tours.

Yup.

Back on board, we busted into the red velvet champagne we had brought on board (sounds amazing, doesn't it? It wasn't.) and got pretty for the first cruise elegant night.

Monday: Fun day at sea. We did our first Insanity class, went to the spa, had breakfast, then sat on the adults only deck for like 3 hours staring at the ocean, dozing, reading, and playing chess. How about every week starts like that? Oh, then after dinner we went back up and watched the sunset in a hot tub. 

No big deal, just pure bliss and perfection.

Tuesday: San Juan, Puerto Rico. We walked over to Castillo San Cristobal, a fort that had amazing city views. It was also super high up and we climbed a lot of hills, which may have contributed to my minimal weight gain.

Balls.

A real dungeon! Not going to lie, I mainly wanted to be "imprisoned" here to
better identify with Game of Thrones characters. 

Drinks on the ship were watered down and ridiculously overpriced, so Eric chugged this teeny tiny Coors light for $1!

 Wednesday: Virgin Islands. We docked at St. Thomas.



We did our only excursion of the trip here, taking a Ferry to snorkel at St. John. It was a very generous birthday gift from my dad - I can't thank him enough, because the beach there was absolutely amazing. It's one of the top ten beaches in the world! Plus we got to ride past Michael Jordan's house on the way over.

Michael Jordan's house!

Trunk Bay Beach. We snorkeled here. No words. Also #nofilter

Yeah, I'll allow this, so you can fully appreciate how unbelievable this beach was.
And how hardcore I am for snorkeling without the flippers or life vest.

There was an underwater trail - plaques explaining what you were seeing and where to go along a live coral reef. I really just felt like I needed to pinch myself because I couldn't believe how lucky we were to be there. That's a rare non-sarcastic sentiment in this blog. 

Wednesday night was our last cruise elegant night and we wised up and asked someone else to take a pic. I mean, I am a blogger, after all.



Thursday: Grand Turk (part of Turks and Caicos). 



I was dying to rent a bike to tour the island (it's only 4 miles long!) but we didn't bring enough cash. Instead, we took a cab to "downtown". I got hot walking around, so I just walked off the street into the ocean. I would really like this option more often.

This may come as a relief to you - I don't have any pictures of downtown. Because that's where Eric lost our camera. I had been backing up our pictures to my tablet every night and our camera was super old, dented, scratched, and basically no longer the greatest. Also, when he came back from searching for it to tell me it was officially gone, I was laying on a beach chair with this view. 

I don't think there's any first world pain that could have upset me here.

 To my real life friends and family: he's pretty pissed at himself so let's not ever bring this up.

Because it was paradise, we took a few more iPhone photos.

Friday was our last day at sea. So sad. We weren't really interested in the show that night, so we took advantage of having our private spa all to ourselves!

You may remember my rant about Carnival when we first booked our trip for June and then had to work. As a result, they rebooked us and upgraded us to a spa room. We've never flown first class, or really had any special privileges or anything, so the fact that we had access to a private spa that other passengers couldn't go in was extremely exciting.

Arriving and finding our spa vouches and slippers.

See? PRIVATE. Only 50 of the 4,500 passengers could go!

Special fancy thalassotherapy pool (basically a hot tub).

After the hot tub, we got to go through a series of four thermal rooms that all purportedly have magical powers to make you superhuman. Since I'm always cold, even in the Caribbean, I just liked them because they were thermal and had hot, ergonomic chairs that overlooked the ocean.

Laconium room

Tepidarium

The other rooms were steam rooms so I couldn't get a picture but they were sweet. 

And that was our fabulous, wonderful, just absolutely perfect vacation! To anyone still reading - thanks for indulging me! 

What was your favorite vacation? Anyone been on a cruise? What did you think?

Just another manic Monday - except a million times worse

Words cannot express how happy I am that I took the time to explain in detail my deep seated fear of needles. If I hadn't, none of you wonderful readers would fully be able to appreciate my traumatic experience yesterday.

Eric and I got back from Harrison's birthday party around 11pm on Sunday, and I actually rallied and was up at 5:30 Monday to go for a 5 mile run. Before work, I went to my doctor for a physical, the reason I got the blood drawn last week.

That meant I was kicking Monday morning off with a weigh in. The number wasn't really what I wanted it to be (who am I kidding, it never is, look at the freaking name of this blog), but luckily having a near stranger call me a fat ass to my face recently had prepared me for that.

I brought up my problem with constantly being freezing like I'm on an excursion to Antartica no matter what.

To illustrate, here's a picture from yesterday. I decided to paint my gross chalk boards black. I had to instagram it, because that's really shocking. I've never in my 30 years painted a wall. I'm not sure what went wrong, but I was born without that "make things look nice" gene that all other women seem to have. 

The point is, I was doing manual labor, in August, with no air conditioning, and you can clearly see that I am wearing long sleeves, and what you can't tell is that it's a long sleeved fleece. Yeah.

My doctor thought we should test my iron to look into this. I agreed. That was why I specifically said to the technician (aka my golden angel) "I'd like my iron checked" right before she stabbed me. She had replied "yes, it says that here on your order". 

Well, apparently like half the stuff they were supposed to check for never got checked. My doctor told me I needed more blood drawn. I barely restrained myself from screaming "what the hell did you do with the other blood? It was only 5 days ago, don't tell me you already threw it away! Pull that back out and test it again!". But that didn't seem to be an option, so I tried to resign myself to more needles. 

Things got worse. Somehow, I was coerced into also getting a tetanus shot. Now I was facing two needles. Luckily, my sister got me through my sending me some adorable pictures to focus on.

A very nice nurse gave me my tetanus shot and it actually wasn't as bad as I'd imagined (although it hurts today). Something about my demeanor clued her in to the fact that I wasn't thrilled with the turn of events. It was possibly the fact that I was hyperventilating and yelling "I'M JUST GOING TO STARE AT THIS PICTURE OF MY NEPHEW" while trying to catch my breath. She offered to have the blood taker come to the exam room instead of me going down to the lab. I appreciated her offer, but I really wanted to respond with "unless there's something about this room that allows her to extract my blood without the needle, I don't really see how that will help anything". The ten second walk down the hall wasn't really my concern here.

Side note: When I tell Eric stories, I usually refer to my inner monologue as though that's what actually was said and he ends up really confused. 

On top of all that all this extra torture made me like an hour late for work. It was an adults-only day, which sounds dirty, but I actually just mean I wasn't responsible for caring for children, like I normally am. I hate being late so while I was waiting for the shots I blew up the phones of pretty much everyone I work with, from my boss on down, telling them my sob story and not to judge me for being late, and when I finally arrived, they were all like "yeah no one really cares about you being late". 

Good news though! After work tomorrow, Eric and I are off on vacation! We'll be in Orlando for 3 days, and then on a Caribbean cruise for a bliss filled week. Eric is a major Harry Potter fan, so we're making a stop at Wizard-palooza or whatever in Universal Studios. I've tried to read the first book twice now and could never get into it, but I am trying to force myself to get through it for this trip. I'm 40% done. Now if there was a Twilight world, that I could get on board with. Actually, my BFF Carolyn will be in the REAL Forks while we are meeting Harry Potter, and I'm insanely jealous. And apparently, you can actually go to Hunger Games summer camp, so we will definitely be signing up for 2014. 

If you could "enter" any world from a book or movie, which would it be? I think mine is pretty clear. If there was a Game of Thrones world, I'd sell every possession I own to get there before you could say "Winter is coming". Also, Eric and I have been on the official The Office fan tour in Scranton. We had a drink at Poor Richards and everything!

Harrison's first birthday (subtitle: That time I ate my weight in buttercream)

This weekend, Eric and I went to my hometown of Rochester, NY for probably the most exciting birthday of all time. Not sure if some weird matrix time space continuum thing happened or what, because I'm fairly sure this happened just moments ago.

No lie - never once looked at this picture without tears in my eyes.

He's like ten times that size now, and a whole year old. But we'll get to those precious pictures too.

As if this weekend wasn't exciting enough, we found out right before our trip that my BFF Nicole was randomly going to be in Rochester Friday night! We met up to stuff our faces with barbeque at Sticky Lips. It wasn't my first time having BBQ since going back to meat eating, but it was my best. Then we took classy pictures under the streetlights in the rain.

AND Eric and I finally received our wedding album! I just want to "read" it over and over and over.

so much excitement

After that, I went to a bar in my hometown for what I'm fairly sure was the first time ever. I was never cool enough to have a fake ID, I know, I know, shocking that a blogger wasn't popular in high school. I only lived at home for about two months as a legal drinker: in between college graduation/beginning my first teaching job. I hung out at some bars back then, but they were all in the city, not the suburb where I grew up. I didn't really feel I was missing out, but then I found out that my blog friend Minch was hanging out at a bar like half a mile from my mom's house, so it was on. At age 30, I finally got a little taste of the night life in Greece, NY.

There was a fight. Between two guys that looked straight out of My New Haircut. And I was with my mom. And sober. So essentially.....all I could have hoped for and more.



Eric missed it. He was at the midnight showing of Sharknado in theaters with my stepfather.

I didn't go to bed until 2am. I always stay up the latest when I'm hanging out with my mom.

Saturday morning, I woke up to a text that said "come play with me".

Um, yes please.

I had really good runs Thursday and Friday, so I thought I'd do just a few miles before going over to my sister's. I ran .6 miles, felt like crap, and was like "nope, not worth it, I need to see Harrison NOW". I ran/walked back, woke Eric up, and we spent the rest of the day with the birthday boy.

Harrison got to play in his kiddie pool, and I got to sunbathe.

I wasn't quite prepared for upstate NY August temperatures

We were really concerned about his reaction to the frosting, so we did a trial run with a cupcake before the party on Sunday. He shoved it over a few times, and then managed to find a leftover piece of pizza crust on his tray and ate that instead. This was cause for concern, indeed. Although to be fair by that time the pizza crust did have some frosting and sprinkles on it.

Even with that ominous beginning, my mom and I spent the rest of the night on Harrison's special cake. This was our inspiration.

source

It wasn't one of those pinterest tutorials or anything though, that picture was all we had to go on. We looked at it approximately 5,000 times.

There was a significant amount of prep work involved.

Eric and I stopped at Starbucks after leaving my sister's and had picked up a latte for my mom. This turned out to be our saving grace. Not because we needed the caffeine (although we were doing cake related activities until 1am), but because it provided us with what turned out to be a crucial tool.

And the finished product came out pretty good, if I do say so myself.

Since that was a "smash cake", my mom whipped up these  salted caramel chocolate cupcakes with nutella buttercream frosting. No big deal.

My sister threw an amazing first birthday party, and everyone, even the guest of honor had a great time.

We got him a water table!

 The only imperfect part (besides the fact that we had to leave) was that it was freaking freezing and, as usual, I was 

suffering from numb extremities and bouts of shivering. Luckily my knight in shining armor came to my rescue!

Aren't we just so in love and whimsical??

 An unexpected guest showed up. On Eric's pants.

This caused hysterical screaming from basically every woman there. Tell me it doesn't
look like an alien.

 Frosting attempt #2 was better. He took approximately 600 teeny tiny little finger fulls one by one, but he kept reaching for more, so we figured that was a success.

He wasn't actually upset, I think he was about to sneeze or something, but this
picture is too hilarious to keep to myself.

The aftermath. The actual smashed part required some adult assistance. He wasn't going for it.

I managed to get through my first goodbye in Harrison's entire year on this earth without any tears (from me, he's unconcerned). I cheated and snuck out while he was taking a nap. My relief at his love of frosting really carried me through. 

If you could only have one, would you rather have the frosting or the cake? There are three bald cupcakes in my fridge right now that make my answer pretty clear.

Did you have a fake ID before you were 21? As far as I know, no cops read this blog, so you have immunity. If they do, now is the time to come forward (and thanks for reading and for your service!).