After the longest, busiest day of her life, with no nap, and the latest she’s ever gone to bed, she finally slept in the latest ever too, until 8:30am. So by the time we all got up and moving, we had pretty much missed breakfast. Papa took her down to get a bowl of cereal to bring back to the room while we finished getting dressed and packed up.
She requested an Elsa braid, and although I don’t know how to French braid, and I’m really not very good at little girl hair, I did my best, and it looked pretty cute. I just need to get some more practice!
We finished packing up, checked out of the hotel, and get everything loaded back into the back of the Jeep. We made a quick stop at Dunkin for some munchkins and coffee, and then hit the road again towards home.
We took back roads all the way home from Orlando to Tally, and made a few little side-stops on our way home. We also played “Duck Duck Jeep,” which is just a “thing” Wrangler drivers do, leaving rubber ducks on other Jeeps, that Emmie was super excited to participate in.
Our first little side stop was at this 100-ish-year-old general store out in the middle of nowhere, that still sells locally made products like jams, honey, relish, pickled veggies, and dry goods & beans, and grind-your-own coffee, that we got to watch some other customers grind themselves with this old school machine, which was so cool, and it smelled amazing.
Our second stop on the way home was this old school hot dog stand for lunch, which was a very neat, very eclectic little spot, with really yummy food for very affordable prices.
Mama and I both got two “short” dogs, chili for one, slaw for the other, and Papa got one short chili and one long slaw dog. Then we shared the onion rings and fries, and Emmie had a corn dog, of which she only ate the dog from the inside and none of the “corn” part, because she’s a weirdo 😉
Our third stop on the way home was at the Rural King in Ocala, for Emmie to see the baby chicks, and do a little shopping there. And of course we found a few more Jeeps to “duck” on our way inside.
After seeing the chicks, and her thinking Papa was actually buying one for her (and me adamantly saying NO we’re not having a chicken for a pet), she had a legit breakdown in the middle of the store, sobbing crying screaming, “I just want a chickie! I thought Papa was getting me a chickie!” So we got her calmed down, and found a few small prizes for her instead.
And then lo & behold, when we got back out to the Jeep, two ducks were there waiting on us, from two other folks who had been ducking jeeps in the same parking lot we had ducked on our way inside!
She fought it a while, but eventually she fell asleep in the car on the way home, for the last 30-ish minutes or so of the ride.
After making it back to Tally, we went straight to Grammy & Papa’s house where I had left my car for the weekend, and we transferred all of our stuff from their car to mine. Then we went to meet up with Nana, Jeff, and Addison for dinner at Gordo’s.
Jeff said Addison hadn’t napped much during the day, so she was super tired. But she still ate tons of fries & fried fish at dinner, and then passed out on the ride home as usual.
Once Addie woke up at home though, we had just enough time to give her the Disney souvenirs that Emmie and I had picked out for her, and she loved them.
It was so sweet seeing these precious sisters back together again!
Bedtime for Addison was easy peasy, but Emerson was overtired and fought it hard. Eventually, Jeff let her lay down in the bed with him for a little while, and once she was finally sound asleep, he picked up and carried her back to her bed where she spent the rest of the night.
I opted to spend some time putting all these photos on Facebook after getting them narrowed down, but by then it was too late for me to try to write the blog posts as well. So even though most people have probably already seen the Facebook photos by now, I still wanted to write it all out on the blog to save here and share from here as well.
I had wanted to get to bed early after our big weekend, but I ended up staying up late, so that I could feed Addison a very late night bottle. Today is now Monday as I’m writing this, and she had tubes put in her ears this morning. So she couldn’t eat past midnight last night, so I stayed up to give her a bottle at 11:30 p.m., in hopes that she wouldn’t be so super starving this morning. It went well, and I was able to get her back to sleep easily last night, but that meant I only got about five and a half hours of sleep. It’s just now about lunch time, so I’m hoping that maybe I can get a little cat nap in here soon, when she goes down for a nap in a bit too, and I’ll write and post the regular Monday blog later tonight as usual.
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