That Time We Attempted a Family Vegas Vacation

So initially I was going to be posting about our first real family vacation in a loong time. I made so many great plans and packing went so smoothly, and I was so excited. It was going to be great! When we left for the trip, I kept kind of thinking about how I didn't take our family road trip pic or play "Holiday Road" (I love playing that for road trips), but I didn't think it was that important. 

When I planned this, we were going to see a Lion Habitat, the Shark Reef Aquarium, The Hulk at Madame Tussaud's, go on the High Roller, eat at the Sugar Factory, plan a day at the Adventure Dome, go to the Children's Museum, play at a container park...so many fun things! I was going to do a big breakfast every morning and let the girls pick whatever they wanted. I even did a grocery order to our AirBnB for eggs, milk, juice, etc. We brought bacon, cereal, waffle mix and our maker. It was going to be GREAT! About a week before the trip, Cara gets Pink Eye and I got the flu, so we were nervous, but by the time we left were both doing great. The day we left Gwen started to get pink eye, but we had some eye drops for Cara we brought with us to help her get over it.

The drive down went so well, the girls hardly had any melt downs, we only had to make one stop for stretching, bathrooms, and water refills (in Toquerville, so we had only a tiny bit left of our drive). While that city felt a little cult-ish, it wasn't a horrible stop. Unfortunately, the 2nd half of our drive was the biggest part of the elevation change, and my right ear just wouldn't pop, no matter what I did - yawn, chewing, swallowing, rubbing over and over - it just wouldn't pop. By the time we got to the house my ear and jaw were KILLING me! We decided to order dinner to be delivered so that we didn't have to go out, I was almost in tears over the pain.

Unfortunately, dinner didn't go as great. They had trouble with my order and had weird issues with the chicken nuggets for the girls...it was weird. We put the girls to bed and just relaxed while I tried to get my ear to feel better. 

Luckily the next morning my ear and jaw were filling much better so I thought it would be on the mend. We went out to a playground to let the girls play before the Lion Habitat opened up. I kept thinking how many germs were on the playground, but we made sure to clean hands as much as we could before leaving. We headed over to the Lion Habitat and had the coolest experience. We got to see the workers feed the lions and get really close to them. We got to see their one giraffe paint a scarf and were so close we could almost touch him. Then we let the girls feed lettuce to the giraffes, they seemed to love that. We were about to leave when ALL the lions suddenly burst out roaring for about 2 minutes...it was the coolest sound and experience. We're not sure why they did (one of the female lions was making a cough roar sound so we assumed that started it, but no idea what it was). I tried to record it, but they stopped right as I started. 

We went back to the house for nap time, but it was kind of later than normal, so nap time didn't go as well as we had hoped, but it was fine enough..so I thought. After that we went to the Shark Reef Aquarium. What I didn't know is that the big Rose Bowl game (Utes VS Oregon) was playing nearby so parking was a firm $25, no matter what. I thought we'd be parked for a while so I convinced Larry it was fine. We went and did the aquarium, and it was REALLY cool. However, I was starting to rush the girls because I was getting stressed on time (we had a bunch of things to squeeze in and traffic on the strip was a nightmare - I can't believe I forgot that part). So while we enjoyed the visit, it was quicker than it should've been, in hindsight. We then drove over to Madame Tussaud's. Luckily that parking was free, but we did have a ways to walk. The girls were kind of getting tired, but I figured it would be worth it once we got there.

We got there. Then I quickly realized this one might have been a waste of money because we only went to see the hulk and the girls had NO idea who anyone else was in the whole museum. So it wasn't as exciting. I couldn't even kind of explain who the people were because they hadn't seen most of the movies/shows or heard most of the music of the people so we basically just rushed through that as well. They did end up liking the hulk part and they got to do a 4d movie (Lucy and I waited outside for that one). So it wasn't a total loss, but not worth what we spent. By this time we decided it was dinner time (a very late dinner) so we were walking looking for the restaurant I found, the girls all having meltdowns because they were getting tired and hungry and I'm just yelling at them to stop whining and just keep going (yes I feel horrible about how I was with them). Around this time my ear and jaw were starting to hurt all over again so I was getting extra cranky. We FINALLY find it and by the time food comes, Lucy is in full melt down mode and won't touch her food. Not only that, but she just keeps crying, nothing is settling her. After me taking a few bites of my food, I take her out of the restaurant so that those around us weren't TOTALLY disturbed. She would NOT calm down for anything. So we took the rest of our food to go and then decided we were done for the night. Unfortunately, Cara was starting to cry because I told her we could have ice cream after dinner, but we were NOT sticking around for that so I told her we could have it another night (she didn't like that answer). 

So now we have the LONG walk back to our car, all 3 girls crying over something or other, I'm in a TON of pain, Larry's just trying to keep the peace because all his girls are freaking out right now. It was a NIGHTMARE!

So by the time we get home and get the girls down for bed I'm commiserating to Larry about how horrible the night went and how I'm in so much pain and I don't know how I'm going to do the rest of the vacation in pain like this. But he was nice enough to remind me that it was just the first day and we have plenty of days to have fun and learn from our bad moments. 

We decided to make Saturday a recoup day to let everyone recover from this first day. We had plans to meet up with my dad and some of the "misfit" kids for dinner, but other than that we'd take it as a chill day. I still made a big breakfast, but we were lazy all day. It was a nice day, but my jaw went back to hurting really bad as we got closer to dinner time. I still couldn't open my jaw very well to eat (it felt like after I got my wisdom teeth out). We were able to make it through dinner fine enough and visit for a while, but the girls got restless and wanted to leave so we headed home after a few hours together.

After the girls went down I started to make comments to Larry about how my eyes were burning like I was tired, but I didn't feel tired. We watched a movie and while we were watching it my eyes were watering pretty bad. By the time the movie was over I wiped my eye and noticed I had the same green goop that the girls got right before their pink eye showed up so I had a feeling I was getting it too. I already had plans to go to the Urgent Care nearby in the morning so I figured if I did get it I'd already be at a medical facility. 

This morning and my eyes were so gooped up I could hardly open them so I just knew I had pink eye. We had breakfast and went to the insta care and they confirmed I had pink eye and a bad ear infection so they set me up with antibiotics and eye drop prescriptions. We decided we were done with our vacation at that point, I couldn't keep saying "we just need to get through the vacation and then we can take care of ourselves." So we went back to the Airbnb and packed up. I reached out to the host to let them know we'd come down with some sickness and needed to check out early. They were nice enough to refund us a couple days. We stopped by the pharmacy on our way out to fill my prescriptions and hit the road. Luckily the drive home wasn't too bad, we got home late and Lucy got a little fussy towards the end, but no accidents and snacks aplenty with movies so it worked out. We got home, had pizza for dinner, and then put the girls down. 

Not a flattering pic...but this is how it started

How I looked once we got home

I made sure to wipe down EVERY single hard surface as I unpacked it and then put every cloth item into laundry piles to be washed. I'll make sure to get those done within the two days we have left of our time off so that everything can be cleaned. I'm kind of glad to have these two days to clean and just try and get healthy as much as possible. Poor Lucy might have pink eye too - her eyes are very very goopy (not red yet, but very goopy). So we'll see how this week goes. All I know is we aren't leaving the house for the next 2 weeks to just get healthy and we're not doing anymore public outings for as long as we can keep that up. Just indoor or backyard fun for a while. 

So that was our hellcation recap. It was NOT a great one. I have decided no more family vacations while we have little little kids. Maybe little weekend getaways, but nothing big vacation like. Our next big one will be our Disney trip we have planned in a few years. Lesson has been learned! Also, apparently I've been horrible at getting pics for things we've done. I need to do better with this....once I feel better.