Vacation!

We just returned from a little getaway to the south coast of Barbados. Although we were only 25 minutes from home, we stayed at an all-inclusive resort on a road we'd never even seen - it was almost like we'd left Barbados (and traveled to another Caribbean island..). It was a wonderful couple of days!! We really needed this little vacation. We went to celebrate Luke's thesis being done!! He hasn't submitted yet, but that should happen in the next 2-3 days. The whole thing is complete, though, which is a huge victory! We'll post more about that in the days to come... The other reason we needed a vacation is because, well, we've been living this Barbados life for 6 months now, and living here is not the same thing as vacationing here. It's just regular life - laundry, errands, cleaning, working, playing, living, etc. plus the adjustment of doing all of these things in a new country/culture/house/environment/community/temperature! We were tired - body and heart. And we really needed this stress-free family time together. It was really wonderful. I felt like I just kept praying "thank you!" as the weather was lovely - sunny except for a huge afternoon rainstorm during nap time, the kids were sweet, healthy, and mostly cooperative, we slept so well in dark, air conditioned rooms (Luke and I went to bed at 9, which is about 4 hours earlier than Luke's been getting to bed lately, so we actually felt rested when Noelle woke up at 5:30), the food was good and plentiful, we drank a lot of fun drinks, Luke and I watched 2 movies (which we haven't done together in months), we played Candyland after Noelle was in bed, we got room service dinners after both kids were in bed, the hotel wasn't too crowded (we wouldn't want to go during the busy season, it was just right), and we came home to our house almost ready to be settled back in for a little while until our trip back to the States. Here are too many pictures of the last few days: