Ah, the quality of phone photos! But I’ll take that over lugging around my heavy camera or not having any images from our stay in Pensacola Beach… Graeme’s first road trip/first vacation/first time at the beach/first a lot of things.

We left after Graeme’s in-the-middle-of-the-night feeding (which ended up being around 5am) the morning of Saturday, July 11th. My dad (Papaw), my mom (Mimi), Neil, myself, and Graeme fit perfectly (with all of our stuff and Graeme’s toys, etc) in my dad’s Suburban and we all rode comfortably, except Graeme who hated being in the car seat let alone being in the car for as long as we were… A 9 hour drive took us 14 hours. At least an hour of that time was taken up by awful bumper to bumper standstill traffic on the interstate in Alabama. The rest taken up by stopping to nurse Graeme and feed ourselves, stopping when Graeme just COULD NOT be in the car seat any longer, and stopping to get Graeme asleep so that he wouldn’t know he was in the car seat. I won’t lie – while we were stopped in the God-awful traffic in Alabama, we actually got him out of the car seat just to give him a break.

I tend to get car sick if I look anywhere but out the front window while riding so I rode in the back with Graeme while he slept so I could shush him back to sleep if a bump in the road woke him up. While Graeme was awake and happy – which didn’t happen often or for long – Neil and my mom took turns entertaining him. Honestly, knowing how much he hates riding in his car seat, Graeme did better than I thought he would. We arrived at our condo on a private beach on Pensacola Beach around 7:30pm Saturday evening.

Before we even unloaded the car, we checked out the beach that was right in front of our condo. Gorgeous, you guys. I’ve never stayed as close to the water before. I wanted to see it for myself, but more importantly, I wanted to see Graeme see it. Not that he’s old enough for it to matter, but you know.

The next morning we attended a church my mom had found over the internet – Gulf Breeze United Methodist Church – at their campus called Worship on the Water! How cool!! We sat at picnic tables under umbrellas and listened to a young youth pastor preach on Psalm 23. Later that night we ate at the only restaurant within walking distance from our condo (because we promised Graeme we wouldn’t put him back in his car seat for a few days) – Peg Leg Pete’s. It was good so we ate there again Monday night.

We bought a inflatable ducky bathtub for the vacation and I would say that Graeme loved it – which you can’t tell by his face in the picture below…

My mom brought her paddle board along so on Monday morning, the only day Neil and I spent any significant amount of time on the beach, Neil paddled around while I relaxed in the beach chair. I may or may not have purposefully gotten a tad (read: a lot) pink.

Neil and I had our date night Tuesday evening at the original McGuire’s Irish Pub. We’ve eaten at the Destin location many times so it was cool to eat at the Pensacola location.

Saturday night Graeme slept through his in-the-middle-of-the-night feeding. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday night he slept his normal schedule (only waking up once to eat). Wednesday and Thursday night, however, he woke up every 2 or so hours. Wednesday night he actually stayed awake for over an hour, which led to Neil and myself half-asleep playing with him.

And finally, one last walk on the beach Thursday late afternoon for myself and Neil. It was lovely to have some time alone with him and incredibly sweet of my parents for watching Graeme while we had it.