It’s been a little more than a year ago now that we took our last vacation as a family of three. I was pretty pregnant at that point, but we knew things wouldn’t be the same once the new kid showed up, so we thought we’d treat the original kid to some focused parent time while she could still get it. We had found inexpensive flights to Ft Lauderdale, and so we decided to spend a few days tooling around Miami.

Maya, not quite 2 years old

Funny aside: it really doesn’t work to shop for swim suits in September / October. This appears to be doubly true for maternity swim suits. I wound up purchasing the only suit that fit me in the only store I was willing to stop at.

Maya is funny. She and I occasionally play with some seashells she collected while on that vacation, so she hears me refer to Miami all the time. Since we’ve been working on this post, Sean and I have been discussing these photos and the things we did on that vacation. He looked at her recently and asked her if she’d like to go to Miami again. She gave him her best angry face and said she wanted to go to “Mommy’s-ami, not Daddy’s,” presumably because we found seashells at mine.

Maya and Mommy

We learned a lot on that trip. It was really our first time vacationing when our goal wasn’t to see family or mess around on the beach the entire time. We unintentionally fell back to our pre-kid version of trip planning, which involves getting a good jump on the day and packing in lots of activities. We knew we’d need to keep Maya entertained, so we had beach time and a visit to the Miami Seaquarium built in. But our list also included strolls around town, a list of restaurants to try out, and maybe even a boat trip if the weather held.

Yeah, we way, WAY overshot. Generally speaking, we were lucky if we were out of the apartment, breakfasted, and on to wherever we were going before 10a. And Maya was still taking a pretty solid afternoon nap, so our window for activities was pretty narrow.

Maya and Daddy

We had read that Key Biscayne was a good place to stay for families. We found a nice apartment via Homeaway and also rented a crib for Maya to sleep in. It worked out well enough. The drive from Ft Lauderdale was pretty quick. (Seriously, we saved hundreds of dollars by not flying directly into Miami, and it’s less than an hour car trip between the two.)

Our two difficulties were scheduling and meals. Given our slow start with Maya, we were generally having breakfast somewhere in Key Biscayne, and it just didn’t seem like there were too many breakfast options. We’d drive into Miami, putter around a little, have some lunch, putter a little more, and then head back for a nap. Our intention had been to head back into Miami after nap to do a little more sight seeing, but it just never worked out that way. More typically, we’d play on the beach a bit and then try to figure out where we were going to eat. And the places to eat where kinda swanky. We did reasonably well, in that all the food was really fantastic, but we definitely spent more than either of us thought we were going to.

Cape Florida Lighthouse on Key Biscayne

We also experienced what will forever be known as The Miami Incident. Maya is a really good eater. Even now as a picky almost-three-year-old, she’ll usually try out whatever you’re offering. For instance, on this vacation, she ate a whole plate full of Indian food, a few bites of my grilled octopus, plantain fritters, fish, and who knows what else. She also discovered the wonders of fresh-squeezed orange juice.

We had stopped at a little restaurant by a gas station for breakfast, and each of us ordered orange juice with our food. Sean was holding Maya and letting her nibble on whatever he was eating. Then she got ahold of his juice. It was in a styrofoam cup, so we didn’t really see how much she was drinking, but whatever, it was cute. Of course she liked the wonderful fresh-squeezed orange juice. It was a lovely thing to wash down her breakfast empanada.

Miami

We took the toll road into Miami and were driving along the main drag enjoying how fantastically Miami everything looked. Sean was hunting for good parking, and I was in the back seat with Maya. She spat up a little bit, which is rare, but no big deal. I grabbed a burp cloth to wipe her up (yes, at nearly two years old, I still carried them around; they’re good for spill clean-up). And she just kept vomiting. She looked as startled as I felt. I tried to catch it in the burp cloth, but it was no use. The poor girl was basically sitting in a puddle of regurgitated orange juice.

Sean pulled us into the parking lot of a Walgreens and ran inside to procure cleaning supplies of some kind while I set about giving Maya a wet wipe bath and changing her clothes. He bought a couple jugs of water and some paper towels and did the best he could to de-barf the car seat. This sort of thing was so out of the ordinary for Maya that we actually thought she might be sick, so after all that craziness, we gave up on the day and drove back to our hotel.

Maya loved her beach ball

But wait, there’s more. Maya was crazy about balls, so we bought a package of beach balls to take on our trip. We blew one up, and true to form, she LOVED it. That’s all she wanted to play with. She’d toodle around the apartment rolling it around and laying on it. This very same day, she was playing in the apartment after her nap (yeah, not sick at all), and her ball got the best of her. She accidentally rolled forward on it and cracked her chin on the tile floor. She cut it open and of course it bled profusely. After a trip to the drug store (our second that day!), she was band-aided up and feeling a little better, but I think all of us were a little weary of our “vacation” at this point.

The Miami Seaquarium was neat, but not what we expected. There were some sea creatures in tanks and whatnot like you’d find at a traditional aquarium, but really the draw here seemed to be a series of shows instead. We saw dolphin shows, killer whale shows, sea lion shows. It was really neat, and when Maya was watching it, she seemed interested. Often she was messing around playing in the seats instead. She liked getting splashed because then she could lick delicious salt water off her face. But often, the movement between shows was what she really enjoyed. They had a playground there, and of course we let her play there a bit between shows.

Killer whale

Generally speaking, I remember the vacation fondly, and I think most of it has to do with our very simple time spent together playing on the beach. Also, till I looked through these photos, I didn’t realize just how much Maya has grown up in this past year. She’s leaned out and lengthened a lot. I love, love, love our silly, expressive, independent, almost three-year-old girl, but I do miss the pudgy almost two-year-old she was then. This was still in that sweet spot where she liked to be held, where she rolled with the punches a little better, where she was generally content. She still had her baby face and her baby body, at least a little. She still let Sean take her picture once in a while. These days, she’s much too busy for all that.