All Signs Point North

You may recall that on Sept 22 we left for our fabulous 9 day beach vacation to celebrate our 5 year wedding anniversary on Sept 30. You may also recall that that vacation was cut short when I got word that my grandmother had died about 5 hours after we arrived at our beach house. Our 9 day vacation was more like 18 hours.

If I'm to be honest, there were half a dozen (or more?) things that happened in the weeks since we booked the trip that made us think maybe we should not have booked the trip. Like the stream of medical bills and the discovery that we'd be paying our insurance deductible twice, thanks to the planned January birth of MicroTot. Maybe we shouldn't have spent the extra money on the vacation...

Then Grandma fell. But that was a full month before we were supposed to leave. Then her rehab didn't go well and she got discharged to the nursing home unwilling to even try to walk. Then the night before we're supposed to leave she is taken to ICU with more heart problems. I won't lie, I freaked out that night, not knowing what to do. By morning she was better and Mom told us to go ahead. They would still try to come to the beach house on Saturday. We'd invited both sets of parents to stay with us for the weekend, since we had 3 bedrooms anyway. So we went.

We should have known. There were other minor things... We were all sick the week before and Kaycie was still a bit sick when we left. We joked that the salty air had 9 days to get us all well. Ironically we ended up at the doc with Kaycie on Tuesday anyway. Guess it's good we weren't at the beach. And my BFF Sharonda's baby, who I had forbidden to arrive during that week, arrived on Tuesday morning. I didn't make it back from Mom's house in time for the birth, but I did get to visit with him in the hospital Tuesday and Wednesday.

Did I mention that this time around we did something we almost never do? We took out travel insurance when we booked the house. We were thinking that with me being pregnant and having a toddler our chances of using it were probably higher than usual. That insurance also happened to cover vacation interruption due to the death of a family member. We should be getting the entire amount of our beach house rental back. Just in time to pay the hospital for MicroTot. Sigh.