Vacation!

2 weeks ago I celebrated my 30th birthday.  I was not terribly excited about turning 30 and I told Justin that instead of a party or anything along those lines I would prefer to go on a trip and spend some time together without Madelyn.  After some consideration and taking into the account that I was already going to be well into my 3rd trimester of pregnancy prior to travel, we decided that we would probably be best off staying in the country.  Justin's grandmother has a beach house in Ocean City, New Jersey so we worked out a plan involving dropping Madelyn off to spend some quality time with her Mommom and Poppop, seeing some friends in Philly, and then heading to the beach where my sister Becci and her husband Micah were going to meet us.

The beach house has some history for Justin and I: the first time that I went there with him was the weekend that he proposed.  Then, when we lived in Philly we spent a lot of weekends and random middle of the week days driving down to spend some time there.  So, almost 9 years after we got engaged (we actually got engaged on Labor Day weekend) we were back there spending time together and enjoying some of the same things that we had done early on in our married life.  We didn't take a lot of pictures before Justin's mom brought Madelyn down at the end of the week, but here are a couple:

To cap off a fabulous vacation which included a lot of really good food (Italian at Franco and Luigi's in South Philly for my birthday, cheesesteaks at Pat's, Manco & Manco Pizza on the boardwalk, seafood at the Lobster House...) Justin's mom brought Madelyn down to the beach for her first real experience at the Ocean.  Justin and I did take her to the beach when she was 4 months old, but that isn't really quite the same.

I think that Madelyn would have done a little better with some more time at the beach, she needs a good amount of time to warm up to new things, but since then she has been asking when she gets to go back to the ocean so I think we have planted the seeds for many excellent trips to come.