Returning to a city where you used to live is a bit like entering a time warp.\u00a0 Everything seems oddly familiar yet somehow different.\u00a0 This weekend hubby and I returned to our college town of Jacksonville, Florida where we spent time catching up with friends and showing our girls around our old home.\u00a0 We have not been back in nearly 3 years so it was all new for both girls (Honeybun\u00a0remembers nothing about the other three times she came at 3, 15 and 21 months).\u00a0 We returned to our alma mater and drove the girls through, pointing out all the places we used to live and where we used to have class.\u00a0 We visited the bookstore (and did run into one of my professors) and got each of the girls a book and Sugarplum declared \u201cI wanna go to Co-llege.\u201d<\/p>\n
Due to extreme circumstances (Hubby had a meeting one day and a stomach bug the next), I spent a lot of time out and about by myself with the girls.\u00a0 As we sat places having a snack or eating meals, I found myself expecting someone I knew to walk in the door at any moment.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have these expectations at home and it\u2019s weird that I kept having these thoughts while in Jacksovnille.\u00a0 We don\u2019t have a whole lot of friends left in the city and it\u2019s a HUGE city (largest city by population in Florida and largest by area in the entire US!) so realistically running into someone was extremely unrealistic but nonetheless, I kept my eye on the door (it also kept me entertained while the girls ate ridiculously slow as usual).<\/p>\n
We ran out of things to do\u00a0 halfway through the 2nd<\/sup> day (I was trying to save the good things like the zoo for when daddy was feeling better) and we all started to get bored and lose our minds a little bit.\u00a0 Being in the hotel room was hard because hubby required immediate access to the toilet and having a potty-training toddler made this difficult.\u00a0 We also didn\u2019t have a whole lot of toys (since we weren\u2019t planning on being in the hotel that much) and the girls took to spending their time chasing each other around and making each other mad.<\/p>\n We did a lot of shopping (my hunt for shorts that fit continues\u2026) which was nice at first but the girls quickly lost their attention spans and started chasing each other around and making each other mad (sound familiar?).\u00a0 By the middle of the 2nd<\/sup> day we were just plain bored.\u00a0 I was also left to eating out with them by myself.\u00a0 Food in the room was not an option (food smells=hubby vomit) and I tried to use as much time as possible.\u00a0 I tried taking them to some of my favorite places that we don\u2019t have at home but many of them were gone and we ended up sticking to the chain restaurants (so much for something new).<\/p>\n Overall the girls were very good for me under the circumstances, but I will say I was more than happy when by day 3 daddy was feeling well enough to venture out with us.\u00a0 During this ordeal I realized that while being a stay-at-home mom is extremely difficult, being a stay-at-the-hotel and alone-with-the-kids-in-a-different-city mom is even harder.\u00a0 Usually I really like travelling and find we argue as a family less, but I can actually say this time that I am glad to be home!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Returning to a city where you used to live is a bit like entering a time warp.\u00a0 Everything seems oddly familiar yet somehow different.\u00a0 This weekend hubby and I returned to our college town of Jacksonville, Florida where we spent time catching up with friends and showing our girls around our old home.\u00a0 We have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tiny-travellers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2531,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions\/2531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}