The vacation of a lifetime, Part 2

This is why we loved our room!  Every day we were greeted by an entire family of monkeys!

I know we probably woke up our entire building that first day because we could not contain our kids excitement! 

My personal favorite was this momma and her tiny baby!

They were so close and unafraid of us. So cool! Marisa and my parents came over one morning to experience the monkeys too and they brought fruit!

 One of the kids favorite parts was all of the other animals roaming around. We saw countless peacocks or "peahawks" as our kids call them. They were definitely a favorite of Tyler's! 

The flamingo's were right below our room.

Iguana

the kids called this a crane but I am not sure of its actual name

Agouti were everywhere!

I loved how colorful all the buildings were. Made me thankful I wasn't color blind!

  That first full day was also the day that Ryan was introduced to free ice cream. It was probably his favorite part of the entire vacation and he asked for one pretty much every hour. If you said no, he would just find someone else to ask. Its been a rough adjustment to be back home :P

 While we ate at the buffets for most meals, we had several dinner reservations at the resort's restaurants. The first reservation was for a Japanese steakhouse and it was surprisingly probably my favorite!

 

 

 Ryan, however, enjoyed their spaghetti :P

I didn't get pictures at every restaurant, but we ate at a Mexican restaurant, Italian restaurant, and a steakhouse.  The buffets were definitely fancy! It had a large variety of foods you could pick from, all beautifully displayed.

 Unfortunately, the food and I didn't get along. On Tuesday of the week, I started having tummy trouble that persisted all week until literally a day after we had already gotten home!  -12 pounds later, I am finally back to normal! That is the only major part of vacation that I wish I could have changed but it was simply out of my control. Thankfully, no one else was so negatively affected!

More to come later!

The vacation of a lifetime, Part 1

This past week, we got the opportunity of a lifetime to go to Playa Del Carmen, Mexico with my entire family for our annual vacation.  While family vacations typically happen every year, we have never been to an all inclusive resort out of the country! This was quite the change from years past! We are so thankful to have had this amazing vacation! My parents used money from my grandmother's estate to pay for it so essentially, it was a gift from both her and them. So special. I took over 8-900 pictures so I will do my best to just share the highlights. :)

 Our trip began from home in Ohio on Friday afternoon after Tim got off work. To say the kids were excited is a understatement!

We drove to Pittsburgh, PA and stayed in a hotel with most of the family since our flight was scheduled to leave super early Saturday morning. We tried to tire them out in the pool, but they still stayed up half the night anyway because they were so excited. :)

So sweet! 

The following morning, we successfully made it to the airport and onto the plane with all baggage with 18 people, 9 of which are children! 

How Ryan spent the majority of the flight...

Aunt Rissa

Morgan fell asleep as we were landing! :P

After we got to Mexico and through customs, we boarded a bus that would take us to our hotel about an hour away.

Upon arrival to our hotel, we were given fancy drinks in fancy glass cups and no one spilled OR broke anything!

This was just the beginning of the royalty treatment we felt for the week!

We arrived at the hotel several hours before we were actually able to check in to our rooms and so we had some time to check out the amazing resort and landscape.

I have more of the jungle views later on but this was from our initial walk through..so cool! 

 The amazing beach

 The walkways between the restaurants and lobby were just breathtaking!

 To say we were exhausted by this point was an understatement.  After getting up super early and a long day of traveling, I just couldn't wait to get to our room! It was definitely worth the wait!  While my parents and two of my sisters had ocean front rooms with a great view, my oldest sister and her family and my family had family rooms in the jungle.  At first I was pretty disappointed in our view as we literally could only see bamboo, but we came to absolutely love it and you will see why in our later pics!

 Tim and I's room with big king bed 

 We had a new towel creation every day. The kids enjoyed coming back to the room each day to see what it was going to be.

The kids room had a fun balloon creation for them, a basket of candy, and new beach toys!

 This girl was definitely pleased

Most of our meals were at one of the buffets. Our kids grew pretty good at drinking from wine glasses! 

Every night at 8, they had a special kids disco event where they would have a special game with kids and dance. The kids LOVED it!  This was the first night and only the beginning of the fun!

All in all, our first day was a huge success! 

More to come later!