Plans change

Friday we loaded up our cars and headed over to New Smyrna Beach with 9 glorious days of sand, sun and fun to look forward to.  Ashton spent most of the drive over telling me all about the swimming he was planning on doing in the condo's pool.  That boy LOVES to swim.  It has been a rather large adjustment not having a pool the past 1 1/2 years.  Living in Florida enables you to pretty much swim year around, so the lack of a pool is definitely felt by all...especially him.

On the drive over Ashton mentioned briefly that his ear was hurting him.  I asked if he would like me to take him to the doctor, but he seemed to think it was fine and we dropped the conversation.

We got to the condo, unloaded all the stuff we brought with us, and loaded back up in the car to head to Publix.  With our car then full of lots of things we only buy on vacation (ie. sodas, cookies and the such) Ashton complained again of his ear aching.  This time I told him we were going to go back to the condo, unload our groceries, and then head to the ER to see a doctor before he woke up in the middle of the night screaming in pain.  He thought that a good idea.

We made it to the Bert Fish Medical Center and waited about 2 hours in the ER lobby.  Once we were seen by the doctor, he looked in Ashton's ears and confirmed what we hoped he wouldn't say...Ashton had an outer ear infection, otherwise known as SWIMMER'S EAR.  Boo.  I knew what he was going to say  next.  Yep.  NO SWIMMING FOR 7-10 DAYS!!!  Um...excuse me Mr. Doctor?!  Don't you know that this child has been counting down the days, the hours, the minutes until his toes hit the water???

I felt soooo bad for Ashton.  He was devastated by the news.  He did his best to hold in his tears, but as soon as the doctor left the room, the floodgates opened.

I knew that spending the next 9 days at the beach would be torture for him.  He was adamant on not cutting the vacation short since that would highly disappoint Ethan.  But I knew it would be a LONG week, on everyone, if we stayed.  So I immediately thought of Nonna up in their cabin in Tennessee, as well as our very best friends, The Byrums, who have been begging us to come visit.  The boys would easily ditch the beach with the prospect of heading there!

Sure enough...we broke it to them that night that we were loading back up and canceling our beach trip....and waking up at 4AM to head to the mountains!  Cheers all around!

So, what a crazy 24 hours.  We started out in New Smyrna Beach on Friday afternoon, and by Saturday 4AM we were loaded up in the car on our way to Nonna's!