... of no more international travel... for awhile...

This is the look of one tired baby.

We just got back from Guatemala on Monday. One of Quinn's best friends Luis is originally from there, but went to college in Florida and has lived in Austin working at Quinn's company for something like 10 years. During his visits back home to see his family over the years, he met a beautiful girl from his hometown. After many years of a very long distance relationship, Luis finally moved back to Guatemala to marry her and start their new life there! We miss him already (I know Quinn definitely misses him), but we were glad that we could make it down to Guatemala for the wedding.

The original plan was to leave Abram with my mom for the almost five days and have the trip be a third anniversary vacation for Quinn and I. However, as the day approached and I got more and more apprehensive about the logistics of leaving my 7 month old for five days, we decided to bring him with us. The logistics of taking a 7 month old on an international trip almost rival leaving him behind, but we were remembering how great Abram was on our trip to the Middle East a few months ago. I didn't comprehend the difference between traveling with a 4 month old and traveling with a 7 month old. A word to jet-setting parents out there: If you have a choice, go before they start eating solid foods, grabbing at everything, putting everything in their mouth, crawling, rolling over, and "talking". These wonderfully exciting baby developments make plane travel a little less enjoyable. But here we are, waiting at the Austin airport, still happy.

We flew from Austin to Houston and Houston to Guatemala City. We met up with 6 other friends of Luis' who came from the States for the wedding and Luis, Sara (his fiance), Pasqual (Sara's brother), and Isaias (Luis' brother) loaded up with us in a big van and we headed south about 3 hours to Santiago Atitlan. I wish that we had gotten more pictures of the drive. It was beautiful, but we were a little preoccupied with trying to get Abram to fall asleep since he was incredibly tired from the plan rides.

Quinn and Abram and I stayed in a really nice "hotel": Posado de Santiago, which was basically a great restaurant with about 15 cute little cottages.

Our cottage: "Casa Quetzal"

They had really great food at the restaurant and it wasn't very expensive at all, so we had food delivered or we went down there for almost every meal. We ate breakfast "in" bed every morning, while trying to keep Abram from getting into all of the food. Now that he is very efficiently scooting, it's hard to keep him away from things.

The foliage around our cottage was amazing. Quinn is usually the one taking the pictures, but I would take the camera from him to get pictures of all the pretty flowers and plants I saw just so I could show them to my mom. She is forever stopping wherever we happen to be walking to point out pretty plants and tell me what they are and whether or not she has them planted at her house and if not, why... :) I love you, Mom.

While on a walk across the street and down to the lake, we found the pool (it's the bright blue):

and a hobbit door:



Quinn and Abram on the walk

There was also a sauna and hot tub at our hotel, but we didn't get in any water while we were there. There was a enough rain from Saturday night through Monday morning when we left to satiate our desire for water. There was also a hammock in front of our cottage, but Abram was the only one who ended up using it.

We did find and purchase a pretty cool invention for traveling kiddos before we left called the Pea Pod. It is a baby tent with a thin air mattress for sleeping and playing. It would work for the beach or camping as well and it folds up fairly small. We were able to fit it with all of Abram's other stuff in a carry on sized suitcase. The cottage ended up having 2 beds, which was great, because we were able to put Abram on the smaller bed instead of the floor and cover one side of his tent with a towel. I like it way better than when we had him in the Pack n Play in our hotel a few weeks ago for my grandpa's wedding. You can kinda get the idea of it from this photo.

Pretty neat invention. Worth the money, for sure.

Two of the other people who came from Austin were our friends Akin and Masami. Akin works with Quinn and Luis and we were so glad that we were able to spend some time with them this weekend.

We were able to get this good picture of our family one night:

because Akin was willing to do this to make Abram look up:

But the reason we were there in the first place were these two wonderful people:

Luis y Sara

Sara loved Abram and was always willing to hold him.

Quinn and Luis

Their wedding was beautiful, but we weren't able to get nearly enough pictures. But the guys' coworker, Ryan brought his amazing camera and equipment and was the official wedding photographer. I saw some of his shots uploading on his computer and they are gorgeous. He said that he will give us all copies of the photos and I'm so excited to see all of the stuff I didn't see because I was rocking Abram to sleep a quarter mile away during the middle of the 2 hour ceremony. But here are a few of what I was able to get:

They are so cute

A little girl (Naomi), fascinated by Abram at the wedding

There was a lot of other stuff we did and many, many other things that happened, but I've already gotten too long winded for my liking. Let's just say that this trip made me just a bit more apprehensive about the Colorado/Idaho trip we will be taking in August with an almost 9 month old. You would think after being on 12 planes before his 9th month, Abram would be an old pro, but each one has gotten progressively harder for him and us. Let's hope he starts getting better on this next trip.

Here's to positive thinking!!