We don’t normally go on vacation in December. But one year we jumped at the chance. That September we had just found out we were expecting our first child. We told all our friends and family, and were basking in the glow of pregnancy. Then we realized that life would never be the same again.
We decided to take one last vacation as a couple. Our friends had just moved to St. John, USVI and invited us to stay with them. It would be perfect- one last hurrah with our friends in a tropical paradise. Since we didn’t want to travel late in the pregnancy, we bought our tickets for Christmas time as a present to ourselves. We spent Christmas day with our family, then jetted off the following morning to get some much needed relaxation on St. John.
We spent a few days going to the beach, snorkeling, hiking, enjoying food at local restaurants, and even got in a little shopping. On our friends’ last day off from work, we set up a charter boat and did some island hopping. We checked into Customs on neighboring Tortola, then headed out to some of the best snorkeling spots in the British Virgin Islands, looked for abandoned treasure in the caves at Norman Island, pretended to be castaways on an uninhabited island, had a roti at Foxy’s on Jost Van Dyke, and ended the adventure finding out why the call it the Soggy Dollar Bar.
There would be no way to trump our island hopping adventure, so we spent our last full day of our last couples only vacation at the beach on Trunk Bay. Our friends had to return to work, so my husband and I packed a picnic lunch, put our bathing suits on, and headed to the beach by ourselves to relax. We headed over toward the east side of the bay just past Trunk Cay and set up next to the piece of driftwood that juts out of the sand. The suns rays were pelting our bodies with warming goodness. Then, bang. A foot or a hand hit me from the inside. We both looked at my growing belly and saw it happen again. It was then that we realized we weren’t alone on that beach. It was not our last couples vacation, it was our first family vacation. Our daughter was really there with us, too.