Beach House Vacation

We were fortunate to get to visit the beach house this year for almost 10 days!! The kids, Scott and I were excited about a vacation after such hectic times near the end of the school year. We had a lot of visitors at the beach and tons of fun times... here's my best recap of the trip...

We started out midday on Wednesday- Alex (Scott's littlest brother)rode with us and Kristen, Mo, and Wesley followed us up. It took nearly 9.5 hours, but we made it and eventually got the kids into the bed (somehow riding in a car that long can make them WIRED even when we arrived after midnight).

The next morning we arose early- we being the kids- and were down at the beach before 9:30 (let's just say that got later and later each day we were there). The kids had a blast seeing the water and digging in the sand. They all took a great nap after coming back up for lunch that day! That evening, the city of Atlantic Beach had a Beach Race and Scott and Harbin both participated. Scott ran the 10K (6.2 miles- who knew there was land beyond the Sheraton pier?) and came in 2nd overall, which is highly impressive to me since he hadn't run on the beach in a year and we had very little sleep the night before. Harbin did the 1 mile and was proud he ran the entire way!

Thursday night, our friends Derek and Jamie came up to join us. Friday we spent the day the beach- this time the kids were pros. They jumped waves, rode the boogie boards, and made sand castles like experts.

Saturday was spent the same- at the beach, playing on and under the deck (I am pretty sure in 20 years someone will be able to find a lost GI Joe under there!). I am not sure if it's exciting or frightening, but we did find a few jellyfish- Mo was able to capture one in a bucket and we later buried it in the sand. After much googling, Scott and Mo determined it was a Blue Bottle Jellyfish and fortuantely no one got stung by any of the ones we saw. We spent our evening out at a seafood buffet and then came back to put the kiddos to bed and play an adult round of Phase 10 (adult meaning we actually finished the game and no one bent the cards :)

Sunday afternoon our friends, Joanie and Jeff Lilly and their three kids, Sam, Sarah and Evie joined us. I think we definitely set the beach house record of most number of children under 6 at one house (Sam-5, Harbin-5, Catherine-3, Sarah-2, Wesley-2, Lydia-1.5, Evie- 4months, and Ella-neg.1.5months). All the kids got along well, but it could get quite chaotic with all the little mouths running at the same time!!

Monday, Derek and Jamie headed back to Atlanta, but we had lots of family join us throughout the day. Scott's parents arrived first that morning, followed by Scott's grandparents, Papa and Judy and then Grandmommy. The house was packed but we were excited to have all the friends and family be able to enjoy the wonderful beach weather with us! It was cool that day and the water was a bit chillier, but it still didn't seem to slow the kids down.

The Lilly family left Tuesday to head onto their beach vacation with their family. The rest of us enjoyed time at the beach and watching movies. My procrastination caused us to miss out on the Island Grille (a great little restaurant that does B1G1 on Tuesdays), but we managed to find plenty of food at the house.

Wednesday morning, the house seemed near empty as Papa and Judy, Grandmommy, and eventually Kristen, Mo, and Wesley left for home. Scott, his parents, Alex and Harbin went to Fort Macon to visit, but missed the hours the Fort was actually open and instead walked on the beach and then returned back home. By this time in the trip my ankles were swollen (one downfall to being 8 months pregnant at the beach) and the girls were napping, so we opted out of any afternoon activities.

Thursday we spent our final day at the beach and cleaned and packed up. We headed out Friday morning to Townsend, TN for a family reunion (a post on that later).

All-in-all we had a wonderful family vacation and the kids really enjoyed themselves. We were so fortunate to have everyone be able to join us and it was a blast to have friends in and out for the kids to play with. Enjoy the tons of pictures by clicking on the link to the right labeled "BeachHouse2010". I couldn't seem to get the slideshow program to run efficiently on my computer, so you can view them this way. (FYI, the last 10-15 photos are all very similar if you don't want to go through them). Stay tuned for more posts through this week.

The mom.