Beach House Frenzy

Our beach visit this year was a lot of fun with A LOT of kids!!! The Thomas family all went up and we stayed in our house while they stayed in the house next door. All-in-all we had 9 kids, Harbin was the oldest and all the rest were 5 and under! Amazingly enough, the kids had a blast playing together and there were very few conflicts. The older girls, Catherine, Lydia, and Elizabeth became very close and you can see in the pics, that they were often hanging out together. Harbin kind of hovered between hanging with Matthew (the older crowd) and William (the younger crowd). But, definitely through the whole vacattion no one got left out! We created some new memories this year. For starters, someone thought it would be a great idea to bring the baby pool to the beach for the younger kids to play in. After Adrianne and Katherine (Jonathan's sister, not my Catherine) brought bucket loads of water up to fill the pool, it quickly became not only a play place for the little kids, but also became a really large sandbox for the sand fleas! The kids had fun catching the little critters and putting them into the pool. I am not really sure how this is much different than the actual beach since once they dig into the sand, you can't really find them anyway, but they had fun doing it! I had the misfortune of getting a terrible abcess on the back of my neck. It got worse and worse and became extremely painful, so I finally let Stephen use a "sterilized" steak knife to open it up!! Ok, so I know all of you are like "what, are you crazy?" Well, first let me add, Stephen is a doctor and his wife is a former nurse and this thing hurt like CRAZY and it was 4th of July and the ER would have been packed with true crazy people who blew themselves up playing with fireworks. So, all said, this was the best option. Adrianne held my hand the whole time, and I am pretty sure the "surgery" hurt her more than it hurt me. The abcess drained some over the next few days, but continued to get worse and eventually I visited not only the ER, but also my doc at home. The pain and swelling eventually went away once we were home, but for about 2 weeks, I could hardly turn my head it was so painful. One of my favorite nights had to have been our "Actionary" night. This is a new game that Harbin and the kids invented. It's pretty much Pictionary but because most of the kids can't read...we just tell them the word and then they act it out. It was HILARIOUS watching them try to either act out their own version or act out exactly what we were telling them to do. We were rolling in laughter at each point in the game and it really was a special beach house memory. Well, I know I am still many months behind in my blog. I am trying to catch up but it seems like there aren't enough hours in each day. We're closing out a semester, getting ready for the holidays and majorly renovating the house. Each moment is spent working on all of that or sleeping! Hopefully I will be able to get a bunch posted soon! We did get Christmas pics taken, so maybe I'll be able to at least update the top photo soon (although I love that pic of me, which is really RARE). Stay tuned: The mom.