Beach Trip!!!

We had an AWESOME beach trip.  The kids were at such a great age this year to really enjoy just hanging out on the beach.  This picture kind of epitomizes our beach adventure.  Tyler really loved playing in the sand and was content to spend all of his time playing pretend with his sand toys and building sandcastles.  He told me that he wanted to move to the beach and live there all the time, but he did say that he wanted So-So and Ray-Ray to move there too (he realizes that Grandma and PaPa already live there since we luckily got to visit with them both), and his school and his teacher Miss Abbey!  Katie was all about the water and kept us busy begging to get in the "wave water" constantly. 

They both really loved "crab hunting."  Their teacher said that they talked about it constantly today at school.  We were able to really do some nighttime beach time with flashlights on Thursday when they took a really good nap.  We tried again on Saturday but a pretty bad storm came up right when we went down to the beach, and both of the kids were scared of the wind and Lance and I went in as soon as we saw the first bolt of lightning.  All in all we had pretty good weather - with rain only at night and Friday afternoon, but that storm was pretty scary especially since we almost got stuck in the elevator due to wind preventing the door from fully closing!

We only made it out to dinner as a family one night.  My mom kept the kids our first night down there (big thank you due for that) and Lance and I had a fabulous "date" to Whiskey Bravo and Red Bar.  When the kids actually took a nap they weren't completely exhausted and were great at dinner at the Shrimp Shack in Seaside (home of the expensive but fabulous lobster rolls).  They were so excited about looking for crabs and using their flashlights after dinner that they didn't even remember the promise of ice cream.  They were really great pretty much the whole trip, and even on the way down for the loooong drive.  It was wonderful to spend some quality time with the kids right now because their behavior has been frustrating lately and we were definitely reminded during this trip how lucky we are to have such awesome, funny, smart, just plain fun to be around kids!   

We had such a great time and all of us were really sad to come home and to realize that we have another year before we can probably make it back.  The kids keep talking about going to Disney World and we really do want to try to make it there sometime very soon, but there is no doubt that beach fun gives Mickey a run for his money!