A Week at the Beach

All summer long we have looked forward to our beach vacation. At the start of the summer, I was a little disappointed that we had scheduled it so late in the season because it seemed like it would take forever to get here. But in the end, I am glad that we saved it for later because it was a great way to end the summer!

This is our second year vacationing at Topsail Island, and it felt like coming home! Now that we know our way around and all the fun things we like to do, we came a little bit better prepared! In the end, that helped me to be more relaxed and thoroughly enjoy our vacation. We let Shelby bring her friend, Tori, along this time because it is not always fun to live in a house full of boys when you are a teenage girl! They had a lot of fun hanging out together and checking out all the HOT (their word, not mine!) guys!

The beach was perfect the first 5 days of our vacation and the kids had blast playing in the waves, building sand castles, boogie boarding and playing frisbee.

Chris was excited to spend his first relaxing vacation of the summer since the other two weeks of vacation time he spent were with the scouts and NOT very relaxing according to him.

The last two days we were getting alot of wind from Tropical Storm Fay and it wasn't so much fun to be on the beach, so we spent more time at the pool and sightseeing around the island.

Joshua and I went on a "turtle date" to the Sea Turtle Hospital where we got to see several of their sea turtles that are being rehabilitated and learn more about what we can do to protect them. Joshua's favorite animal in the whole world is any kind of turtle, so he loved going! We had to add a new stuffed turtle to his collection!
At night we went crab hunting. Caleb is our master crab catcher and while everyone else on the beach catches them with nets, Caleb can get them with his bare hand!

We added a new nighttime activity this year. There was a sea turtle nest near our condo that was hatching and Joshua, Caleb and I joined "sea turtle watch". For those of you who have never done this, it is an incredibly boring yet strangely addictive activity! Topsail Island is a sea turtle sanctuary and so far this year, they have 93 turtle nests on the island. The nests hatch 55-65 days after being laid. Here is Joshua with our turtle nest.

We joined in on day 55 and basically sat and waited at the nest for 2-3 hrs. every night with volunteers from the Sea Turtle Hospital. After 4 nights of watching, we became very invested in this activity and really wanted to be there for our sea turtles to hatch! It was our last night on the island and we headed out to sit with our turtle nest again around 8:30 pm only to find that it had hatched a little bit earlier and we missed it! We were so disappointed. Poor Joshua almost cried! After investing that much time, we felt like we missed the birth of our babies!

If we had been able to see the hatch, it would have looked something like this. We took the kids to the aquarium on our way home and saw this model.

We are holding out hope that next year we can try this again with greater success! On the positive side, it was very relaxing to sit on the beach each night and listen to the ocean and look at the stars. I had some good talks with the boys and we learned lots of cool things about sea turtles from the Sea Turtle Hospital nest watchers!

It is amazing the things you find out about your kids when you are on vacation. For instance, Savannah is setting her sights on a modelling career!

After a few of these poses, I asked her what she was doing and she told me that this is how Miley Cyrus looks in all of her pictures! I am sure my mom and dad have plenty of pictures to add of me posing, so what else can I say.....like mother, like daughter!

Then we went to the park one day and Samuel informs me that he is "Monkey Bar Champion" at his school! How did I miss this?!!! I asked him what that meant and he said that he can do monkey bars faster than everyone and people keep challenging him and he still wins. He can do them forward and backward and twist around while he does them! It's always fun to find out your kids hidden talents! I took this video after he had done it several times and was really starting to get tired, but take my word for it......he definitely deserves the title "Monkey Bar Champion"!



Caleb insisted that we go to the aquarium before we left the beach, so we went up to Emerald Isle and visited the aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores. The kids loved seeing all the fish up close! We even got to pet a stingray!

\It soon became apparent that we had been at the beach way too long and we needed to get on our way before the kids changed any more!

On the way home we stopped off in Wilson, NC, where we used to live and visited with one of my friends, Judy. We met up at Sonic so we could all eat and visit without the kids running through her house! It was fun to see her again and she was shocked at how big the kids have grown!

We couldn't resist stopping by our old house and taking a picture! Of all the houses we have lived in, it is still my favorite house! The kids were sad that we didn't see any of their old friends hanging out in the neighborhood.

Wow! What a great week! We can't believe it is over! It is good to be home again, but we are already setting our sights on next year!