Family Beach Trip '09

So I guess I should've looked at our beach trip pictures first before promising a post full of pictures. I really only have one good beach picture to share. :-( Too bad since we had a busy, fun, full week when we were there!

Ethan, Pop-Pop & Aunt Jenny

Mid-late May at Myrtle Beach is a nice, comfortable air temp but the water is still a little too cool. Ethan took a couple of days to get re-aquainted with the sand and water but then he enjoyed it the rest of the week. In this picture, Ethan and company enjoyed playing in a little puddle where the water was a little warmer. This picture was actually taken on our last day - just hours before we drove home.

Now to back track and give a chronological description of our week. This may get pretty detailed so don't feel like you have to read it all. This is the only place I'm journaling our only vacation of this year and don't want to forget what all we did!

Day 1 - We started our trip with a drive to Columbia, SC to help Jenny move out of her dorm and attend graduation. Well, she had such a busy last couple of weeks that packing is all that really got done the day we arrived. If you remember my last post before we left town, Ethan had an ear infection and the day we left, Dan also started not feeling well. :-( By the time we made it to our destination, Dan had a full blown fever/chills and crawled into bed at the hotel and stayed there most of the day/evening. Fortunately, Ethan felt good for the trip - as I've come to learn with his 2 back to back ear infections that he had, the first 24 hours is the worst and then he feels fine for the duration of the ear infection. With 2 sick boys, I had to stay at the hotel to take care of them so I couldn't help with packing.

Day 2 - Graduation Day! We were all pleasantly surprised and proud that the baby of the family graduated Cumm Laude from her school. This is way better than I ever even came close to doing - and this was her 3rd school in 4 years! After graduation, we all went downtown for a celebratory lunch with a couple of her closest friends. Then it was time to head back to campus to help Jenny finish packing and moving her stuff off campus to storage for the summer. She'll be returning in the fall to share an apartment with a few friends still in school. Well, by that time, it was Ethan's nap time and there was no place for him to nap except in the car (which he actually fell asleep in during the ride back from lunch). So we were able to get out of packing/moving and got a head start on the rest of the family to the beach. We arrived at dinner time, found a place to go eat and then went ahead and hit the grocery store for the week. The rest of the family made it around 9pm.

Day 3-9 All the mornings at the beach started out pretty much the same. Dad (Pop-Pop), me, Brandon, and baby Annie (who napped after her first feeding) all got up around 6-7am and enjoyed a couple hours of quiet time until the rest of the house woke up around 9-10am. The first couple of days at Myrtle, it rained and was kind of chilly. We spent most of our time in the beach house just relaxin'.

Highlights during the week included my sisters and I having a girls day out - shopping and lunch at the outlets (while Mom (aka Mimi) babysat the grandkids), the men all going golfing together later that same day, Mom & Dad enoying an early anniversary gift from the kids - going to Le Grand Cirque, several yummy dinners out like at Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville at Broadway at the Beach, Carolina Roadhouse & Crab Catchers, running into some church friends at the condo's pool, and shopping at Barefoot Landing! Mimi even bought Ethan a personalized children's CD that says his name more than 45 times during the 6 songs on the CD.

Some less memorable events included having the golf cart stollen from our condo the day before we left, Ethan busting his lip open at the playground at Broadway at the Beach, and Ethan having a diaper blowout on my leg at Margaritaville (oh the joys of motherhood!) during dinner, and me getting a striped sunburn on my leg from missing spots with the spray on sunscreen the day we went to the beach/came home.

Well that about sums up our one and only "summer" vacation for the year. Back to reality now - lots of hot, humid NC weather (except for the flooding, 3+ inches of rain and mid-70's day we're having today), and trying to keep cool finding by finding friends with free pools in their neighborhoods to go visit!