Beach Vacation, Part 3

It’s almost ridiculous, my need to chronicle our life chronologically!  It’s October, and I’m blogging the end of our beach trip.  I blogged Parts 1 and 2 in August!

Oh, well.  Love me, love my quirks, right?

Towards the end of our trip, we took a break from the beach and went to Fort Sumter. 

We were a little afraid that the kids would get bored at the fort, but hoped the boat ride to and from the island would be enough to keep them from being too awful!

As it turned out, they loved the boat ride AND the fort, thanks mostly to a really amazing park ranger!

It kills me that I can’t remember his name because he was really amazing!  Not only was he incredibly knowledgeable, but he was incredibly patient with the kids.  They were full of questions, especially Jonathan, and the ranger was so nice and answered every one of them.  I kept expecting him to get tired of small people and move on to some other group, but he seemed to really enjoy the kids and their curiosity.

For any of you who have never taken little ones to a military fort, especially one near a beach, here’s a lesson we learned: Explain to the kids that artillery shells are not the same thing as SEAshells!  Ha!  The kids were so confused at first!  They thought the soldiers were shooting seashells at each other!

If you’d like to know more about Fort Sumter, you can read about it HERE.

Beach Vacation Part 2

Cris and Kennedy

Look, deer!  At the beach!  This was right beside the boardwalk and, literally, 10 steps from the sand!

Zachary, Carter, Reagan, Kennedy, Jonathan, Thomas

Josh and Cris

Me and Jim

More playtime:

In the afternoons, the tide went out and left these great tidal pools.  The kids LOVED playing in them!  They were really shallow, so the kids didn’t actually need their floats.  They kept insisting on wearing them! 

A little mother-daughter time!

In case you didn’t notice in the pictures, it was pretty windy on the beach.  That made for more than a few chilly moments!  We were usually okay if we were dry or still in the water, but being wet and not in the water just made us cold!

I’ll just stay in the water!

More to come!  Stay tuned!

Beach Vacation Part 1

We started our summer off with a trip to the Charleston area for a beach vacation with our friends, Josh and Cris and their kids, Carter and Kennedy. (Well, technically we started the summer by moving into an apartment, but whatever.)

We rented a house in Isle of Palms that was only a short walk from the beach.  It was great!

Running amuck on the beach on our first night there:

On the beach:

We also had access to three pools!

Un-synchronized Jumping

Stay tuned for more!

Last Night

As in, the last night we slept in our old house!

That’s right!  For those of you out of the loop, we sold our house!  In less than a week!  We did NOT expect it to sell so quickly!

We were supposed to close on it June 1st, so we began moving out of it the week before, into an APARTMENT because we had not found a new home yet!  (Well, we had found a home, but couldn’t move into it until the end of July, and it ended up falling through.  That’s a whole different story!)

There ended up being quite a bit of drama with the closing, not because of our buyers who are fantastic, but because of the appraiser and the bank.  Anyway, it eventually worked out, and now a really lovely family is living in our house and eating tomatoes from our garden!

Anyway, we moved all the furniture out on a Saturday and the apartment became home.  However, we didn’t really appreciate that Friday night was our LAST NIGHT in our old house, so we went back with sleeping bags and spent the night again so we could really mark the occasion!

I miss my hydrangea bush!

One last picture with the hydrangeas!

One last game of Statues!  Boy statues are SO different from girl statues!

One last cookout!

One last night in the house!

Oh, it was bittersweet to leave that house!  So many memories there!  It was our very first house!  Jim and I had been there for TEN YEARS! The babies came home to that house.  It’s that only home they’ve ever known!

That house will always hold a special place in our hearts!  We are delighted that it is now home to a wonderful new family and hope they love it as much as we did!

Little Four Eyes

Don’t worry.  We never actually call him that! 

Some of you may have noticed in this summer whirlwind of posts that at some point, Zachary started wearing glasses!

At his 5-year checkup last summer, he struggled to read the eye chart, so we took him to a pediatric eye dr to have a full eye exam.

The dr discovered that Zachary was not really using his left eye.  He was only using the right one.  The left eye was weakening and beginning to turn in.  Yikes!  So Zachary got a special pair of glasses to force him to use both of his eyes. 

I wish I could recreate some of the tests here for you.  It was a really fascinating exam.  There was one test where the dr showed Zachary four little dots of light and asked him to count them.  He only saw three!  Because he wasn’t using his left eye at all, he couldn’t see the fourth one!  Fascinating!

It was hard on him at first because he actually saw worse with the glasses on than he did without them!  Luckily, that didn’t last long!  His eyes adjusted pretty quickly.  He wears them all day every day, and his vision has improved greatly over the past year. 

If the glasses had not improved his eyes, we would have had to additionally have him wear a patch over his good eye until his weak one caught up.  Happily, we don’t have to do that!

He’ll probably have to wear the glasses several more years, kind of like a retainer for his eyes.  We’ll see!

AND here are a few more pics from my phone!  These are from 2011.

Yea!  Face painting at Spring Celebration!

Easter clothes retake

Fancy hair!

What a face!  I’m pretty sure we posed this face on purpose to send the picture to Daddy!

Shark teeth!  Reagan’s first permanent tooth came in before she lost the baby one!

The Thanksgiving victim

The Thanksgiving culprit!  Yummy!