WHAT?!?!?!?! An UPDATE???????

Well, it's only been a year or so since our last blog posting. My only excuse is that I feel like I've missed SO much that trying to catch up just felt overwhelming. So I'm NOT going to try to catch up. I'm going to start with a relatively current update, and if I get super-motivated, maybe I'll go back and add in some of the stuff that we've missed. But for now, we'll just pretend that the last year was faithfully blogged and you all know exactly everything going on in our lives up to, say, May.

So, for the past year or so, Sarah has been asking (read: BEGGING) to go to the beach. Why? Well, being the consummate collector, she really wanted seashells. And she wanted them straight from the source, not some lame craft store. Well, in December, we TRIED to go to the beach during our DC/Maryland trip, but due to insanely cold tempratures and even colder winds, our beach excursion was a bit of a failure (my eyeballs received a nice sandblasting, however).

So, in an effort to placate Sarah, we decided an end-of-the-school-year trip to the beach was in order. After much debate about the pros and cons of the zillion or so beaches that really are less than an 8 hour drive from here, we opted for Destin, Florida, on the Gulf of Mexico. We even got lucky this time: No freezing temps, No hurricane force winds, and even no nasty oil tar balls. Here's a glimpse of the fun:

This is the view from our hotel balcony out onto the gulf. Beautiful!

Sarah the Beach Bunny

Shawn and the kids at various stages of sand burial.


Ethan wasn't completely convinced he wanted to be in the water... In his defense, some of those waves got pretty darn big.



Sarah, on the other hand, LOVED being in the water.... So long as daddy was holding her securely.



Ethan escaping the waves...



Photographic proof that I WAS actually present for this vacation



While we were there, we took a dolphin sightseeing cruise. It was pretty fun, and we saw quite a few dolphins, but none close enough to get a good picture of (mostly because the dolphins were the same color as the water under cloud cover, and I couldn't tell which was which through my camera lens) Here's Shawn and the kids on the boat BEFORE we got out onto open water-- which is why they're still kind of smiling.



The entire coastline of Destin is filled with these HUGE condo/hotel monstrosities. They're kind of cool looking, but you have to wonder what this area looked like before tourism took over.



Part of our boat tour included an opportunity for the kids to "drive" the boat. Ethan looked pretty good in that captains hat.


Sarah wasn't sure she wanted to go up to drive the boat (it was rocking pretty hard). By the time she decided to go, she was the last one up there. The captain was really great to her and let her drive for a long time until she was comfortable. He even let her drive under the huge bridge (the highway). Thanks to his patience, she ultimately decided the big, scary, rocking boat was fun after all.



One of the restaurants we visited had a resident clown, Giggles. She was a lot of fun and made really cool balloon creatures for the kids. The restaurant also had a resident pirate, but we didn't get pictures with him.

So that was Destin. We had a great time getting away with just our little family, relaxing on the beach and doing pretty much whatever we felt like whenever we felt like. We definitely plan to do it again. Oh, and for the record, Sarah got LOADS of seashells.