Beach Vacation!

We went on our first family vacation last week! We went to South Padre Island with our friends Joe, Julie, Kristen, and Sarah. We had an awesome time and did not want to come home and back to the real world. I guess that is the perfect vacation, right? one you don't want to come back from?

Here is a recap.

We all rode down together in our friends SUV. Yes, 4 adults and 3 toddlers in one car. Good idea or not.... Overall, it went great. The girls were really awesome about the long drive ( total trip time was about 8 hours each way). We took fairly frequent stops, but not as many as we thought we might have to take. We stopped at a Dairy Queen and treated everyone to some ice cream, the girls all loved the ice cream, their first DQ experience. See Julie's blog for ice cream pictures.

We rented an awesome beach house- complete with a heated pool, billiard table, a flat screen tv in every room, 3 porches, and lots of beach toys and accessories. It was great! We wanted fun stuff to do at the house because we knew we would be there in the evenings.

Amazingly the girls were on pretty much the same sleep schedule. They all got up about the same time, napped the same time and went to bed the same time! All the adults were very ready for the 7:30 bedtime to come around so we could have a little vacation. Vacation sure is hard work with 3 little ones. We decided we really needed two full time nannies with us too- maybe some day.

Our beach transportation. We were about 1 block from the beach.

Julie, Kristen and Sarah

The girls playing washers. Joe brought them for us to play, but we were unable to have two people play and keep track of all three girls ( they kept running into the water) so we had to give up. The girls enjoyed the washers.

The beach was awesome! Ainsley loved it instantly. She loved everything about it- the sand, the water, the birds, the waves, the shells, everything! She had no fear with the water either. It was pretty windy while we were there and the water was pretty rough. When we first went to the water, she walked right in and would have kept on walking if we had not stopped her. She enjoyed the waves hitting her( we were supporting her) and she would let it sweep her legs out from under her and "surf" a little with each wave. We stood in the water a lot and jumped over waves, we played in the surf- sitting in the sand and digging holes and letting the waves hit us, and we played in the dry sand trying to build sandcastles. Yes, we had sand everywhere!

Our sandcastles did not get very big as every time we got some structure to it one of the little ones would come by and mash it. Dan was dismayed, he tried several times to build the ultimate sandcastle.

One day we went to a local sea turtle rescue center- the girls all enjoyed seeing the turtles up close.

The pool at our beach house