Beach Vacation - Recap #3

Last recap. I promise. I'm sure everyone is sick of seeing beach pictures, and at this point I think our family is a little sad that it will be another year before we're all back there with our feet in the sand.  So here is a bit of a picture overload from our beach days!

Y'all.  Kate wanted us to pull her through the waves on her boogie board, and let me tell you, it was not easy. If you want a good beach workout, this is it.

Karsten was practicing her baby yoga, again.

And Kate wore herself out from playing ALL. DAY. LONG.

On our way to dinner one night, we saw that the Hot-N-Now sign was on at Krispy Kreme.  Of course we did what any reasonable vacationer would do - we stopped. 

We took a time-out near the end of the week to stop by Urgent Care to get Kate's spider bite checked out.  We picked up her prescription and were good to go again.

And then it was back to the beach the next day.

Until next year!  That's a wrap. 

Sunday Snapshot

Just a quick pause in our Beach Vacation posts to share a few pictures from before church today. Love these girls so!

Beach Vacation - Recap #2

On Monday, Kristi and Davis joined us for the vacation fun. It was still a bit cool, compared to the rest of the days, but that was GREAT because then you could stay out in the sun and still weren't hot. And from a girl who has spent the past 4 months inside (hello winter and tax season), my pastey skin was ready for a little lot of sunshine.

Let me just say, the beach this year was 1000x easier with Karsten a year older than our last beach trip. Not easy, by any means, but this year she is walking/running and she didn't try to eat the sand. We call that a win in our household

Kristi and Davis introduced Kate to the joys of being buried.  I'm not sure why all kids think this is so awesome. I mean, I remember doing it and loving it as a kid too. And now?  No way would I want to do that.  

Pretty sure she got buried nearly every single day. And I had to show Kevin how you clean little girls bathing suits to properly remove ALL of the sand.  

Remember that whole "no eating sand" thing? Well, we're still working on the "no throwing sand" thing.  That was our one difficult spot with Karsten. She loved playing in the sand, but it was breezy almost every day.  It felt great, but it was not so great for an 19 month old that would fill her shovel up with sand and then hold it up high and pour it out. Guess where all that sand went? Yep. Right in her eyes. We used up a few bottles of water getting sand out of her eyes.  It also went in her hair. I had no idea how hard it was to get sand out of curly hair until this week. There may or may not still be sand in her hair two weeks later...

Kevin and I went back to the house early afternoon to get our crew showered and cleaned up, and give the girls a chance to catch a nap.  Then we all went out to eat at yet another seafood restaurant that night. 

And that pretty much wraps up our Monday.

Beach Vacation - Recap #1

We've been back from our beach vacation for about a week now, so it's definitely time for me to update the blog.  Since we've been back, Karsten has had a double ear infection and hasn't slept, Kate is still recovering from her spider bite, and Kevin and I came down with awful colds. Oh and a week after starting medicine, either Karsten's ear infection is still lingering or she's teething. Or both. Vacation did us right. :)

Just kidding!  All that "sickness" is just part of life.  Without a doubt, we enjoyed our vacation. And... apparently I have too many pictures to put them all in one post.  What's new, right?  So this will get split up into a few posts.

Friday, May 20th was Kate's very last day of preschool and we definitely did not ease into summer.  We jumped in feet first!  Saturday morning we left for the beach. We'd rented a house on the NC beaches and were looking forward to a week with our toes in the sand!  What we WEREN'T looking forward to was the long drive to get there!  But finally, we headed over the bridge, got a glimpse of the ocean, and saw the end in sight!

What a great view!

After a little unpacking, and a very late lunch/dinner, we headed to our destination. Kate has been looking forward to this for a solid year.

Sunday was our first full day there, and it ended up being rainy, very cool, and overcast. There was a break in the rain and the sun peeked out, so I attempted to take Kate out to the water while Karsten napped.  She loved it, while I shivered because it was still pretty cold!

And it didn't last long either.  After maybe 15 minutes, this was the scene. 

So we packed up and headed back inside.  We loved the place where we stayed.  It was not ocean front, but was across the street from the houses that were ocean front.  And there was a public beach access RIGHT across the street from us, but no public parking.  So in other words, we basically had our own private beach access. 

That night we hit up a local seafood place for dinner. 

Funny story about this little kid.  Our server came to the table for all of us to order.  I went first and ordered mine and Kate's (which Karsten usually just shares some of), and then he looked at Kevin.  He was standing right behind Karsten's high chair so I guess Karsten figured it was HER turn to order.  She looked straight up at him and said "Chock-it milk, Peas. Tank you!" Love that girl!  Like her big sister, she keeps us laughing. 

I ordered crab legs because it's the beach. And vacation. And that's pretty much enough of a reason. 

I finally talked Kate into tasting it and after her bite, she kept wanting more. She asked me to order crab legs at every dinner for the rest of the trip. 

And that was pretty much our Saturday and Sunday.  The rest of the week got much warmer and the weather was awesome. We couldn't have asked for any better, so the first day and a half of cold and drizzle didn't hinder our vacation at all!

On Becoming a Mama

Near the living room in the house where I grew up, was a room that branched off that our family originally used as a playroom. It has since been converted into my dad’s home office, but during the “playroom years” it was filled with toys and great memories. It was on the couch against the wall, that my dolls lived. I had so many that when they were all lined up and sitting at attention—you know, so we could play school—they stretched from one end of the couch to the other. Even so, if I’d had my way, I would have had lots more.

I remember being in Wal-Mart as a little girl, looking down the toy aisle and finding the perfect Christmas present- triplet baby dolls. Anybody remember the Magic Nursery dolls by Mattel? You know, the ones where you didn’t know if they were a boy or a girl until after you bought them and got them home? You put their nightgown in water and then like magic, it would turn into a certificate that said “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” I am definitely a girl of the 90s!  But for me, I don’t think there could have been a more perfect toy. The only problem was that I didn’t want to wait the month or so until Christmas, I wanted them NOW. Looking back, I’m pretty sure I didn’t end up having to wait all the way until Christmas for those dolls.

It’s obvious that I was created to be a mom. I was created for a lot of things, but being a mom was one that I didn’t have to discover. From the time I was a little girl, I always knew it was for me.

When my husband and I had been married for about two years, we decided that we were ready to grow our family.

We got a puppy.

And then another one.

About a year after that, we decided to start looking into adoption. Because of medical issues, we knew before we were even married that biological kids would likely not be in our future, so, when we decided we were ready for a baby, we almost immediately started looking into adoption avenues. Talk about overwhelming! Foster? Adopt? Agency? Lawyer? Self-Match? Baby? Older child? Unfortunately, we didn’t have any close friends that had adopted, and so we felt like we were navigating it all on our own, until we attended an informational meeting for the agency we ended up adopting through. We just knew. This was it.

Continue reading this post over at Michelle Madrid Branch...