The Amazing Twin Adventure

Our wonderful beach crew!


Cool Will with shades!



Spener holding Mason up in the waves

Grandaddy and Hays

The twins loved the beanbag chairs in the condo!

Will in the shade

My sweet boys

working on a sandcastle!

Mason and the wonderful Spencer

So it only took me a week to get around to blogging about the beach! Overall, it was a really great trip. There were some exhausting moments, but I would definitely call it a success. The drive down wasn't nearly as bad as I feared it would be. The kids were pretty content, slept a good bit and did very little screaming. Leastways, we didn't throw anybody out in a small, south Georgia town, I didn't decide to fling myself out of the car around Vidalia or anything, so that went remarkably well! We took the kids down on the beach the day we got there, and the twins LOVED it. They were crawling into the waves as fast as they could like little loggerhead turtles, and they were just squealing with absolute glee. Unfortunately, they didn't retain that attitude for the entire trip. There were moments when they were just tired of being hot and sandy, but for the most part they really liked it.

Mason, of course, loved it. He had the best time playing in the waves with his daddy and Spencer. Spencer is 12 and he's my mom's best friend's son, and he's pretty much the coolest kid ever. He's smart, funny, handsome, and endlessly patient with Mason. Mason is pretty much Spencer's shadow the entire week, and Spencer never tells him to go away and leave him alone! He spent hours playing in the ocean with Mason, and Mase just absolutely worships Spencer! I tried to talk his mama into letting me adopt him, but she wouldn't. (darn it)

Most years our whole group goes out to dinner together. That takes a long time since there are 15 of us! This year, Matt and I weren't up to the challenge of getting three little ones dressed and ready for dinner, waiting for an hour with hungry kids and getting them to bed hours after their bedtime, so we opted out of dining out! Since my sister and her husband are currently house-poor after purchasing their new home, they opted out with us. So we cooked several delicious dinners with them, got take-out a few nights, and got one evening out when my sister, Paige, and our beloved Spencer babysat the little ones for the annual "grownups night out."

The upside to not going out to dinner was that we got to take Mason to the pier village several times instead of just once. He had a good time poking around in the little shops, playing on the playground and checking out the people fishing on the pier. One night we took all three boys down and saw something I've never seen before on the pier. Now my family has been going to St. Simons for close to 30 years and I've never seen them pull anything bigger than a baby shark off that pier, but that night we joined a crowd that had gathered to watch a fisherman try to wrestle his catch out of the water. We didn't know what he had, but we knew it was BIG. That fella pulled up an 80 pound stingray- that son of a gun was HUGE!!!! It was neat, but also pretty gory. The hook had caught it in the side and it was bleeding profusely. Mason wasn't too upset by the blood, but as we were leaving the pier, we walked by the guys cutting up the stingray for fishbait. That was pretty traumatic for Mason. He kept asking us on the way home why it had to die, and why couldn't they take it to the doctor, and what if its stingray friends were sad? It was hard to explain the circle of life to my sweet, sad little boy.

But that was just one dark spot on an otherwise stellar week. It was exhausting chasing those twins around the beach and hauling down the loads of equipment we needed for a day on the beach. There were times that I felt like we should be getting paid to do this, not paying for it! But mostly, we were just so thankful to be down there as a complete family with three healthy kids. This time last year we had no idea that we'd make it to the beach this summer, we thought it would be at least a few years before we'd make it back. So we were extremely grateful to be there, no matter how exhausting it was!

When we got home, we had the wonderful surprise of walking into a sparkling-clean, beautifully organized house. My mother-in-law was hard at work while we were gone, and based on the amount of work she got done, I'd swear she had some little elves helping her! She cleaned every nook and cranny, organized the kids' closets, finished painting the bathroom that I started before vacation, and bought lots of fun little accessories for the house! I truly can't think of a better thing to come home to, and words can't express how much we appreciate the time, money and effort she put into helping us make our home a beautiful place. And now I'm going to sit on my deck that she rearranged and updated with new cushions for the furniture and a fabulous outdoor rug, and relax!