Life at the Beach

I will start by saying that I apologize for the incredibly long delay between posting. Life has been beyond hectic, but I love keeping all of our friends and family up-to-date on our lives and have missed blogging for sure. This post is mainly pictures of our wonderful family trip to Destin, Florida.

For those of you who do not know, my husband is one of TEN (yes, TEN) children- eight boys and two girls. Every other year they plan a big (that's an understatement) reunion, it's usually around Christmas time, but this time around we all thought we'd give summer a shot. Sadly we were missing two families out of the ten, but we still had a great time relaxing on the beach and playing in the sand. 

I'll tell you what, I LOVE these large family get togethers because I have so many extra sets of hands and eyes. The extra help meant a much more relaxing vacation for this mama.

Due to the sheer amount of photos I have included in this post, I will admit that very few of them have been edited. But I just wanted to post them all. Also, yes, sadly the ocean was that green. Yuck. But we did manage a few days of bluer waters.

R loved everything about our beach vacation. She loved the sand. She loved the water. She loved all the people. She was fearless when it came to running into the water and waves. She made me very nervous!

This little girl was not so much my water baby. Her exact words.... "Too Wet!"

She wanted nothing to do with the ocean. She did however enjoy the beach and all the people, and the fact that all the people would constantly feed her. Have I ever mentioned that she LOVES to eat? :)

Quite literally, a sea of Pepins.

Yes, we all laughed.

We laughed a lot.

This picture is one of my favorites. Two girls just hanging on the shore.

This was the ONLY time Baby Girl got in the ocean all week, and honestly the only reason they made it that far was because Pops distracted her with food. Once they got in and she realized it, she just kept saying, "No, Pops! Too wet!" 

A tradition that I love, family prayer. It looks a little different now that there are so many small children running around. It is definitely shorter and less quiet, but there is no stopping it. 

I feel like Baby Z is really feeling this prayer. : ) 

And this is where I would ALWAYS find her... in the snack bag.

We even managed a family photo on the beach with our favorite photographer! Thanks Stacey/New Life Photography!

The trip was a whirlwind. We drove almost 2,000 miles and on the way back we slept in four different states in four days and I could not believe how well the girls did as a whole. We got to spend a week with (most) of Jeff's family and we also got to see my parents and my two best friends. We even managed to fit in my best friend's wedding somewhere in the mix! (That blog post will come soon.) 

It was definitely a trip we will never forget.