Beach Vacation Day 1

If you haven't been over to the beach in a while.......I HIGHLY recommend it! We got back from our mini vacation over to the Oregon coast and I can't describe how wonderful it was. We had SO much fun, both Dustin and I seriously didn't want to come home. We were trying to figure out if there was anyway we could stay over there another day or two but, alas, duty called and we had to head for home.

But, ala my friend Heidi, I am breaking up our vacation into different parts. That way it doesn't take me so long to get this post done. So here are pictures from our first day there.

We left Friday, late morning after leisurely taking our time to pack up and get everything ready. Which I must say is the way to do it. Usually I am home alone with the kids left to pack and clean up and get ready to go and then we head out to the door the minute daddy is home (or some scenario close to that one). This time Dustin and I BOTH packed up together tag teaming wrangling the kids as we got ready to leave. It was GREAT!

We decided to rent a little two bedroom beach condo instead of a hotel room because we thought the extra room would be nice and the kitchen would save us money. I wish that I had taken more pictures of the place because after taking a blind leap of faith with a few pictures posted on craig's list we rented a condo that turned out to be AMAZING! It was the prefect amount of space with everything you could need in it, walking distance to the beach and an ocean view to boot. This was Lilly's favorite place to sit for the weekend.

I know you can't really tell from the picture but you could see the whole ocean and Lilly loved to sit there and watch the water. Dustin even spotted a pack (is that what you call them?) of whales since it is whale watching season and we were all very excited. I am not sure the girls actually knew what they were looking for but they certainly acted excited! Unfortunately this was about as close as she wanted to get to the ocean all weekend but more about that later.The girls couldn't wait to get down to the beach and we wanted to take advantage of the sunny afternoon since we weren't sure if it was going to last. We have had nothing but rain and hail for practically two months straight so we definitely weren't going to miss out on our chance to play out in the sun. So, we dropped off our stuff and ran down to the beach. Immediately Josey and daddy found a starfish (dead) in the sand and she insisted on keeping it the whole weekend in her bucket outside our condo, it was such a lovely smell! We finally dumped it before we went home. It was actually warm enough to run around in bathing suits. I guess I should amend that. It was warm enough for little kids to run around in their bathing suits. I was personally still a but chilly but I guess freezing water temperatures don't bother 5 to 8 year olds.Maddy actually found some pretty amazing shells. It seems to me that all I ever find at the beach are like a fragment of a sand dollar if I am lucky. Maddy was finding all these fully intact big snail and hermit crab shells. This was her favorite. After a little bit Josey came up to me complaining that Maddy had found all the good shells on the whole beach! I thought that was pretty funny. I also want you to take a good look at Lilly's face in the background of this picture. That was the face we saw almost the whole time we were on or near the beach from her. She HATED the sand and she HATED the waves. I think she has sand on her hands in that picture or something because she is obviously agitated. This is where Lilly's felt most comfortable. She wanted to be VERY far away from the waves. I think that Maddy and Josey didn't help as they would play wave tag and constantly run screaming away from each wave. I think Lilly thought it was something scary not fun. She didn't get over this fear until the last day we were there and even then she would only get marginally close. She would just pull your hand and keep saying " I go over der" and walk to the logs to sit down on.That night we went to eat at Mo's. If you missed my previous post about Mo's, you can catch it here if you would rather go straight to the song go ahead and click here. Dustin and I will randomly start singing this jingle. I tell you that to warn you that it may never get out of your head if you listen to it. Whoever wrote that little diddy was a lyrical GENIUS! We were all very excited to eat here and it was one of the things we were looking forward to the most about the trip. We all filled our gullets with delicious clam chowder and then spent a little more time down at the beach. It was a great first day and lucky for us the weather only got better!