A Little Sandestin

I have to say that the family support at our base is pretty good.  Okay, really good.  For instance, we just got back from two nights at the Sandestin Hilton.  Courtesy of the base family support center.  Granted, we are about to go through a deployment and a long separation is not the best thing for a marriage so they want to help support that.

We went to a family retreat and they treated our whole family real good.  First of all, this view.

They put us in a room that slept eight.  Which is pretty hard to find in hotels that are in our price range (which this hotel was not).  Even so, two of our kids slept in the smaller-than-twin sized bottom bunk.  It was more exciting than in one of the comfy double beds where the rest of us were I guess.

Let me tell you how it has rained all but five days this month.  That's 12 out of 17 days with rain of some amount.  I know that other parts of the country need this rain and I'd happily send it your way if I could.  Anyways, we were going to the beach on a mini-vacation...I needed the rain to go away.

Friday morning it poured.  Friday evening we were surfing the waves.  Thank you rain, for taking a break.

Lest you think we had this perfect family mini-vacation, I will tell you why there are only three children in our Saturday beach pictures.  

Picture this in your mind...

We were in a beautiful hotel on a beautiful beach, and two of my children didn't feel like getting sandy.  Chris took Leah back to the room to go potty or something and for some reason Gabe didn't go with him.  (I think I may have made him stay because usually when he says he doesn't want to swim at the beach, he ends up quickly changing his mind once we are there). So I left him sitting by our stuff and went in the water with Anna, right in front of where he was sitting, so I could see him.  Only when I turned around after a moment or two, he was gone.  

I saw him pretty quickly, a few hundred feet away washing the sand off his feet at the hotel showers.  There was a packed beach between us so I didn't want to try screaming like a crazy lady or  take my eyes off of him to play with Anna, and she was getting upset that I was holding her. I sent Matthew up to tell Gabe to come back and he had to pull a bit on Gabe to get him to come.  Gabe came, crying the whole way.  And he wouldn't stop.  He stood there and cried and cried.  

He's six.  So I ignored him and went back to playing with Anna and the older boys in the water, keeping a better eye on him at the same time. 

Once I realized that Chris wasn't coming back down with Leah, I called him to come get Gabe.  Again, the beach was packed, and I figured I wouldn't want to sit on the beach on my vacation and listen to some whiny kid throwing a fit.  I let Gabe go wait up by the showers so he'd stop crying and could wash off the sand while he waited for Chris to come get him.  It worked as planned and the three kids left and I enjoyed the rest of our beach time, drama free.

Intermingled with free time, we attended some marriage workshops while the kids were in childcare.  There was about 20 couples there and the leaders kept it pretty entertaining while they talked and we did activities about relationships.  The kids were fed in the childcare and meals were provided for us.  We even got a date night and we went into Destin and watched The Bourne Legacy.  What a great mini-vacation!  

This little one has a flower picking habit we can't break.

Sunday morning we woke to this neat rainbow.  It was complete and this end here ended so close to us.  I guess I thought they just went to the horizon, but this is up in the shallow beach waters.  So pretty.

So, we tried the beach again on Sunday.  It went a lot better, but this kid walked so carefully through the sugar white sand that he didn't barely got any sand in his crocs.  Pretty impressive.  (Ughh, yes, it looks like these should be replaced soon....LOL)

And this is how he sat the whole time.

What a great way to end the first week of school, right?!!