Florida Vacation

Last Saturday morning we headed to Florida for our annual beach vacation. We met Jon and Kelly (and Jordan and Matthew) and Dave and Mary Beth at a nearby gas station at five a.m. and hit the road.The nice thing about leaving early is that the kids sleep for the first few hours of driving. When they wake up we're already in another state and half way to our destination. We dressed the kids in their travel clothes and told them we'd get them up in the middle of the night...they were so excited they could hardly sleep!

That lack of sleep contributed to much of this on the drive down:

Sleeping kids are such WONDERFUL travelers! :)

Once we got there, we quickly unpacked, settled the house, gave the guys a shopping list (eek!) and Kelly and I took the kids to the beach.

The kids didn't waste any time jumping right in...it was breezy but that didn't stop them. They ran right down to splash in the ocean and then spent time building things in the sand.

Here's the kid crew right before we left the beach the first night...Jordan and Matthew were pretty cold by that point, but it didn't stop them from playing!

It was a beautiful drive down, and a perfect first day on the beach.

When we headed back to the house it was getting late, so we had pizza for dinner and settled in to our evening routine: kids snuggled up on the couch for a movie...

...and cards at the table for the adults!

The next day, Sam and I tried to convince everyone that we should all learn the Hoedown Throwdown (It's a Hannah Montana song. Don't worry if you haven't heard of it--I hadn't either!). We got Jon to join us and we got the first few steps nailed down before deciding we were not going to pick it up as easily as we had assumed. ;)

We spent time at the beach and the pool, but it was fairly windy (which made water activities a bit on the cool side), so we all piled into cars and went to visit the nearby Bass Pro Shop. We took the obligatory picture by the shark out front (notice my daughter is the one with her finger up her nose)...

...and saved Henry from getting eaten alive.

There was lots of time for cousin-bonding, as evidenced by these two clowns:

We spent the rest of our days doing a myriad of activities: mornings and afternoons at the beach...followed by time in the pool (in our backyard, of course!), playing at the park up the road from our house, spending a morning at the air force armament museum, going bowling (a first for our kids!), visiting the science museum, and lots of reading time for mom. :)