Beach Fun Day 2

Another full day, but not quite as full as yesterday. After breakfast Ginger and Karen went to the grocery store. For some reason we never quite understood, we were left explicit instructions not to go into the pool until they returned. The lines were apparently long at the store so they didn't end up getting back until close to noon. This meant we had to keep the kids entertained inside for a while. I broke out the Nintendo so that Quinn could play that some and we got out the Barbie dolls for Catherine and Amanda. After Quinn kicked Ken's butt at Mario Kart a couple times he started getting bored. Luckily Ginger and Karen got back when they did so that the kids didn't end going stir crazy.






After a quick lunch everyone headed out to the pool while I tried to take care of some work stuff on IM. Once I finished that, I was able to snap some pictures of the kids from the balcony. At this point it's hard to believe that Quinn was once timid about getting into the water. Now he dives for rings, jumps in the deep end, and has even gotten the point where once jumping in deep water he can come up for air two or three times before he would drown if I wasn't there. I eventually joined everyone and we all played in the pool for a long time until Catherine ended up swallowing some of the pool water (which if you'll remember from yesterday is a salt water pool). So after that we decided pool time was over. We made the kids nap, simply because they really needed it.


Once all the kids were up (which took a while, Catherine was apparently very tired), we all packed up and headed to the beach. The house is pretty far away from the beach, and there's no public parking near the beach access. The standard operating procedure so far has been I drive people to the beach, drop them off, drive back to the house and then walk to the beach. Then reverse that for leaving the beach. And I as running the distance, which since I'm out of shape has been tough. The plan originally had been I would ride one of the bikes at the house down instead of walking, but both bikes had flat tires. So after a call to the rental company, we got a new bike delivered today. So I'm no longer walking back and forth and can ride the bike.

For some reason I didn't take a lot of pictures of the kids while at the beach today. I was going to get video of them making sand angels at one point, but they quit by the time I had secured the video camera. Quinn and I walked a good ways up the beach. We started this journey 'looking for sea shells', but it quickly turned into Quinn pretending to be a train as he walked along the tracks in the sand left by a dune buggy. As we walked back to the group, we walked in the waves a bunch. And once we got back to everyone the kids were playing in the waves. Quinn would run and jump in the incoming waves and Catherine would sit down in the waves as they came in. At one point a really big wave came in that Quinn wasn't watching and I took one for the team by putting myself between him and the wave and got completely soaked.


John and Buddy have been talking about starting up a blog for taking pictures of random people, so I thought I would try and get in some practice. I took the above picture of a perfect stranger just for John. The pictures below are also of some random people. The last one isn't people though, it just struck me as amusing. For some reason when I saw it, I thought "One nation, under pirates."







After I dropped the everyone off at the house on the way home, I drove on down to the sound to try and get a sunset picture. I got there like 5 to 10 minutes too late for anything good. Plus it was cloudy, so it wasn't going to be a good night for pictures anyway.

During dinner tonight some people were setting off fireworks. This made dinner that much longer as all the kids had to run out to see the fireworks. I grabbed the camera, but it's hard to get everything set up that quickly, so I only got like one or two shots worth viewing (if that).