Vacation

We arrived home Monday from our wonderful vacation to Holden Beach, NC! What a fantastic trip. The beach house we rented with 2 other families was right across the street from the beach access and was perfect! I was very impressed with the east coast, having not been there before. The water was soooo warm and there were no crowds - I have been completely converted to an east coast girl!

The week went so well, in spite of having 3 families all living in the same house. The house was big enough that we didn't feel cramped, and I guess we're all just such good friends that no one really got on anyone else's nerves, as far as I could tell, anyways. What a blessing to have such good friends and to still be in touch with them after 5 years (I think) since we all met back in CA!

Some of the fun, besides hanging out on the beach, was playing Mexican Train Dominoes, playing Corn Hole (see the Heldt's blog for more on that), collecting shells with Laina on the beach (Jay will have to post more on that as it was more of a father/daughter activity), and my own personal highlight of the vacation....reading the first book in my new found favorite series, Twilight. I won't get into the details here, but let me just say that these books are more captivating than anything I've read in a long time, maybe more so than anything I've read, ever. I finished the first book in 2 days (Tara brought it to the beach for me) and passed it off to Rachel who finished it faster than me. Before we took off on the flight home on Sunday, I purchased the second book and finished that by Monday at 3pm. Then I happened upon the 3rd book at the grocery store on Monday afternoon and just finished that one before starting this post. Now I'm in trouble because there is one book left in the series, but it doesn't come out until August 2nd. What's a girl to do???

Alright, enough about books...on with the pictures from the trip.

a bit windy but we got a decent "self portrait"


The awesome view from the family room upstairs in the beach house
(we saw dolphins from this view one of the days!)

Laina loved playing in the sand

and floating in the super warm ocean!