Dig a Big Hole: Thursday, May 22

I hardly took any pictures this day. When I got up, Phoebe was already wide awake, watching video montages on a phone. Sunrise was at around 5:45 every morning, so the day was already bright and well under way by the time we were getting up. 

Here are the kids with their fortress of pillows they slept with...which were supposed to be on the floor in case Phoebe fell out of bed. 

I was worried about this because she has a floor bed at home, so if she falls off it is no big deal. And when she does sleep in a real bed it's usually between Mommy and Daddy. 

Wouldn't you know it...she stayed on the bed every night except one when she crashed to the floor with a tremendous clunk and not a pillow in sight to break her fall. 

We had fun at the beach on Thursday morning. Daddy had meetings, so I took the kids to the beach for a couple of hours during those meetings and then we stayed a bit longer once he joined us, coming inside in the middle of the day to escape the harshest hours of sunshine.

Alexander wanted to build a big hole...and he succeeded.

Here's Phoebe sitting in the hole:

And here's the hole-digger himself in the hole:

The bucket hats he and Phoebe are wearing have been in my stash of swim stuff for years. They came from (1) a swim set we bought for Benjamin about 8 years ago and (2) a hand-me-down swim set of the same brand that someone gifted to Phoebe a couple of years ago. We've never really used the hats though because although they're good in theory they would just blow right off the kids' heads at the beach. 

I feel like beaches are often quite windy.

So this year I sewed some ribbons onto the hats and the kids were really good about using them. I really was hoping that no one would burn and I may have succeeded, too, except Benjamin decided that sunscreen was optional and simply...didn't use it...even when he was told to. 

To be fair, he had regrets about that decision. 

But I was really trying to not burn my kids. I didn't get burned at all! 

Did I get kicked in the jaw?

Absolutely...but I didn't get burned.

Anyway...here's Alexander in his big hole:

I think it was about at this point in his hole that he declared, "I think we're at sea level!"

And I just realized that we didn't bury anyone in the sand this year. We buried some feet (Alexander spent about an hour covering Darla's feet over and over again) but we didn't bury anyone. I think the water was too enticing.

Oh, look—here's Phoebe in a hole again:

This was a sad day of vacation for me because I realized how close we were to finishing up our week. And although I knew we had a lot of work to get back to (as well as quite a lot of work that we had to check in on while we were there), I wished we could have stayed for just a little bit longer. 

Here's Miriam in front of our beach house sign—Ballyhoo Villa:

I'm pretty sure we went back to the beach after dinner. But evidently I took no pictures between 1:00 and 8:00 pm. So just know that we went the beach—and maybe we swam, and maybe we played surfminton. I know that we for sure filled in that giant hole Alexander dug (we stuck a beach chair in it when we left for lunch so that no one would inadvertently fall in). After playing at the beach for a while we went back to the condo for dinner. 

I think this is the night that we decided to get McDonald's for dinner because we had planned for pancakes, but then realized that only one stove burner was functional and we didn't want to cook pancakes for ten in a single pan. 

After dinner we hit the tennis court for some pickleball instruction:

Grandpa and Darla like to play pickleball. None of us ever have. It was quite a lot of fun so I'm thinking we'll need to get a set of raquets so we can keep practicing. I told the kids that I didn't think we'd be doing co-op this coming year...but that we could spend some of that extra time at the tennis courts (since our pool has tennis/pickleball courts as well, which we've never used). Of course, I don't know how to tell the difference between tennis shoes and running shoes...so I don't know that I'll be very good at this after all. 

Here are the ball-fetchers taking a break:

Grandpa and Darla consistently got up in the mornings to play pickleball while we were at the beach and we...consistently did not (though Alexander and Zoë did join them on Friday morning).