Swim team sure is keeping us busy!
Alexander started in the "Future Barracudas" program the week we got back from the beach. He said he felt "the urge to excel" in swimming...and he did! He graduated from the "Future Barracudas" program by the end of the week and practiced with the competitive team this week.
That means he missed the kids' first swim meet (on June 6), but he was an excellent spectator and learned how swim meets work.
Here's Zoë (dead center...and dead last) swimming last week:
Here is Phoebe singing "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep":
We gave the Phinizy Swamp Nature Center another try on our way home from the beach. This time it was open and it was well-worth our time, I think!
They have beautiful boardwalk trails over a swamp, surrounded by tall reeds and trees dripping with Spanish moss:
After getting back from Botany Bay, we headed right back out to sit on our "own" beach.
Don't ask me why Phoebe looks so grumpy in this picture because the truth of the matter is that she loved being buried.
On Thursday morning we visited Botany Bay, a beautiful land preserve on Edisto Island. We weren't really sure what to expect—some websites said to strap on your hiking boots, some websites said to wear shoes that can get wet. We mostly opted for sandals and that was a good choice.
It's a half mile walk from the parking lot to the beach, and it's best to visit at low-tide. When we checked the schedule in the morning and saw we were just about at low-tide we started hollering Grandpa's catchphrase: "Ten minutes!" (meaning that we should all be getting ready to go in ten minutes). I'm not sure we managed to leave the house in ten minutes, but we did leave pretty quickly!
Here we are looking at all the oysters and crabs we can see thanks to the low tide:
This next picture is from our walk back to the parking lot and you can see the tide is certainly much higher than it was when we came:
Five years ago we moved to Georgia and then Rachel turned 12, and Miriam was still only 9, and Benjamin was barely 7, and Zoë was newly 4.
While I was at the optometrist, Daddy took the kids to Wal-Mart and a couple boxes of doughnuts fell into the shopping cart, so we started Wednesday morning with a doughnut breakfast (before Daddy and Grandpa drove off to the mechanic) and then Darla pulled out some big doughnut floats that she likes to bring to the beach and declared that it was Doughnut Day.
Going to the beach with—essentially—six grown people (Grandpa, Darla, Andrew, Rachel, Miriam, and me), two medium people (Zoë and Ben), and two small people (Alexander and Phoebe) is considerably easier than going to the beach with three small people and two grown people. Or even three grown people, one medium person, and three-and-a-half small people.
Most mornings it seemed like Darla was out the door with the early-bird children and in the water by the time the rest of us stumbled onto the beach.
