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| Josh and Collin. |
Josh attached himself firmly to his cousin Collin’s shadow and pretty much didn’t leave his side for a week.
He had an absolute blast with so many great kids to play with (he gets pretty sick of just boring old mama every day, I’m sure!).
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| Jed and Crystal |
We spent lots of time at the beach (again only a hundred yards from our vacation rental),
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| Grandpa Riggs having a sword fight with Collin. |
ate wonderful food (thanks, Mom!), and got to hang out with my most favorite people in the whole world.
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| Me and my brothers. |
We revisited some of my most cherished family memories - baseball on the beach,
playing a game invented by my dad many years ago that many of you may be familiar with called Hit or Be Hit (can you guess how it’s played?),
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| Anita |
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| Scott |
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| Dad - widely accepted as the best Hit Or Be Hit pitcher in history. |
and especially hanging out in the evenings after the little ones were asleep talking about all kinds of whatnot. We spent one of those evenings watching some true Youtube gems. Scott introduced us to the Bronchitis lady, the original Honey Badger bit, and the Double Rainbow dude. We laughed until we cried. Man I love these people! I’m so grateful that everyone still makes such an effort to get together.
We also got to go mountain biking! Since I’m generally considered to be a pretty unpredictable (read: not good) mountain biker, I elected to not bring my camera along. It was a wise choice as I crashed about half a dozen times, but I hated not being able to take photos. These are from my brother’s phone.
It was pretty awesome to get to go biking again! Mario got to go twice. Can’t wait to find some good places here!
Flying kites one beautiful afternoon.
Dad brought his sand machines and we were really looking forward to some riding on the dunes, but the wind was blowing at about 40 mph so we decided it wasn’t going to work for people to occupy little kids in the parking lot while others went for rides in those conditions.
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| Our aborted attempt to ride quads. |
So we went home and got in the hot tub.
We also tried a new (to us) activity - crabbing! Half the crew got up super early and tried their luck with crab pots from the pier.
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| Checking out the crab haul. It was pretty windy out on the pier. |
We try to take family photos every couple years. It is difficult, to put it mildly, to get a good photo of this many people, especially with such a high ratio of kiddos.
My parents switched halfway through the week and we finished up with Yaya on board.
Mom brought stuff for the grandkids (and others :) ) to decorate cakes.
Josh for some reason decided to abstain from using his hands to eat for the duration of the activity. Silly kid!
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| Jake and his girls. |
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| She sure loves to clean rocks with her mouth. |
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| Max followed her around for a while picking up handfuls of sand and pouring them carefully on her head. |
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| Crab boil - Good job, crab hunters! |
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| Ben's double decker hamburger. |
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| They should re-name sunscreen "sand glue." |
Josh had an excellent time with his cousins.
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| Jake with Claire. |
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| "Fishing" off the balcony. |
We ended the week with a bonfire on the beach our last night.
