Wrapping Up Our Chaotic Summer and Preparing for an Awesome School Year.

This was a Summer I will never forget!

This was a really busy summer for my entire family. There was not a lot of time for me to blog because there was so much that was happening. It started with softball and baseball season, which took up a lot of our time. We also had three birthdays to celebrate, a vacation, and preparing for back to school. Between the sports and family stuff we also added a four legged friend to the family. Lets just say our youngest has a best friend now.

After ball season was over the first thing we did was celebrate our oldest for her birthday. Last year I decided that we will not being doing birthday parties anymore for the older ones. It feels like they enjoy their birthday more if we go somewhere fun and have the experience. This year we took her to the Science Center and we let her take a friend. She ended up enjoying it but she really wanted to go to a bouncy house park, but unfortunately we don’t have any around us.

VACATION TIME!

The best part of the summer was here and we were more than ready to get down to Gulf Shores. I will say that driving 19 hours with four children is not super fun. We made the best of it though and in the end it was worth it. After our long journey down to Alabama we finally made it to our first stop. We stopped at my Mammaw’s. It had been almost three years since I had last seen her. Last time we only had the three older children.

I will say that I gained a core memory from this stop. One of the twins, Bubba, had asked her to go out to the backyard and throw the football with her. She took herself out there and threw it back and forth with him. Bean, the other twin came out there and Bubba threw the ball at him and stated “Play football with Mammaw. I need a break.” My grandmother was shocked that those words came out of his mouth considering that fact that he was 6 at the time and she was considerably older. This is one stop that I had made a priority since it had been so long and it was so great to see her.

On to our destination

The next morning we headed out to Gulf Shores. We were there before everyone else but had almost an hour to kill before we could get into the house. Once the time hit 4 o’clock we were in the house finding our room. We chose to have our whole family sleep in one room to save on money. Lets just say we were ready to be in our own rooms by the end of it. Our family spent some time at the beach and a lot of time in the pool.

We did not have a single green flag at the beach the entire time we were there. We had red and purple. There were a lot of jellyfish and our family found that out real quick. There was 6 or 7 people who were stung by the jellyfish, including Bean. When he got stung he was screaming so loud that I am sure all of the neighbor people heard. It took a little bit to get him back into the ocean but he did get back in the next day. We did a little shopping and went out to eat a few times, but spent most of our time at the house swimming in the pool.

Best Day Ever (as my kids would say)

On July 23rd my mom decided to watch the kids so we could go out for a date night. We chose to go to Wolf Bay to eat and we shared a seafood platter. It was delicious and worth the money. We were going to go mini golfing after but there was so many people at all of them that we decided to just go back to the house and look for crabs in the dark.

When we got back we snuck under the house and walked straight to the beach. As walked along the shore and found a few crabs and even found one that had creepy human like eyes. We were starting to walk back to the house and all of a sudden James was on his knee asking me to marry him. To say the least, I was shocked but of course said YES!

You wanna know how much I love this man? He didn’t even have a ring and I still said yes. All I wanted was to be able to steal his last name and continue to build a life with him. After he proposed and I said yes we went back to the house. Most of my family was still awake but we did not announce it. He made subtle hints and it was fun to keep it to ourselves. We did tell my mom the next day and one of my family members figured it out and told everyone!

Summer comes to an end

As we headed home there were some challenges. Nardo was car sick at the beginning and anytime we got stuck in heavy traffic. Bubba cried the last 6 hours home and we were more than ready to get there. Once we were back an settled we got back to reality, kids went to daycare and we went to work. I don’t think I have ever been so excited to go back to work.

Soon after we had James’s Birthday and the twins. We did not do much for James as he did not want to but for the twins we did a party at a waterpark. It was the first waterpark they had all been to and oh my gosh I forgot how much of a blast they were. We decided that we will be going back a couple times next summer. During this time I tried to prepare for back to school and get the school supplies ahead of time. Well that back fired and two of the three book bags did not show up until the week after school started.

In the end it was a fantastic summer full of laughs, fun and core memories that will be with me for a life time. Now on to wedding planning, school events, and more sports!