We spent lots of time at the beach as usual this year. The kids loved playing in the sand, standing in the water, searching for shells, and going down the slides on the beach. One beach visit Anna spent over an hour playing with a bucket of water–scooping sand into it, splashing her hands in the water, putting shells in and taking them out. We also visited Max’s favorite local restaurant twice. They serve an amazing buffet that includes a salad bar, a variety of pizzas, and ice cream for dessert. This year Max proclaimed it, “The best pizza I’ve ever had” so we had to go back for a second visit.

Another treat this year was overlapping with my aunt and uncle and cousin who were visiting from Michigan. We hadn’t seen them in far too long and I loved watching them interact with the kids. They joined us, along with another local uncle and aunt, for a beachside picnic to celebrate Maxwell’s birthday. Helen put a lot of work into it and it was a great success. We had a picnic lunch, cupcakes, and Max got to open presents. He was so excited by each present, it was really cute. Each time he would say, “I wonder what’s in this present” and then would gasp in delight as he opened it, exclaiming “Wow!” or “Oh my gosh!” (the latter is a new favorite expression, I’m guessing he picked it up from someone at preschool).

We took about 800 pictures and it was very hard to narrow them down for the blog. I’m going to do a couple installments, so below is just the first batch. I’ll do another post soon with more.