Grindstone Festival!

We missed Funland when we were on vacation so we told the kids we would make sure they got a chance to ride all the rides at the 4th of July festival this year! We met up with some friends so the kids could hang out and ride together and they all had a blast! And we had people to talk to while we waited in line too;)

Nobody looks excited in this picture...

Action shot!

Best inflatable I've ever seen! They have to race against another person to get up while going against a conveyor belt and then turn the corner and slide down the slide

Owen and his friends raced each other over and over!

Great picture of Owen and his friends, Noah and Jalen

Ready for the zipline!

Big slide! The person running this ride had a baby skunk hanging out on their shoulder and no one was manning the top so Paige got all the kids set up to go down!

Rain Delay

This game is from a few weeks ago at this point but I still love this first picture so much that I'm posting about it anyway! When Owen's baseball game started we didn't think they would get all the way through it because we could see the storm rolling in. The wind was crazy too! By the time it started raining it was so bad that an umbrella couldn't protect you from any of it. A friend and I took the younger siblings to the pavilion for some shelter and watched the game from there until they finally paused the game for a rain delay. There was a girl's game on the next field over and their game got cancelled but our umpire said it was his call and we were waiting it out! Owen and TJ were anxious to leave because they had planned a sleepover together after and the game ended up taking a long time because of the rain delay.

Rockwell-esque picture of some of the team

The ball went off of Owen's bat and right into the catcher's knee!

Owen's friend hit another in-the-park homerun!

Fort and video games after!

Vacation Day 5

On our 5th day of vacation I spent a good chunk of the day cleaning the beach house while Pat figured out how to get us a car so we could get out of Delaware! We were supposed to stay one more day but we all decided we had enough of this vacation! We found a minivan to rent and after trying to get the car rental place to pick us up and failing we tried Uber (no drivers in the area), and we tried a taxi service (too far out of their pickup area). We were out of options so we just kept pressing the Uber button and finally someone got close enough to pick up Pat so he could get the van! The ride home actually wasn't that bad. The kids played some cards and read and enjoyed the novelty of a different vehicle. We stopped at the Maryland welcome center and it had great views and a playground. Also, we made bowls of candy. Owen and I ran into a drug store at one point to use the bathroom and grab Pat some Advil and we picked up 5 different kinds of candy to bust out when we all needed it the most. I communicated the surprise to Paige via a notebook and we spent a good chunk of time writing each other notes back and forth. Other than making our own bathroom stop late into the night on the side of the road, that was all the excitement we needed! We arrived home about 1 am and everyone went immediately to sleep, glad to be in their own beds!

War!

The rest stop had interesting facts on the ground

Pretty view from the playground

Really bad picture of a really good candy-strawberry kit kat

Lots of candy=silly faces

Vacation Day 4

Sigh. Day 4 was rough. I can skip over the small stuff that didn't go well but there's no talking about our vacation without mentioning what happened on this day! The day started out normally, we took a walk to check out a nearby Pokemon Go stop, then we hung out on the beach until lunchtime. We had a quick lunch and then decided to stop at some of the outlets we missed the previous day because we would pass them on our way into Rehoboth anyway (we were going to get ice cream and hang out some more on the beach there). We ended up in a three car accident with our car smashed in the middle. Everyone was fine but Owen had a bump on his head that was worrisome so the ambulance took us to the hospital to get him checked out. Once we were done there we realized we had no transportation (we found out later that our car was totaled) and had to call an Uber to get us back to the beachhouse. Pat spent the rest of the day talking to insurance people and trying to iron out details about what would be happening.

Owen and I came across these hawks guarding their nest while we were out checking out Pokemon Go stops.

Paige was feeling a bit melancholy

Smooshed;(

Poor Owen! We were glad we took him to the hospital to make sure everything was ok! 

We still had some time for shell-hunting that night

Skip-bo!

Vacation Day 3

Day 3 of vacation was very low-key. We mostly hung out around the beach house and built sandcastles or checked out the sandbars. Everyone liked playing on the sandbars more than the beach until Owen got pinched by a crab. That evening we stopped at Panera for an easy dinner and went to some outlets. We didn't have much time at the outlets but we figured we'd go again another day...

Assateague-Vacation Day 2

One of the things Pat wanted to make sure we did was see the wild horses on Assateague Island. I have to admit that we weren't super impressed with the horses but the beach was great! We started off in the nature center that you come across before you cross a big bridge to get on the island. There was a lot of good information there and we got our National park passports stamped there too. The island was very windy and the waves were a lot bigger than the ones on the beach by our house! We didn't think to have the kids wear their swimsuits but really they should have just kept them on the whole weekend and we would have been better off. One of my favorite parts was seeing the kite-surfers enjoying the wind. I never knew they could get so high! We tried to find some horses but they were mostly meandering near people's campsites which made it a little awkward to stare at them...We were getting pretty tired but there was still more of the island we wanted to see so we rented some bikes for an hour and barely made it back in the hour we had paid for because the kids were moving so slowly.

Rangers!

Windy!

So windy!

Pat finally got near a horse!

Stopped for a picture on our bike ride

People can crab fish here but we just read the informational signs and moved along

Paige was exhausted!

Back at the beach house. Fun game-how many horseshoe crabs can you count?

Vacation Day 2

We told the kids we could check out the beach first thing in the morning so Owen got up at 6am ready for us to deliver on that promise! We made it out the door by 6:30 and discovered that it was covered with horseshoe crabs! Pat and Owen spent some of our vacation rescuing the ones that had flipped over on the beach and couldn't get back in the water.

Vacation Day One!

For vacation this year, we ventured to Delaware to stay at a friend's in-law's beach house! They vacation there every year so we were pretty excited to check it out and see what the beaches were like. We left early in the morning and drove straight into Rehoboth because it was around dinnertime and we had  a bunch of food places we wanted to cover while we were there. We ended up at a pizza place called D'Agostino's on the recommendation of a friend but we were either not hungry enough to enjoy it or we ordered the wrong things because we weren't super impressed with it. The kids really liked their cups though:) We walked down some more of the boardwalk until we got to the beach and the told the kids they could check out the water as long as they didn't get their clothes wet. Yes, they got completely soaked! When we got back to the car we found a note on our windshield from a person apologizing for hitting our bumper and offering their phone number in case we saw any damage. Not usually very noteworthy but considering what happened to us on day 4...

Pizza!

The other side of the table!

Dinnertime fun

Paige made one too!

Not quite wet yet...

Soaked!

Managed to get us all in the picture!

Fun spiral staircase at the beach house