Beach Weekend in Collages & Videos

Warning: this is a long post, which contains several collages.
Please click on any collage you would like to see in greater detail.

We spent Easter weekend with *all* of Ben's family at a beach house on beautiful St. George Island, FL. This was a wonderful place to hang out, and it really felt like we were "Over the Rainbow" for a few days. Jack settled right in when we found our room (on the third floor, near the elevator) and told me that he would like to sleep in this chair.

There was plenty of fun to be had on the beach...

Papa fished as much as he could, and most of us got in on the fishing action as well. (Yep, even yours truly. I managed to set a record for the most tangled line on Ben's pole. No pictures to prove it.)

We got to know some native islanders a little better. (One of the highlights of the weekend was when we saw a pod of dolphins jumping out of the water for several minutes. If I'd realized it was going to last that long, I would have tried to take a picture! We see dolphins most of the time when we got to the beach, but for some reason it's still so exciting to me. Love those guys.) The night-time crab viewing was so fun for all of us. Those little (and big) guys were everywhere!

It was so fun to get to hang out with Mema & Papa,
as well as aunts, uncles, and cousins for a few days.

We were also lucky enough to spend a day with Tim & Cassie, some good friends from Tallahassee. They drove over on Friday and the kids loved being together! Tim and Ben have been close since they were very young, and it is so fun that our kids are all around the same ages. Here are a few pictures from this year and past visits to the beach with T&C's family:

Ben taught Cat all about boogie boarding.

Then she practiced with Lana. They had fun boogie-ing together.

Jack didn't get in the ocean at all during the weekend, and he only spent a few minutes in the pool. Funny, considering how fearless he was at the beach when he was 13 months old:

One fun thing that happened was that there was a wedding reception at the neighborhood pool on Friday night. So the girls danced as they swam, during DJ Porkchop's sound check. Just before I started recording this video, he'd been playing upbeat dance music.



They also danced on the balcony during the reception itself.

We had a little Easter Egg hunt on Saturday evening, followed by a great Easter FHE. We loved getting to celebrate this special holiday with extended family.

We attended a tiny little branch (when we showed up, we more than doubled the attendance from the previous week) for Sacrament Meeting on Easter Sunday. It was a great reminder that the gospel is the same everywhere, and that a unit does not need to be strong in number in order to be strong in spirit. I was also reminded of how loud my children are in Church. They somehow seem quieter when we're in a big chapel full of people.

And here is one last collage, full of pictures that didn't make it into other collages.

Thank you for the fun weekend, Mema and Papa!
And thank you for sharing your pictures, Keturah!

Also, congratulations to anyone still reading this loooooong post.
Way to endure to the end!