The Beach and Finals

Our two day trip to the beach was very last minute and thrown together, but so worth it. When JD announced that he was going down for work, that meant one thing to me - hotel is already paid. We traveled down on Wednesday after swim practice and arrived about the time he got off work. That evening was cool, but it didn't keep the kids out of the waves. They played and then froze back to the hotel.

On Thursday JD worked, but my friend, Wendy, and her kids came down to play with us at the ocean front. My crew was there about 4.5 hours and not one child said they were ready to leave.

This was Selah and Bella's first beach trip. There will be no pictures of Selah, however, as the child has ZERO fear and spent her time getting out in the waves as far and fast as she was allowed. I could barely get her to break to eat.

 

In the middle of the day, I had to move the van, since the meters were limited to three hour parking. After trying three garages, I managed to park our bus  van in the Hyatt hotel lot crammed between two economy cars. When we left the beach, however, it seemed Hyatt owned a few blocks and there were several gargages and several entrances. Since Wendy saw my van on her way out, she guided me to it via phone. I may still be there looking had she not seen it. Here's the small area to get on the small elevator with 7 kids, 7 boogie boards, a large rolling wagon and cooler. Good memories!

The next day we headed to a base beach where we commonly saw dolphins  when we lived in VA Beach. The waves were so big that there were no dolphins or even boogie boards allowed, but the kids had a great time anyway and were worn out!

Leaving town we had a stop at Wendy's to pick up a goat.

See Flutter packed in with the boogie boards? She was such a good girl on the trip home and as I said on FB, a goat is a perfect souvenir from the beach!

We got home late Friday night and the small kids had to be up by 6 a.m. for swim finals. They are troopers and did great.

The kids all swam well and Tori was awesome to watch as usual. On her first relay, she was the last leg of the relay and started out about 10 feet behind one of the competing teams. JD and I were worrying that the gap was just to great to even give her a chance, but she swam past and won with a nice little margin.  On the second relay, the team was first the whole way.

I took this picture as they were posing for one of the other girl's moms; it's so loud and chaotic that I didn't want to ask them to pose again.