Beaches and Bones

Summer is officially here! 

We basically spent the whole day at the beach.

We tried out a "new" beach this morning, one that is about a 10 minute drive up the lake and even less crowded. There were only two other families on the whole beach. We enjoyed ourselves so much (well, except for one minor snafu that I'll describe in a moment), that after naps, we headed right back out to the beach for the rest of the afternoon. 

These sort of beach days remind me of what drew us to Holland, MI. In the dead of winter it was getting hard to remember, but I remember now. Amongst other reasons to settle here, we liked the idea of living near the beach. 

I took this picture this morning, just before "the incident".

Lovely, right?

While I was nursing Owen and therefore a little tied down, I noticed Finn walk to the side of our blanket and pick up something that he was calling a stick. 

"Look Mommy, a stick."

Only, I immediately realized that it was NOT a stick. It was a bone. A rather large, probably deer, bone. It was in a pile of bones. And suddenly I realized that the smell I'd smelled when we'd laid our blanket down, wasn't just a random bad scent (Having five boys, four in diapers, I dismiss a lot of random scents). This time however, the smell wasn't coming from us. Nope, it was a rotting carcass. Basically, we'd set up camp right next to a rotting carcass with a pile of very large bones, that my sweet curious Finn had just picked up. How I didn't notice this when we arrived, I'm not sure.

"OH MY GOD! No! NOOOO! Put that down! Finn, PUT THAT DOWN!!"

Unfortunately, this has the opposite effect that I'm going for. Instead of deterring them, my words just peak everybody's interest. I could see the others starting to run over and all I could picture was them all picking up bones, or worse, diving into the bone pile. Seriously, it could happen.

Thank God our nanny, Jordyn was with me and has lighting quick reflexes. She pried the bone out of Finley's hands and blocked the others from getting into it all.

We tried wiping Finn's hands with baby wipes but the smell was just not coming off. It was disgusting. All I could envision was him putting his fingers in his mouth. OMG.

So although we'd made quite an effort to get down to the beach, we packed up our stuff and left.

I washed every, single, thing that even touched that beach. Including myself and the boys.

But we weren't deterred that much. Apparently it takes a lot more than a rotting carcass to keep us away from the beach on a bright, sunny day!

Because after naps, we headed back to the beach that's closer to our house.

Beach bound! That's one choo-choo wagon and one double stroller and a bag full of shovels and buckets.

Ahhhhhh..... summer. Soak it up!

Our week

I feel like we're starting to finally get in the swing of things here. We know where the grocery stores are, which farmer's markets are on which days of the week and where. The boys are back to sleeping well and Colin seems happy and excited about life in Holland.

This past week, I took Colin and Carter to story time at the farmer's market. It was outdoors and really wonderful. After story time some guy from a nature center gave a presentation all about animals and brought turtles and a rabbit. Colin was fascinated.

Throughout story time and the animal presentation, Carter kept doing 'trust falls', if you will. If you've ever been to a team building event or ever watch tosh.0 then you know what a trust fall is. Carter will literally just suddenly turn around and then drop backwards, trusting that you'll catch him. He's such a goofball that kid.

Trust Fall!

Other highlights of the week:

Momentarily loosing Everett and then finding him in the pantry. The door was left open because I was cleaning it out. Don't think I haven't thought of climbing in the pantry for a break myself. Unfortunately I don't fit.

Here I am!

On Thursday, Colin and I biked to a local blueberry farm, which also had this cool tractor out front.

We liked it so much that we brought everyone back for ice cream another night!

The playset got finished!

Wahoo! It's been such a blessing to have another outdoor space for the kids to play on and swing.

Tonight, I made pizza in the kitchen while watching Chris and the boys play on it. 

When dinner was ready, I actually had to lean towards the window screen and yell, "Come in! Dinner's ready!" and then I sort of giggled to myself because I remember playing house as a little girl and pretending this same scenario, only I'd never really done it in real life. Never had a backyard to call my family in from. It all felt very domestic. :)

But for sure, the highlight of the week was when I came home from exercising Thursday morning and saw the boys in the front window.

Two were already there waiting. They must have seen me pull into the driveway. As I got closer I could see the other two scrambling to get up on the couch as fast as they could. They were all jumping up and down, waving, screaming, laughing, and slapping their fat little hands against the window pane.



I think they were excited to see me :)

Doesn't get any better than that.

Happy weekend!

Oh- and then as I was typing this, I noticed a rainbow outside. So I went out to look and low and behold it was a full rainbow, right over our neighborhood! I've never seen one like this before and it was really pretty cool.

All I could think about though was, "Double Rainbow!" Have you seen that on youtube? hahahaha.