The Dog Days Are Over

I've got this song in my head because I just watched a video snippet that Bethany {Nancy's sis} made of our Labor Day weekend trip. Check it out. Bethany and her {extremely good sport} fiance Brandon joined us this year to take on six kids under the age of 6 so that their parents could go out to an adult-only dinner. It was much appreciated and we repaid them by inviting them to join us for the weekend. I'm not sure how relaxing it was for them, but good birth control, nonetheless! Our children couldn't have been left in better hands, Bethany is about to finish up nursing school and Brandon is a fire-fighter. Talk about well-trained sitters.

Bethany used a 8 mm vintage camera app by Nexvio Inc to create the video and I love it's nostalgic look. It made me smile from ear to ear. It makes me a little sad, too. It reminds me of watching old home movies of myself around Paige's age and I realize that these moments when are children are young and innocent are fleeting. Next thing I know I will blink and they'll be full grown.

Our annual Labor Day trip was soggy and windy {which you can tell/hear in the video} from Tropical Storm Lee. But each year, no matter what or who tries to ruin our trip {have I mentioned that we are 2 for 4 on tropical storms blasting our vacation?} we always leave having made memories – good and bad. And what makes me happy is that our kids will look back one day and remember these trips fondly. So, TS Lee can rain on our beach weekend, but he can't rain on our parade!

This year we opted for a house right on the beach in Carillon Beach {right smack dab between Panama City and Rosemary Beach}. Having the beach just a stone's throw away was perfect, especially since we could run out there in between showers and soak up what little beach time we could get. And the rest of the time, we could watch the storms roll in from the living room windows.

Unfortunately, I forgot my digital SLR, so I'm disappointingly short on photos this year. I'm relying on my girls, Ali and Nancy to send me photos. Alas, one week later and no photos have appeared in my inbox {hint hint}. Hopefully, Nancy will post a few more soon on her blog, including our annual bed photo of the kids, which went surprisingly well this year. Here's a little look of the few iPhone pics from the weekend.

 Tropical Storm = Good Boogie Boarding. Blaine and Brandon head out to hit the surf.

Our private boardwalk led right down to the sugary sand. We all left with baby soft skin after the sand-blasting our bodies took.

I thought it might be nice to put up the tailgate tent, so that we could maybe sit underneath it while it was lightly sprinkling to watch the kids play. Too bad it didn't actually make it all the way up, the wind was ferocious all weekend. Note the kite surfing off in the distance!

Our house was the pink stucco all the way to the right. Carillon has tons of beach access walkovers for the rest of the community to use – you can see one of these boardwalks just to the left of our house.

Amazingly the kids didn't seem to mind the Tropical Storm conditions and were able to pretty well keep themselves occupied inside in the house. But they took every chance they got to get out of the house and play on the sand and surf.

Our adult-only dinner at Caliza in Alys Beach. The food and atmosphere is amazing! We toasted to Blaine and Nancy's six-year wedding anniversary – what perfect timing!

And this was taken on our way home. For the past month Ben has been growing out a goatee. He decided before he shaved it completely off, to make it a handlebar mustache. I thought this called for preserving in history with a hipstamatic photo.

Yay for clean shaven faces!

Following the beating that TS Lee brought, the weather changed instantly across the Southeast from extreme heat and 100 percent humidity, to fall weather with highs in the low 80s and low humidity. Again, why couldn't we have had this weather last weekend? It's starting to warm back into the low 90s this week, which means we might get a few more pool days in before the dog days are really gone. We hit up the pool twice this weekend for a mermaid pool party on Saturday and an impromptu neighborhood pool jaunt on Sunday.

Logan likes jelly shoes in the pool. That's the way she rolls.

This was a little game to see if they could make it to the top of the wet slide. When they didn't it was a domino effect down the slide. Paige thought it was hilarious, Logan was not amused.

Jack told me to call and see if Mr. Blaine and Logan could come join us at the pool. When I called Nancy to see if they could come, I told her not to take this the wrong way, but Jack actually requested Mr. Blaine and not her. When I told Jack that Nancy was coming instead, he told me sadly that he didn't want to be the only boy. I assured him that there would be boys at the pool to play with. Luckily Jack found one of his new school friends, Xander, at the pool. He gave him a nice little hug goodbye when it was time for Xander to go home. I love Logan's expression in this photo. I can only assume that the bucket just dumped and caught her off guard.

Why can't these two stay little forever?!

Summer was great...but gotta say, I'm looking forward to the fall and all of the fun and excitement that this time of year brings.