4th of July

I love Independence Day! I really do! So we always go to more than one celebration each year. Even if Ray decides not to go with us. (He doesn't see any reason to get stuck in hours worth of traffic for July 4th celebrations.)

This year Yvette and Jada went to Addison's Kaboom Town celebration with us. We also took Marcus and Bruce. Ray stayed home to enjoy some rare peace and quiet.

The kids played in the water.

And enjoyed some volleyball:

The music was so loud that we had to yell at each other just to make conversation.

There was also an airshow for us to enjoy. One stunt lady stood on top of a propeller plane while it performed tricks in the air! Amazing!

When Samara saw these planes in formation, she said, "Look! That Mama plane has babies!"

When darkness came, we sat down for a great fireworks show. The only bad thing was that we had positioned ourselves right behind a tree that blocked some of our view.

The next night Ray went with us to see fireworks in Lewisville. There were no other activities other than the fireworks so we parked a short distance away. Ray's mom, Rachel, and Yvette and Jada went with us to see the show.

Fishing Storm

We took another fishing trip to our new spot on Lake Lewisville (Westlake Park) to show Ray's sister how nice it was. We were surprised by how crowded it was! There were very few empty picnic tables and the water was full of boats, music and swimmers! It was nothing like the quiet spot we found during the week. We decided we could still have fun though! Here's a picture of Yvette and Nehemiah getting their poles ready.



I didn't last long fishing because all the little ones kept getting snagged in the rocks. I quickly tired of freeing their lines. So I opted to just jump in and go swimming with them! They like to fish, but they LOVE to swim! It was Jada's first time to swim in a lake instead of a swimming pool and she was very nervous about snakes that might bite her or fish that might touch her or water too deep for her, etc. Poor baby! I wanted her to be informed, not scared!



Soon we started seeing lightning in the distance. I decided we had better get out of the water.


Before long we could see a dark cloud moving over the lake.


We watched in awe while the sky literally opened up in front of us! (All the while Ray was still fishing, of course!) In this pic, you can see the ducks flying for cover and the boat racing to get out of the water!



We decided we'd better put everything in the truck in case the rain came. We left only our fishing gear out, hoping that the storm would pass. This looks like an evening shot, but this was early afternoon!



When the rain finally came, it hit hard! We ran to the truck with our poles and praised ourselves for being so smart as to put away all of our other belongings before the storm hit! We made it to the truck safely but it was raining so hard we couldn't see through it to drive!


So we had to wait it out. Luckily it wasn't long before the worst of it was gone.

More from the Beach Trip

I had a few more pictures from the beach trip that I just had to post. (By a "few", I mean, ahem, a lot!)

I love this one of Isaiah and Samara walking along the beach.

And this one of the birds flying in a straight line:

As I was looking through the pictures, I was shocked to see this one of Samara in the water with the mouth of a Great White Shark in the waves not too far away!!! ("It" is in the upper right hand corner where I drew a circle around it.) I kept looking at the picture trying to figure out what it was.

Finally, I realized it was my brother with a white t shirt over his head! Whew!

I was surprised with how much the kids played with the wagon we brought from home. I originally brought it thinking it would help tote things to and from the beach. But it ended up being the best toy we brought! Even better than the boogie boards!

They raced with it, pretended it was a surfboard (it floats), pretended it was a boat and "fished" from it.

In this picture, Samara is on the "boat" and she is "fishing" with a toy shovel as her fishing rod. Seth is the fish.

One day we challenged ourselves to walk to the end of the jetty. It seemed like it was neverending!

It was weird being that far out into the ocean coupled with reassuring signs like these:

Yay! We made it to the end!

We found another family who was willing to snap a group picture of us:

Now for the long walk back!

We were lucky enough to see a couple of ships come in! When we would see them coming in, we would jump in the car and drive down the beach to see them up close.

See that boat behind the ship? That one looks tiny but actually is good sized too! It's bigger than any boat I've ever been on.

The kids began picking up rocks and throwing them into the water. No matter how hard they tried they couldn't pick this one up:

And since my aunt lives in nearby Clute, lots of family members stopped by to visit.

Here's Aunt Ellen and Nehemiah:

My mom, Ellen and Seth relaxing:

Uncle D waiting for a fish to bite:

Shanna, Mom and Ellen:

Jessica, Mom and Shanna:

Laura and her son William:

Laura's son Randall:

Shanna and her husband, Danny:

Shanna's son Riley and daughter Alyssa:

My cousin David brought his family by to visit too. But we were on the beach and for once I didn't have my camera. (See why I like to always have it with me?)

We found lots of shells and rocks. We even found one that looked like poop that we just had to take a picture of!

On our way back home, we stopped at the Sea Center.

It's a really cool place with lots of hands on stuff to do. They have a touch tank with lots of little critters. And the staff was really great too. One of the staff members picked up a blue crab (part of the claw was removed for the touch tank) and explained to us that if their claws are orange then it is a girl. Just imagine that it is fingernail polish. The boys have blue claws. Cool, huh?

There were several aquariums too. Here is a picture of a nurse shark. It is a very unusual shark because it can use its gills to breathe while sitting still. Most sharks have to swim in order to breathe.

There was also an outdoor wetlands area that we walked around hoping to see some wildlife. We saw several birds and turtles and bugs. We were hoping to see a snake but were disappointed. Isaiah really enjoyed looking through the various telescopes in the wetlands area.

Malachi was a little too short so he looked through it backwards and admired the clouds.

And I got a cool shot of this dragonfly.

A Week At the Beach

It's been a long time since I posted.

We actually went to the beach about a month ago but I'm just now getting around to posting about it. My mom and my brother rented a beach house with us on the Gulf Coast. We visited Surf Side Beach.

Our beach house was right on the beach. Here's our view from our patio:

Our beach house is the brown one in the background. You can see our Suburban parked in front of it.

We went swimming everyday, of course. We played on the beach, found sea shells, took walks and relaxed. It was good times.

Dustin helped us build our first sand castle. Our sand castle was not very well defined. It was amateur work for sure! But we quickly learned how wet the sand needed to be to make the best castle, and that no matter how hard we tried we could not build a functional moat. Every time we dug one it looked great until we poured water into it. Then it would just disappear as all the water and sand would mix and even out.Finished product. See the added sea shells? Those are windows.

Ray literally fished all day long!He brought his catch home to clean and we oohhhed and ahhhed over how different they were from freshwater fish.Nehemiah spent some time fishing with Ray everyday. Sometimes Nehemiah would go out into the water to fish. Ray preferred to stay dry. He found a great place to fish where he didn't have to get in the water and he stayed there.
Ray also experimented with catching crabs. He was quite successful! This is one of the first ones he brought back to show us. We all peered into the bucket to look at the crab. Just then, a truck drove by pulling a trailer with a piece of equipment on it. Mom said, " What is that, a lawnmower?" Samara turned to her and said, "No, Grammie, it's a crab!"Danny showed us how to clean crab. He also told us not to keep the ones who had orange under their butts. That orange stuff is their egg sacks. Oops! Glad he was here to guide us. The crab legs sure were good!