Our First Visitors!

After a wonderful week in West Virginia, we moved the party to our house in Florida with Sara, Abbie, Kaden, and Sadie joining us. Abbie and I were lucky to be on the same flight and since it was nonstop we offered to take 'a traveling infant on lap' named Sadie. We don't know how moms do it by themselves and with more than one kid! We were like a zoo in the airport hauling car seats and strollers and children...ok just one child, but really it was a good thing that the adult to child ratio was 2:1 haha. It all turned out fine and Sadie did great on the flight and was very nice to her aunties :)

Our first full day, of course, was spent at the beach! The weather was perfect...lotsa sun, but not too hot.

Kaden spent much of his time shuttling buckets of water from the ocean to fill up his sand pool. SO FUN!

After Sadie's nap on the shores of the Atlantic she was rearing to go...little dare devil loved getting pummeled by the waves and would laugh and squeal every time a wave got her.

Our one bedroom duplex was converted into a spacious two bedroom unit thanks to Uncle George and his mad fort building skills. This was Sadie and Kaden's 'bedroom' decked out with Christmas lights even!

Think this crew could get 'er off the ground?

Pilot in training :)

Day Two we got to explore what Uncle George has been up to this year...HELICOPTERS!! It was fun for both kids and adults to explore all the features of a Schweizer 300CBi. Sadie and Kaden got to control the joystick aka cyclic :) And Sara and Abbie even got to go fly with George!

We were blessed to see lots of different creatures not found in the deserts of Utah. In the picture above Abbie was explaining to Kaden and Sadie why it probably wasn't a good idea to take Mr. Crab (in bucket) home with us. We stopped by a 'ditch' where we saw an alligator. He was very interested in us and swam right over to greet us. I think Mr. Alligator would have liked to have a little taste of Kaden. We also saw dolphins swimming in the bay and lots and lots of birds...I need to learn how to identify them! And when Abbie and I were biking along the beach one day we saw hundreds of Portuguese Man o' War that had been washed up on the shore. There were so many of them it was hard to avoid running over them, and each time we did they would pop like balloons...so weird!

While Abbie and Sara the 'crazies' from AK and UT were swimming in the freezing water...

George and I were snuggling Kaden and Sadie trying to keep them warm :) It's all about perspective I suppose!

Obviously the beach took up most of our time, but we did sneak in a few bike rides, walks, hot-tubbing, and some miniature golfing!

This mini golf course was awesome. We went at night and it was POURING rain. The people thought we were crazy to want to go so they only charged us $2! We had the whole course to ourselves and it was so much fun!

It was so much fun to have kids in our home to liven things up a bit!

It was definitely too short of a visit, but we crammed in a lot of fun and we're so happy we got to share Florida with some of our family! Is anyone else convinced they should come visit us in Florida yet? Come on down!!!