A hard decision to make...

I have been meaning to blog about this for about say 8 months now, so here goes...

     For our vacation last year we had a hard decision to make.  My parents were serving a mission in Nauvoo, IL and had been begging for us to come visit them.  (According to them, they are the only couple missionaries who had not had any family come visit them.)  They also like to remind us that we never went to visit them on their first mission in Hawaii.  It's not my fault I wanted to go visit without children, yet since they were gone I had no one to watch the kiddos...we had to wait until they got home to babysit!  :)  Our other option was to go to Florida to Disney World.  With Jimmie no longer working for Disney, we had a few Disney park passes that we needed to use before they expired.  So we weighed the options and did what every normal person would do, we decided to go to Florida and hope my parents would some day forgive us.  They have to understand, my father is one of the cheapest most thrifty people I know and those Disney park passes saved us hundreds of dollars, we'd never be able to go as cheap as now!  So off we went to sunny Florida!

Day 1: Coco Beach

     What better way to start a vacation then relaxing at the beach? We love the beach but this was by far the best beach we have ever been to!  The water was as warm as bath water, not cold like the Pacific coast water.  The shallow water also extended out for probably a good 30 feet before it dropped off which the kids loved.  They could be chest deep further off of the coast.  We spent 5 hours playing in the sand, collecting shells, and jumping waves.  

 Alyssa finding some sea life

 The kids waiting for the next wave to jump

The sand was so wet it wouldn't hold together enough to make a sand castle.  That didn't stop us though from figuring out a way...we made drip castles.  After we started our new method, we had a lot of other kids around us start copying us.  At this point we thought we were pretty cool!

Even Brainy Smurf was the lucky recipient of a drip castle.

The day couldn't have been more perfect until we were in the water jumping waves and Gavin yelled, "Ouch, ouch, ouch!"  Thinking he had probably landed on a rock, I told him to let me see his foot.  He lifted it out of the water when we saw he had a crab attached to the side of it!  This wasn't a little crab, the shell was about a 4 inch diameter.  The shear fear of seeing it scared him and he quickly kicked his leg causing the crab to fly off and back into the water.  He was so afraid to go back into the water that he spent the rest of the time on the beach.