Rob slept in today.

He actually woke me up (or so he thought) at 7:00 and said “Hey, we slept in”.

I had already been awake at 5:30, but since it was cloudy saw that the sunrise wouldn’t be so impressive, so I tried to catch a few more winks.

He got to sleep in, but then I dragged him to the beach to run! We left the kids in the house. It was a little daring as only Zach and Josh were awake and they are the most likely to go to war with each other…but nonetheless we wanted to get a run along the beach together.

We started running, and immediately Rob started looking for sharks in the water. We weren’t even going IN the water right then. Apparently, his sister informs me, when they used to go to Hilton Head when they were kids, she used to read up all about sharks and share that info with him. So thanks CJ. You created a monster.

We got back and all the kids had survived. Rob wanted to take a tour at the pier in Duck where the Army Corps of Engineers do Ocean Studies. Gabe wanted to go with him. Both guys enjoy collecting bits of information, so off they went to learn all about the ocean around here.

The rest of us headed to the beach! We tried out the new Boogie boards. They jumped in the waves and tried to catch fish.

They also set up a “boogie board waxing station” where they polished their boards….

Gabe and Rob joined us after their tour. They joined us in the water before we all headed back for lunch.

After lunch, we headed back to the beach and did more of the same. Everyone did some sand castle building too.

And we had some good talks in the ocean in between waves. I just finished reading a book called “Hold on to your Kids” by Gordon Neufled and Gabor Mate. They talk about how kids open up to you (parents) when they have no distractions of peers or others around them. Family vacations are special times because it is a unique bonding time and your kids will open up to you in so many ways as the vacation progresses. This certainly was true today! We talked about some deep topics and feelings in between being knocked over by waves.

There were a few “paybacks” going on too: The boys buried Zandra’s boogie board, then Rob helped Zandra bury Zach (he was not happy) and tried to get Josh too.

We headed back and rested a bit before having a delicious lobster meal. It was the first time for some of the kids to have lobster – it was a huge hit!

Evening was our usual ice cream, flashlight tag and Starlight, Starbright before heading off to bed.

It was a perfectly ordinary beach day.