I AM ONLY ONE WEEK BEHIND NOW IT’S A MIRACLE. But now I really really need to stop blogging and do some work on this birthday party I’m throwing on Saturday so I probably won’t really catch up for another 3 weeks.

Sunday:

KNUFFLE BUNNY

Screen zombies. It’s getting old.

Monday:

Big bottle for a little baby

Standard tv watching in our house

Tuesday:

Rose garden sun dial

Maybe it’s time to get him some shoes

Wednesday:

This is Finn’s favorite game

Skeptical I REALLY need all this stuff at the craft store

GET TO WORK, CHILD LABORERS

Thursday:

Toddler for sale, everyday low price

Finding rocks and hiding rocks

WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, BABY?

Friday:

Waiting for blood draws is exhausting

More rock painting

My new blanket for the USS Virgina. TIMELY.

Saturday:

Mad Scientist station at Cousin Camp

Custom made pizzas

Borrowing a neighbor’s swimming pool to end our awesome camp day

My parents are here to help with party stuff and I am SO unprepared. This is not going to be my best party. At this point I’m going to be impressed if there’s a cake and no construction actively occurring. Have I mentioned that I am TOTALLY OVER having people in and out of my house and not having a working full bathroom?

I don’t care what breaks in this money next – I’m throwing a tarp over it and ignoring the problem forever. NO MORE HOME IMPROVEMENTS. EVER.

Our Kiawah trip each year is fun for a lot of reasons, but the number one reason is I LOVE the people we go with. These are my oldest friends, I have known them longer than I have known my husband (although some of them have their own husbands now), and somehow they still like me. They’re basically family, so the kids call them Aunt and Uncle, and they are the kind of people who let Caroline “help” crack eggs or read Linc the same book 15 times. My life would be 1000% less awesome if they weren’t in it.

There is a small…medium…maybe slightly larger than medium chance that we (the Davis family) will be moving in the next year, which means we might also miss a year or two at the beach house. All I can do is make everyone promise they will still go, so when we eventually move back to the east coast we can pick right back up with our favorite week of the year.

In case you haven’t seen all the previous years (here: 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011) and are wondering about The Beach House, it is the vacation home of a friend’s uncle who is incredibly generous and kind and amazing and allows us to use it for a long weekend each year. It’s nicer than any other house I have ever been in, on an absolutely stunning stretch of Kiawah Island off the coast of Charleston. There is a bunk room for the big kids to share, separate bedrooms for each adult/adult couple, and approximately one million bathrooms. The toddlers sleep in closets that are actually bigger than some of their rooms at home. It is air conditioned to a perfect 72 degrees, the pool is heated to 88 degrees (I know because the pool guy came to clean it and check the temp for us), and there is a house-keeping staff that scrubs the whole thing right before we get there and right after we leave. It’s basically heaven.

I promise these are the rest of the pictures. I won’t make you sit through a third post.

The first floor (the one that walks out to the pool, not the basement with the cars) is the movie room, where the kids can control the TV and no grown ups have to watch it.

All the kids, wearing Hanna stripey jams! Almost all looking at the camera!

These are from our first, not-s0-good family photo session. It was very dark and I messed up my settings and I don’t like my dress and Linc got soaked within 10 minutes. But I still edited all the decent ones.

We bought an inexpensive underwater camera for the trip, since we’ve had fun with them in the pool before. When this one eventually breaks we’ll spring for a much nicer underwater camera, because this are not what I was hoping to get. I really need something that shoots RAW so I can edit them nicely.

ALL THE TOES!

And the rest are our family photos – the good ones! – from the second try. Instead of a tripod I got my friend Erin (who is also a photographer) to press the shutter button when I wanted the whole family in the shot. MUCH better than a timer or a remote. I am so happy to have these.

Is it too early to start the countdown to NEXT summer??