More from the beach

I've been hard at work trying to salvage more beach pictures, and this is what I've come up with so far. A few okay ones here and there, with a major lesson learned for future shoreline shenanigans.

If you could see Laura's expression in this picture, it would probably look like this:

Or this:

But she did love the pool.

So much so that it completely tuckered her out.

Will was also a pool maniac (and also a fan of Luke and Jake's pool toys). His hair is straight up Lloyd Christmas when it's wet (and sometimes when it's dry). He's in serious need of a good shearing.

Back to the beach business at hand, we generally went to the pool in the mornings and headed over to the beach in the early evenings. Here are (some of ) the women hanging out on the beach one of those evenings. Laura is in the picture too somewhere, most likely squinting and grimacing.

Cousins on the beach (minus Laura).

Cousins on the beach, plus Laura.

An illustration of some of the things their Papaw does to get these cousins to laugh for pictures. (Will just said, "What's Papaw Gary doing in the sand?")

Will and his new BFF, Kyle (his cousin Kayla's boyfriend, who so patiently played with Will by doing such fun things as going octopus hunting--Will is still talking about it).

Self-explanatory. And pretty.

Laura asleep on the golf cart, her hand in her snack trap. She developed into quite an eater while we were gone. It all started at Cracker Barrel with a taste of my chicken and dumplings. She's not been the same since.

The eater herself asleep in her "rickety" crib, as Will called it. He called it about right, as Laura's small self about maxed out the capabilities of this little "crib."

And finally, Laura with cousin Casey, child-wrangler extraordinaire. Seriously, he's better with my kids than I am. He needs to give seminars on taking care of little ones.

The final installment of our trip will be coming soon. It includes our climb up Old Baldy, the lighthouse. Will was completely enamored with it our whole trip and is still talking about climbing up its 800 (actually 108) steps.

Happy day after fireworks! (I think we're officially old and crotchety. We were both complaining about all the fireworks over the weekend. Not necessarily the city- and neighborhood- sponsored shows but the intermittent banging and booming from houses in the neighborhood, much of which was done before dark, some in the middle of the afternoon.)