Bumgarner (Birthday!) Beach Week

With all the grandkids getting older and starting school, in a variety of school districts with varying school district schedules, we opted last year to move our family's beach week to August instead of spring break. So we had to wait several extra months this year to scratch our beach itch, but we finally made it! And celebrated Charlotte's birthday there, to boot!

(Girl's going to start thinking she gets a trip every year for her birthday.)

I made a laughably fundorable janky sunshine cake, per her beach birthday request, and it was... something. (She loved it.)

In better crafty news, I also made that shirt myself with a roll of iron on glitter paper and a blowing up a fun font and tracing it, oh yes I did, LIKE A BOSS.

Her one birthday request for the beach was to have an egg hunt. Normally we have always been there near Easter of course, and we often do a big family egg hunt outside on Easter afternoon after our beach arrival. Egg hunts aren't really part of our Easter celebration at home, so she totally associates eggs with the beach, not Easter itself. And. So. She wanted one for her birthday. At the beach. BECAUSE EGG HUNTS ARE A NORMAL BEACH ACTIVITY DUH.

After her birthday, the rest of the week was full of drinking and ice cream and watching the Olympics together, which was sort of fun since we hadn't done that together since we were kids.

We also took some of the kids to a tye dye event in the little pavilion by the town hall. Excellent activity.

We waited by a turtle nest for some turtle rescuers to shepherd some babies into the ocean (Holden Beach is a turtle sanctuary and we were there exactly the right week!) but it had already mostly hatched, so we only got to see leftover eggs, no babies.

John and Mark and the kids built a lot of sandcastles. Like, a lot. A LOT. Sometimes I think those two only pretend to be into it "for the kids" because they just legit like digging themselves.

Anneliese figured out how to ride waves in on the boogie board, and spent literal hours doing it. At one point during the week she asked me if there was an olympic medal for boogie boarding. "No reason, just curious."

We had some lovely evenings out on the beach, too. Our normal (little kid) routine had been to bring everyone in by 4 or 5 for dinner and then into bed afterwards. But this time of year, when it's hot in the day and everyone doesn't need to be in bed super early (because Olympics) (and getting older), it became easier to have some a/c time inside in the middle of the afternoon, and play to our hearts' content in the evening. Just so amazingly beautiful.

And fun uncles make things pretty fun too.

Thanks for a fun week as always, Dad and Cathy! It's so fun to see how the kids grow up all crowded around you at the beach every year. We are lucky to do this and lucky to have you.

It seems every Carolinian family has "their" beach town that they go to every year, a thing that is apparently unfamiliar outside of this part of the country. But it happens, it starts to feel like home, everyone has one, and this one is ours.

See you next year, Holden Beach.