Our Family Vacation--Day 3 and 4

As I said in my last post, we worked ourselves into a nice routine at the beach.  Wednesday morning was no exception.  Here are our pictures from the beach that morning.

More sandcastles  :)

We taught Kai to write in the sand and he decided to write "I love Daddy"

Finn discovered the joy of chasing seagulls.  We followed them all over the beach.

At one point, he chased them right into the waves.  He was so intent on chasing the gulls that he didn't notice he was in the water and he got knocked off of his feet by a wave.  I caught him before he landed on his bum, but he did get wet.  He wasn't so happy about that.

Reid really enjoyed just being out in the water.  It would be shallow, get deep, and then get shallow again.  See where Reid is standing?  That's the second shallow area.

For lunch we decided to get ice cream at Dairy Queen which so conveniently was located on the beach.  After ice cream, I put Finn down for a nap and then spent some one-on-one time with Kai.  Reid stayed in the room with Finn to read and Kai and I went to research boat rides.  Kai had been watching the boats while we were at the beach and really wanted to ride one.  So, we went to search out the options.  After we settled on a possible boat ride we decided to take a walk.  We walked a few blocks down the street and stumbled upon this history trail.  It was definitely interesting and we enjoyed our time together.

I had heard of pretty much all of the "legends" except this one.  And it made me laugh!  So Virginia has a certified witch, huh??

Our activity that afternoon was to walk to the north end of the boardwalk.  We were staying on the 18th block and it turns out that the boardwalk runs from 1st Street to 40th Street, but for some reason going from 18th to 40th seemed a lot longer than it seemed to get to 1st Street.  The kids were a bit wound up and definitely ready to be done with our walk when we finished.  So, we decided to get in our van and drive a few miles to Taco Bell for dinner.  Finn had a great time dancing at Taco Bell.  He was seriously ready to go to bed at the end of another good day.

"The World's Largest Inflatable Water Slide"

The statue across from Neptune Park.

There were lots of these fun sculptures up and down the boardwalk.

Thursday morning was our last day on the beach and so it was hard to leave that morning.  We lingered as long as we could that morning.  We seriously had grown to enjoy our time in the sun and sand.  One of the things that I found interesting about the area was the large military presence.  Every day we were out at the beach we would see a large number of military aircraft flying overhead.  It kind of reminded me of Colorado, except this time the reality was that these planes were probably headed to war.  Such an interesting contrast to the people playing happily on the beach below.



Kai wanted to bury someone in the sand.  I told him absolutely not.  Good thing Reid is a more fun parent than I am!  Here's the process they went through to bury Reid in the sand.

Finn and a large pile of sand

Finn was being a good helper

Testing out the hole

Buried!

Kai made his daddy a pillow for his head.

Playing and stepping on buried Daddy.

After Reid got out he left what looked like a slide to Finn.  So, of course he slid in the dirt.

An attempt to capture a plane headed east.  It was hard to see if I actually had it in the shot because the sun was so bright.

One last time out in the water.  This is one of the boats that Kai had been seeing over the last 3 days.

One last look at the beach

At lunch time my parents and brother arrived in town and so Reid and Kai went with them to lunch while I stayed with a napping Finn.  After the nap we all headed to the Virginia Aquarium where we took a creek tour--or a boat ride for Kai.  It was about a half an hour trip that just went up and down a inlet.  There really wasn't much exciting about the trip, but Kai got to ride on a boat and he loved it.  Finn actually held court on the boat.  He kept turning a chair over and then setting it back up so that he could turn it over again.  I tried to stop him at one point and he threw such a fit that everyone on the boat told me to just let him do it.  Sigh.....he won that battle.

On the boat

So excited!  He made good friends with the boat's captain and even got to blow his wooden choo-choo whistle.

The scenery on the boat ride

Checking out the scenery from the chair that he kept turning over

We ended our time in Virginia Beach by heading to Golden Corral for dinner with my family.  We had a good time and the boys were tired.  They had been waking up earlier and earlier as the days went on and were getting a lot closer to switching to Eastern Time despite our desperate attempts.  And so for that reason the boys were getting more and more tired, which resulted in Finn getting more and more clingy.  Since I was the primary photographer it became a lot harder to take pictures with Finn constantly clinging to me, and so the pictures from this point on are a lot more scarce.  Drat!