Casa de Clements: Vacation!!!!!

Probably my favorite time of the year...our annual family vacation to Atlantic Beach. This is our 5th year coming here and we love it so much. While we're still on the hunt for the "perfect" condo to rent, it's an absolutely wonderful week. We're able to unplug, no TV, no work calls, no work emails (well, not too many), sleeping and eating when and where we want to, relaxing time sitting on the beach doing nothing, reading lots of books, swimming, eating good food, the list goes on and on. The beaches here aren't crowded at all and the water is warm and relatively calm, so it's really great for a vacation with kids.

We stopped in Raleigh on the way down to visit with our friends, Jeff and Kathryn. Their kids, Carson and Sienna are close in age to Sydney and they all had a BLAST. We got to meet a lot of their neighbors at their Fourth of July picnic and even got to enjoy some fireworks in the cul de sac :) Connor was NOT a fan of those!

Started out the ride with a stop at Starbucks. One of the few places I can get a dairy free milk alternative! Needless to say, the car was PACKED with an extra car seat this year. We ended up getting a roof rack, which simplified the packing greatly.

We have a bookworm on our hands. She read most of the way to Raleigh.

Our condo wasn't ready when we got here on Sunday, so we went across the street to the restaurant on the water. That's become our stand by if the condo isn't ready yet (technically check in is at 4pm, but sometimes we can get in earlier). Sydney had a blast waving at all of the boats going by. Connor was not so impressed!

Sydney showing us that 10 boats had waved back to her :)

This is the view from the deck at our condo!!! We're staying in the same development as last year, but tried a different unit. We loved the development last year, but weren't convinced that the unit was *the* one. There aren't elevators here, so it can be a bit of a hassle to haul stuff up 3 flights of stairs. So we walked around last year and figured out which units we wanted to try. We thought this one would be good with a non-mobile infant. It's on the first floor (which we usually don't like), but the deck has direct access to the beach, rather than having to go down a bunch of stairs and through a parking lot. Makes it a thousand times easier for me to haul the beach cart down to the beach by myself with 2 kids in tow. Definitely worth it for this year, though I think maybe we'd like being up a little higher next year.

Brad went grocery shopping and the kids and I walked down to the beach. See how uncrowded it is???

She walked right in - the water temp is around 80 degrees, so it's not cold at all!

When Brad got back from the grocery store and after we had put everything away, we went over to the dive shop so he could drop off his gear and get his tanks set up. Sydney LOVES the Neptune statue and was really excited to have her picture taken with Connor and Neptune :)

Last year she was terrified of this. This is the gun that was recovered from the sunken U-352.

Silly faces at bedtime.

Not a bad way to spend a Monday, right? Connor didn't like the ocean and held his feet up (I think the noise of the waves scared him), but he LOVED the sand. I wouldn't let him play in it, though, because his hands are always in his mouth. We brought an inflatable baby pool for him and had Sydney fill it with buckets of ocean water, so at least he can play in there, stay cool, and not get too sandy.