Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Beach pictures

Things have been a bit hectic, so I haven't had a chance to blog for the last few days. But I did get our beach pictures put together into a scrapblog. Enjoy....

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

I sneaked on you

We are home from the beach. Arriving home is always bittersweet. We LOVE our time at the beach, and we LOVE coming home. So we're sad that our fun is over, but glad to get back to our lives.

Last night was capped off by four rounds of Uno. I seem to be the only "loser" of the weekend. Leslie won three rounds, Nada won one. Add Henry's Sorry win and Nada's Sorry win, and I got nothin'. But great sportsmanship abounded, so Henry went to bed watching Nick at Nite or Noggin or some kid's programming channel. We finished watching Emma, that we had started two nights earlier and called it a night, ourselves.

When I woke this morning, Henry proudly announced to me that he had a loose tooth. Now, this has been his heart's desire for quite some time...ever since watching the episode of Arthur where Arthur has a loose tooth. He asked me when he would get a loose tooth and I told him after he was five. Well, the day he turned five, he started looking for his loose tooth. And today, he found it. It is one in the center bottom, on the left (looking at him). He had to talk to both Nana and Papa tonight to share the news with them. Papa's hoping it holds out until he arrives next week.

This morning, as anticipated, we enjoyed crepes with nutella and fresh strawberries. They were tasty. Even Henry ate one for the first time, although he insisted on "no chocolate".

Then we started on the hustle and bustle of cleaning and packing. Between loads of linen laundry, we headed down to the beach for a photo shoot. Henry was most cooperative even in the face of biting flies that we were all swatting at.

Back at the house, we finished up the laundry, lugged everything down to the car and headed for home. It was a quiet trip home and Henry occupied his time playing his new "first day of school" gift of the Wall-e game for his Leapster. There were parts of it where he just giggled and giggled, so now I want to play it to see what's so funny.

After unloading the car, Henry and I headed up to the carwash to de-sand the car. He was a great little helper guy, pretty much vacuuming the back of the van all on his own.

We decided to cap off our holiday weekend by having dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant, Gringo's. On the way there, Henry requested sitting next to Aunt Leslie. As dinner was being served, he kept kissing her cheek. He was trying to surprise her with his kisses and kept telling her "I sneaked on you". Neither of them was too happy when I told Henry he would need to stop kissing Aunt Leslie so everyone could eat their dinner. So he used our temporary distraction to pluck the cilantro off of Aunt Leslie's enchiladas and stuff it into his mouth. He then demanded that I give him mine, which I thought was only fair.

We ended our evening watching a few minutes of the Astros/Cubs game. Henry was rooting for his cubbies, but during the inning that we watched, the Astros tied the game at 3. I had to promise the boy that we could check the score in the morning in order to get him off to bed.

Monday, September 1, 2008

A different kind of beach day

So, we weathered the storm of Gustav...which was non-existent for us. Our thoughts are with those that did take a hit from Gustav, but we are so grateful that it didn't interrupt our weekend.

Wrapping up yesterday, we were going to eat at a place called Hammerheads. It "looked" like a cool place...high up with glass all around, and near the beach. However, after parking and walking in, it was really a bar and was quite smoky. So we headed off to find something different. We drove past another place, but it also called itself a bar and grille, so we passed. We ended up at the Red Snapper Inn.

Oh my, dinner was yummy. Henry insisted I order a fish and shrimp combo to share with him. So I tweaked one of the combos on the menu to get what he wanted but to get what I wanted, too. I ordered a side of "la grecque" sauce. True to form, Henry ate his portion willingly, even asking me to put lemon on his fish.

We returned home and Henry decided that we should play another round of Sorry. Well, he was not able to repeat his win from the evening before. Nada won while Henry had his last man in the safety zone. Due to unsportsmanlike behavior, Henry lost his TV privileges for that evening and soon headed off to bed. When I came back after getting Henry to bed, Nada and Leslie were engrossed in a 2006 rendition of "The Ten Commandments" starring Naveen Andrews and Dougray Scott, and other people that they made me keep looking up on imdb.

We turned it off at 10 to watch the evening news. Assured again that we would be okay for the night, I headed off to bed.

Today was not our typical day at the beach. Maybe because of Gustav, the tide was as high as we've ever seen it. Where we normally set up our "camp", there was three feet of water. We had to set up on the far side of the beach...across from where the traffic goes by.

Henry did get to visit the ice cream truck once today. He spent a great deal of time digging and playing in the sand. The surf was so funny that I wasn't really comfortable letting him play in the water on his own...compounded by how far away we were from the water. We went out for a while, but the undertow was so strong that I had these horrible visions of him being dragged out and not being able to do anything about it.

He went for a long walk with Aunt Leslie, and when they returned, we took our beach chairs out to the surf and sat where the waves crashed around our feet. At one point, I was eating a snickers and a wave caught me off guard and splashed my candy bar. Henry did get down on the ground and roll around in the surf at this time. We all got sandy and yucky and decided to call it a day (as far as the beach was concerned). We packed up and headed back to our yellow house for a late lunch.

After lunch, Henry had an upset tummy (after eating blue ice cream, red tomatoes and orange cheetos) and tossed his cookies. He laid down afterwards and fell instantly asleep, and slept for 3 hours. He felt better when he awoke and was claiming he was starving before dinner was served.

I was on dinner duty tonight. I made the same meal that I always make, just had to shift from cooking outside on the grill to cooking inside due to the mass amounts of mosquitoes. On the menu tonight: bratwurst with carmelized onions, corn on the cob, and sweet potatoes. I won the "messy kitchen" award, but thankfully, since I cooked, I didn't have to clean up. :-)

Tonight, we are playing Uno. Henry promises to work on his sportsmanship, and even his dinner prayer included a special request to "help Henry have good sportsmanship'.

Tomorrow, we'll enjoy a leisurely morning complemented by Leslie's strawberry and nutella crepes. Then we'll start the cleanup efforts of our favorite, yellow beach house. Then its home again, home again to unload all of this sandy stuff and get ourselves ready for work on Wednesday.