It's the fastest week of the year. We count down the days leading up to it...and they go by at a snail's pace. And then, BOOM! It's over. Gah! Take me back!!!!
We spent last week in our happy place, Gulf Shores, Alabama.
I've blogged about it many times before: like here, here and here.
This year we rented the most adorable beach house...the Lucky Dog
It was a dog-friendly rental and we would give it 2 paws up if you are looking for a place to take your family and pups to the beach! It was a 3 bedroom, 2 bath house and it was perfect! There was a little fenced in backyard full of fun toys for them and less stress for us having to take them out to potty.
A little inside tour...
We had some stormy weather off and on during the week. It would be super sunny with blue skies and then all of a sudden a wall of black clouds would swoop in.
So, we would head back to the house for a little break and hang out on the screened porch and just watch the storm until it passed. Griffin loved this hanging swing on the porch...
We all worked on this fun jigsaw puzzle and Sudoku, too...
The owners of this house have thought of everything. There are games, cards, the kitchen is fully equipped with everything you could want and the drawer in the cocktail table in the family room was totally full of tons of issues of eye candy magazines. I LOVED thumbing through them and daydreaming about our SOMEDAY beach house...
It was our first vacation with our brand new 21 year old. She played bartender a lot. We brought our Nutri Bullet from home and it made fantastic frozen cocktails...
She was trying to style a pretty photo of her concoction...
I can't tell you how many photobomb shots she got before getting that one above...
Which takes us to the photos...oh, the photos. We brought a selfie stick with us to GS. Before we left on vacay, I posted our family beach portrait from our very first year that we stayed in Gulf Shores {2001}. Griffin was just one year old!
We used the selfie stick and recreated this memorable picture...14 years later:
Of course, I'm trying to get our Christmas card photo and they are all a bunch of goofballs...
Me: "can I get a nice shot of you kids with Daddy?"...
my turn...and I love it.
Katie tried to get us to take a special family selfie of a selfie. It was a #selfiefail...
then she took one with her brothers on the beach and it was awesome...
We loved bringing the dogs down to the beach at the end of the day each night, when it had cooled off and the sand wasn't so hot. They loved it too...
the ocean turned pink from this delicious sunset...
On Thursday evening, we saw something we had never seen before in all our years going to the beach.
A shark!
He popped up right in front of us...thankfully we were not in the water! He was about 5 feet long and swimming in knee deep water. KNEE DEEP! Katie snapped those pictures. I don't know how she did it...we were all so rattled by it. Riley ran down the beach to some folks who were in the water in the shark's path to warn them. The next day was our last beach day and sadly, we stayed out of the water all day. But, we sure counted our blessings.
Yet another fabulous beach week is in the books. We're already daydreaming about next year!
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