Our First BIG Trip (part 2)

Day 2- Carey's birthday

Our first morning in the condo, Laura and I took the kids straight down to the beach, so Carey could keep sleeping.  We walked out of the condo complex onto a boardwalk over the dunes down to the beach.  Ever since I was a little girl I have wanted to walk out to the beach on one of those boardwalks.  I can't even explain how excited I was to actually be walking on one.  I felt like a little girl meeting princesses at Disneyland for the first time!  It was surreal!  Despite the fact that it was cloudy and windy, it was plenty warm at the beach and we had a blast playing in the warm ocean water.  We even invented a couple games:

1)"Knocked Over"- you sit at the ocean's edge and every time a wave hits you, no matter how tiny, it knocks you over!

2) "Dead Squid"- in the super shallow water you lay down and just roll around however the ocean pulls and pushes you, just like it does to a dead squid!

The boardwalk!!!

First time in the Atlantic!

Awesome St. Augustine shells:)

Seth was the inventor of "dead squid"!

After a couple hours at the beach, we spent some time in the pool at the condo.  After a little while at the pool, we all headed up to the condo, ready for naps, and walked in just as Carey was getting up!

After naps we ran a few errands; grocery store, Dollar Tree for sand toys, fish market (at which Abby and Haley were thrilled to touch a huge dead fish, eyeballs and all, that the kind fish market lady brought out for them), and the cutest little cupcake shop!  Back at the condo we enjoyed the cupcakes and then headed back down to the beach.  At that point, we had been informed (by all the weather stations) that the bad weather was thanks to tropical storm "Debbie", and she poured rain down on us and tried to blow us away as we played at the beach.  I think that afternoon, playing in the water in the pouring down rain was one of our favorite memories!  We finally went inside when the rain was pouring down hard enough to hurt our skin!

Yummy cupcakes on the balcony!

Day 3- Alligator Farm and Tropical Storm Debbie!

One thing we knew we wanted to do in Florida was to go to the Alligator farm, and since tropical storm Debbie was out in full force, we decide to start doing the things that we wanted to do in the beginning of the week and hope for sunny beach days towards the end of the week.  Laura and I started the day off taking Abby and Seth down to the beach while Carey and Haley slept in.  We wore dresses but were laughing as we walked back to the condo, because it had rained so hard that we might as well have worn swim suits!  We were literally wringing water out of our dresses.  We could not have been any wetter if we had gone swimming!  After the wet trip to the beach, we spent a slow morning in the condo.  Laura's mom, the fabulous Julia, had stocked it up with all sorts of treats for us (as well as necessities like laundry detergent and shampoo), making it super fun and cozy.  The condo itself was awesome.  It is two bedrooms and I'm pretty sure it is bigger than our whole house.  It has a great balcony that looks out onto the beach and ocean, too!

This is a pile of all the cookies that Julia had baked for us!

 We spent the rest of the day at the Alligator farm.  It was kind of like a small zoo, with about a billion alligators and birds, some snakes and lizards (Laura and I opted out of that part), and some cute little monkeys and things.  We had a lot of fun there, and I decided that I would like to be an alligator.  They just lounge around all day, and the bigger they are, the more impressive they are!

Looking at baby alligators and turtles!

This was a "pen" of 41 alligators!

We kept seeing these little frogs all over the zoo.  They are so tiny (that's Haley's hand) that it looks like tons of little bugs jumping around!  Haley caught a ton of them (an activity that not all of the frogs survived)!