Surf City!!

We spent a week in Topsail Island with friends, and what a great experience! Emily had been to the beach twice, but this was a first for Maicy. They loved it! They spent from morning to night in the surf. Maicy would eat sand and Emily would crash in the waves. Hour after hour after hour. When they were done, it was back to the beach house for food, DVDs, and video games!

Here's a view from the beach house. You can't tell, but that's some talllllll sea grass growing from a tall sand dune. It was perfect! The area was all residential, so there wasn't alot of crowds or busy-ness. Just silence. Free silence, in fact, since the house was on loan from a family member. All we had to pay was for food!

Here is Em the surfer girl. She really took to it, and kept her balance quite well! Granted she was only boogie boarding, but still it's more than I can do! Here's another picture of her, and a video, this time trying to catch some waves.
Maicy was attacked by a rogue wave. All was fine for a while, she was just splashing on the shore, and then WHAMO!

I was able to sneak in a few other pictures, too, like this one of Maicy eating her banana, and another of the two of them attempting to take a walk along the beach.
We even attempted a kayak! Here's Misty's kayak try.
Heading out to the water.....
Tipping over....
LOSING the kayak....
The kayak, found....
At the end of the week, fun was had by all.

Random Pictures: Christmas Concert

I haven't posted any of these yet because my camera was horrible and didn't take any good pictures. But here's some fun video. Emily is the gal in all white in the middle.

Random Pictures: Christmas Pagent

OK I cannot get over Pastor Kirk doing the movements along with the class. I didn't even notice it until a friend pointed him out! Emily did this program with the church right after her 6th birthday. It was alot of fun to see how far she's come and see her confidence grow!

Random Pictures: Thanksgiving Play

Emily's kindergarten class put on a cute Thanksgiving play with a couple of songs and some poems. Here's a couple of pix.

Random Pictures: Sledding

Just because.

Curly Hair

Somehow Maicy was born with some curls in her hair. I'm guessing it came from my Mom? Since every other relative I can think of has stick straight hair. I don't think it'll stay, and I'm actually kinda hoping it doesnt, because teenage/adult curly hair never looks like the curly hair you see here! And I threw in a random temper tantrum picture, just because.

Lifted Picture

As in lifted from High Strung's blog. But here's the kiddos, the first two on the left are Land of Madness residents.

Independence Day, or night, was fun, but Emily for some reason was NOT into it this year. I love the 4th, so her jabbery complaining took away from the fun. Actually she was a jabberin' because she wanted to back to the playground with her friends. A strange playground, at night, surrounded by strangers? That would be a NO.

4th of July Events...

Here in our town, I've discovered that the 4th isn't a day for fireworks, it's a week for celebration. And I love it. Again, I've never lived anywhere that's taken so much time for the community. There's always something to do, always some sort of event going on, and you see the same people everywhere, and that's ok. I'm really learning the meaning of community.

So this week is the town festival and parade. I took Emily and a pal to the carnival, but the friend wasn't tall enough to ride all of the rides, so I took Emily back the next day. We made a quick detour to the animal presentation, where she held a tarantula and pet (petted?) an alligator. Neat stuff, but quickly tiresome, so it was off to the carnival to ride some serious rides with Mommy. Again, that quickly grew tiresome, and she was gone and away with two older neighbor boys while I rode the Zipper with yet another neighbor boy. What fun. This was the same kids that rode the thrill rides with me at 6 Flags. My sign language is definitely improving with him, because when I signed "I want to go see Emily" he yelled "she's right there!!!" At least he didn't respond with "the wolf is at the library?" or some other nonsense that I tried to sign to him.

Today was Parade Day. Emily and her gal pal chose to walk in the parade with our church and stir up some VBS recruits. They had fun, from what I could tell. They were 69th in line, but 68 entries and one train delay later, here comes the kids.

I was told that they marched almost all the way, but petered out the last 1/4 mile and rode in the back of the convertible. What a couple of hot shots!! Here they are, after the parade.

Of course the festivities aren't over yet. After a post-parade party tonight, we have a pre-fireworks party on the 3rd, a fun run and festival on the 4th, a fireworks party and then of course fireworks. Here we take our 4th very seriously!

Just some Pictures

Well, it appears that although we have an excess of professional photos of Emily, we seem to have an excess of personal photos of Maicy. I think it's because digital cameras were just catching on when Emily was born, so although we have scads of hard copies, we have very few digital copies. Anyways, here's a few from an afternoon at the park.