The Beach!

We were fortunate enough to be able to make it to the beach last weekend. Nick found a condo across the street from the beach at Carolina Beach. We had a fabulous time! The weather was absolutely perfect - warm enough to make swimming enjoyable but definitely not too hot to be hanging out outside, like it is in the summer. The location was perfect too - the lot in front of the condo isn't developed so we had a beautiful view (the top 2 pictures and the one of Nick and Isabella were all taken from the deck). It was a luxury to be able to just walk across the street with a towel and not have to pack up everything in the car for a 15 minute drive to the beach. There was hardly anyone down there either, so we pretty much had the beach to ourselves. Bailey is still taking 2 good naps a day, so she didn't really enjoy the beach too much. We got her down there for a photo-op though. I love that last picture. It cracks me up. Isabella still loves the beach. She spent lots of time playing in the sand. Annie and Chrissie went down with us, and Isabella enjoyed building sand castles with Chrissie. Let me rephrase that: she enjoyed smashing the sand castles that Chrissie built. It was nice to have other adults down there, so we could actually enjoy being out in the ocean and riding waves. Isabella loves being out in the ocean, and was such a trooper even when she went underwater a couple of times due to some big waves. Traveling with the girls wasn't too bad. I had my sister as company on the way down and we suffered through quite a bit of whining before Isabella finally settled down. Same for Nick and me on the way back. But Bailey slept most of both trips. She'll wake up as soon as the car shifts into park, but she's either sleeping or just contently awake most of the time. We made some delicious culinary discoveries while we were down there. Although we didn't get to eat at our new favorite restaurant, Temptations (the name doesn't even fit the vibe in there, but their food is AWESOME), we ate twice at Flaming Amy's Burrito Barn (holy cow that place is amazing) in Wilmington and we had some good food at a surf shop at Carolina Beach and some amazing hamburgers and french fries at a place called The Dive, also at CB. Isabella didn't want to leave, and neither did any of the rest of us. 

The big milestone signified by the trip is that when we came home, we didn't set back up the pack 'n play in our room, so Bailey has been sleeping in her crib. The transition was a complete non-issue for her. She still wakes up occasionally during the night, and we have to go put the paci back in, so that is a little more of a pain for us, but that's about it. She's still waking up between 4 and 5 (I try to stretch it to at least 5 whenever possible) to eat. I usually fall asleep with her in bed with us, and she'll sleep too, until about 7:30 or so.