Myrtle Beach: Fun with Family!

 Last week all of my side of the family got together for a family vacation in Myrtle Beach! We had so much fun spending time together and just sharing space. I was in charge of picking out the vacation house this year and when we arrived I was a little worried about the size of the house. It was a lot smaller than the pictures made it out to be, but it turned out great! Anthony said he actually preferred it to a larger house because it gave us more time to be together.

After everyone arrived and got unpacked the cousins were dying to go to the beach so my sister and I walked them down there. James and Savino were fearless and kept running into the waves! They both ended up completely soaked, but so happy:

All of the cousins:

The vacation house was a few blocks from the beach, but the backyard had a dock on a canal. Anthony was really excited about this feature and planned to do a lot of fishing. On the first day he found three different crab traps out on the dock and he spent the rest of our vacation baiting and catching blue crab. Seriously, all week long he would go "check the traps real quick" and be gone for at least an hour. James always wanted to go with him and check everything out and he even showed us how he can reel a big fishing pole!

We had a hard time getting James to eat and sleep on this vacation, there was so much to see and do, he did not want to sit still even for a minute! We usually ended up giving him a bath at some point and then trying to see what we could get him to eat before bedtime. Here he is in his pj's, smiling for the camera:

 

One night we had some seriously bad weather (I think it was a tropical storm? I'm pretty horrible at keeping track of that stuff while it is happening). It was so bad at night that the wind even blew the outside door to our room open! Luckily, the next day we were able to see a beautiful rainbow, and after that the weather wasn't that bad.

 

James napped pretty well on this trip which I think is partially due to the fact that his pack and play fit into our bedroom closet and we could actually close him in the dark during the day. (Which sounds scary, but he loved it and would request for us to close the door!). For some reason on this day he decided to play during his nap time, which meant by the time we did all of our activities and sightseeing and were able to grab some dinner he was going on 18 hours of no sleep! I was so glad that we were the only ones left in the restaurant because he was loud. Luckily it wasn't too much of crying, just loud, ear-piercing, "I'm having fun" screaming:

 

We came across this hilarious car in the grocery store parking lot. Someone scraped off the daewoo decal from their car and added a jaguar decal, as well as a jaguar hood ornament in the front. Either they have an interesting sense of humor or they seriously think they are fooling everyone! Why??

This was a pretty typical view throughout the week. All the boys got into playing the same racing game on their phones and would sit there, trade tips, and play for hours:

It has become our tradition to spend at least one night playing card or board games and this year was awesome! We played UNO attack for about 30 minutes and then played Taboo for at least 2 hours! We were dying, it was so hilarious!! Anthony, Daniel, and I were on one team and Alex, Gabrielle, and her husband Tim were on the other team. At one point Anthony had the word "Rabbi" and started to describe the people who wear "clocks" and "plates" on their heads (apparently he said "cloth" but we all heard "clocks"). We were laughing at his description but had no idea what he was talking about and then he started saying "they don't believe in Jesus" and "their special person" and I was laughing so hard at this point but I was able to squeak out the right answer before the time ran out. Another time Anthony was manning the buzzer for my sister when she had the name "Samson" and she quickly started describing and getting her team to realize it was someone from the Bible, but then she started describing the story of David and Goliath. After a good 30 seconds she realized that she got the story mixed up and said "Crap, I got it wrong" and passed. Anthony was crying he was laughing so hard!!! He said that he kept expecting her to connect the stories somehow and bring it around to Samson.

My sister made an executive decision this year that we were all going to do Old Timey portraits with the entire family. We were all game for it, but I honestly didn't expect for it to be so much fun! James was not happy about putting on the costume, but once Anthony got into his he was having a blast and did really well. No crying at all during the photos! Amazing! We ended up with 5 different poses and we all chose one to take home. This was my favorite from the bunch. All the women were southern belles and the men were cowboys. I love how my mom is holding the family gold! It is also pretty cool that this picture has literally all of my family: all my siblings and their spouses, my niece and nephew, and my mom. Pretty cool!

This was our fun pose! We all held fake guns up to my brother's head and my mom is in the far right background making off with the family gold! Love it!

I also love that they told us to make a "mean face" and that that is the best that Anthony and I could do :) What can I say? We were having so much fun you just can't be mad at a time like that! Also, don't you just love Savino's face?? The photographer laughed out loud when he was previewing the shot. What a ham!

We had such a good time laughing and visiting, I wish we could do it more often than once a year!