Weekend at the Beach

Thanks to Grammy, Mike and I got to take a nice weekend trip to Ocean Isle beach.  It truly was a wonderful weekend away!! 

We started out driving to Wilmington to see the USS North Carolina.   It was really cool to be on a ship and get a glimpse into what life was like as a sailor in WWII.  Gotta say, I was beginning to get downright claustrophobic in some of the areas!

 

 

 From there we headed to Ocean Isle.  What a beautiful view we had from our hotel room!!

 It was a little chilly while we were there, so no actual swimming took place, but Mike did brave the water and got in up to his calves.

 We ended up spending a lot of time walking on the beach and looking at all the seashells that had washed ashore.  Oh, we also decided to rent bikes to ride around the island.  When we got to the rental place we opted to try out a TANDEM bike!!  It took a little getting used to, but we had great fun riding together.

 Another highlight of the trip was sitting on our balcony Saturday evening eating pizza and watching 4 beach weddings take place!  I was pretty amazed that 3 of the 4 weddings involved tuxedos and full-on wedding dresses.  We had great fun talking about the brides and grooms and pondering various aspects of the ceremonies.

We returned home on Sunday.  While we were sad to leave the beautiful view, Mike and I were both ready to be home and see the kids.

Turned out the kids and Grammy had a great time while we were gone.  They had all-you-can-eat pancakes at IHOP.  Seth ate FIVE!!!

 They took the train Uptown and had fun exploring Imaginon:

And, they went to a little farm and rode horses!!

Thanks, Grammy, for a fun weekend for all of us!

Shades

This is what I have learned:  I love painting.  I do not love prepping to paint.  I despise cleaning up the painting supplies and mess when I am done.  The actual painting itself is quite relaxing and seeing a finished product, all clean and neat and new, is amazing.  But, perhaps I should limit the work to one room per year instead of 3 rooms per month...

It all started when I realized the kids' bathroom needed a coat of paint.  From there it was an "if-you-give-a-mouse-a-cookie" kind of a project.  I let the kids pick the bathroom color (the choices were green, orange or purple).  They choose orange.  4 coats of paint later (yes, I said FOUR!!), the finished product looks great and is much BRIGHTER than the builder white that did cover the walls.  Check it out:

Once we began talking of painting walls, the kids were really excited and both wanted their rooms re-painted.  Here are the before and after shots of both.  

We (Mike and I, not Seth) were sad to see the cute animal mural on Seth's wall go. A friend painted it on there 6 years ago when we moved in the house and Seth decided he was ready for something a little more "Big Kid". We are all really pleased with the results of all the rooms!!