The Story of a Carolina Beach

If the old adage is true that a picture is worth a thousand words then I have a novel of pictures that if converted into words would total approximately 530 pages describing our recent vacation to Topsail Island.  I will not share them all with you (you're welcome), but it's been very difficult to choose because I tried, this time more than others, to only take pictures that told the story of our deep love for these Carolina beaches.  Each picture that was kept reminds me of a priceless moment spent in a priceless place and, after taking this week-long vacation eight times in the last eight years, it breaks my heart that these quiet beaches are going to be much harder to visit from now on.  I do pray that we will fall in love with our new home as deeply as we have fallen in love with this one.  And I'm not just saying that... In fact, it's been the central topic of many prayers.  But, I'm actually still trying to maintain a certain level of denial so that I don't spend my last couple of weeks here acting like a wet noodle.  So - let's move on, shall we?  Allow me to tell you my story of our beautiful North Carolina beaches.

The week starts quietly.

It ends quietly, too.  And somehow the points between that beginning and that end string themselves together ... quietly. 

I don't mean 'quietly' in the sense of noiselessness.  In fact, at no point in the entire week is there a complete cessation of sound, what with the 8 bedroom beach house full to bursting with busy bodies and the ocean consistently breathing out its crashing song.  Instead, the quietness comes from a feeling inside... deep, and real.  A quietness that dulls the pecking worries of the world and releases me from the stressful barriers that must be maintained to keep a social tactfulness.  What I mean by that is that there are no awkward excuse me's when my boogie board bumps into a stranger... and no trying to explain to my children, again, that unfamiliar towels are not for drying sandy feet and no reminding them that strangers have a much bigger personal space than do friends.  These things do not happen because there are no strangers here.  We are all friends.  Dear, dear friends.  Which makes it easy to be myself.  I can let the good in me shine through our conversations and I can be unafraid when my bad comes shining through, too.  I am loved here, with these people.  And we have the beach to ourselves. 

The mornings start early.  Someone wakes up with the sun by 6:30am, and usually that someone is small and loud and excited to wake up all of their other small and loud friends who are sleeping next to them.  They are called children and are quite unable to understand the value of falling-back-asleep or the even more coveted value of letting-the-other-sleepers-stay-asleep so, soon all of them are awake and running through the hard-floored, echo-y house, calling for adults and for breakfast.  The adults are much harder to pull from their beds.  Mostly because they went to bed just a few hours earlier after a fun-filled night playing games, or chatting, or hot-tubbing, or watching a movie, or eating the after-kids-go-to-bed snacks.  Or all of the above.

But, sleepy or not, the duty of parenting calls. So half of the adults kindly tell their partners to keep sleeping, and crawl out from under their warm, somewhat sandy sheets.  They shake the sleep from their heads and trudge downstairs to say hello to the other parents who are slothfully pulling down boxes of cereal.  The bed-headed kids are then bribed by screens of all kinds to stay quiet until the other adults awake.

The whole house is awake and moving by 9:00, and the first of the children begin appearing in their swimming suits.  The swimming suit fashion catches like fire and soon everyone is sporting one.  The smell of sunscreen floats through the air and the sliding glass doors out to the beach are opened 153 times as the eager children run from the deck to the living room to the deck to the living room, checking to see if an adult is ready to take them across the wooden bridge over the sand dunes.  The sound of the waves and the smell of the salty air excite me and hurry my pace. Sometimes I'm the first adult ready, usually I'm not, but the children do not care.  At the sight of any adult walking through the sliding glass doors the children burst out and sprint to flood the beach, dragging their boogie boards behind them. 

While some kids boogie, other kids fly kites.

(I love that the kite is upside down here... it just seems so... Miles)

 

(I watched Claire fly this kite for probably 20 minutes before I reached for my camera.  She just stood there, in that exact spot, the whole time... flying her 'tiny kite' and watching the blue tails blow in the wind.  She is one of my very favorite three-year-olds.)

While some kids boogie and fly kites, others play in the sand.

Or snuggle.

Every day is remarkably the same.  Time follows along a seamless and predictable path and one child felt proud to have it figured out by mid-week.  "I get it, Mom," he said.  "We wake up and eat breakfast, then kill some time, then go out to the beach, come in for lunch, then kill some more time, then go out to the beach again, come in for dinner, kill some more time, and go to bed."  Well, when your week consists of only three things – eating, killing time, and beaching – I see no reason to change it.  Of course, using a soup analogy, the predictable flow of the day is simply a broth.  The unique people and conversations keep things interesting and add an unpredictable array of spices and meats.


I thought 'killing time' was an interesting way to describe our down-times.  And, for a kid, I suppose it probably feels a bit like killing time.  For me, however, I like to think of it as a 'rest time'.  The kids are usually involved in one of the following:

1) Screen Time.  Large, large quantities of screen time.

2) Foosball tournaments.

(This was Miles's absolute favorite... he made himself a force to be reckoned with, and it was fun to see the older boys seek him out for a game).

3) Playing games.

4) But mostly screen time.  Large, large quantities of screen time.

The adults killed time by reading books, checking e-mail, dozing on the couch, preparing food, talking, talking, talking and laughing.   So much laughing.  This trip, we laughed away an entire afternoon taking pictures of ourselves after I kindly demonstrated the difference between taking pictures from below vs. taking pictures from above.   (Taking these kinds of pictures is a skill I learned from my dear friend, Melissa)

I'll refrain from posting my friends' ugly pictures... for now.  Leverage, you see.  Anyway, they're not as lucky to look so eerily like John Travolta when he's all dressed up like a woman in Hairspray.  (Look again - you'll see it.)

Lunch is always delicious.  So is dinner.  Four out of five meal-times, I simply walk from the beach into the house and am met with fantastic new smells as one of the other families puts the finishing touches onto the meal that they've been preparing for the house. The other time, I get to prepare something myself... always picked carefully to balance deliciousness with ease of preparation.  We sit together to eat.  More talking.  More laughing.  Always complimenting the chef.  The beach menu is always one of my favorite things. 

After lunch clean-up and a little more 'killing time', the ocean starts calling again.  This time we might catch some sand crabs, get buried in the sand, or build sand castles.

Maybe we'll find the jackpot of sea-clammy-things and fill up a couple of boogie boards.  (Lily, while throwing handfuls of the creatures to the pile said "Looks like we're eatin' well tonight!"  I laughed.  Hard.  Mostly because... gross.)

  
Or scour the shores for shark teeth.

 
We ladies might sit in the sand and chat with each other and the babies while the men play a game of Frisbee 500.

And we might laugh when they lose their frisbee in the surf because they look so much like sad little puppies,

but we cheer extra loud when they find it again.  We watch them play and we comment, every single year, on how lucky we feel to have such great, great men in our lives.  I feel secretly lucky to have the greatest one out there... and I know that each lady feels she has the exact same secret about her own.

Eventually, someone gets cold and pulls the party back inside.

So we eat some gourmet dinner and then, maybe on a special night we might go back out to the beach in our pajamas to play a life-sized version of foosball.

Or, on an extra special night, the adults might take shifts out to eat at a local sea-food restaurant.  Half the adults go out while the other half feed the children, then they swap and the late group goes out while the early dinner crew puts the children to bed.

(Brian and I went in the late shift with these crazies.  We spent the drive out there belting out the newest hit pop song and belted it out even louder when we realized we were all just a little embarrassed to like it so much...  and then, can I tell you just how much I love this picture?  First of all, Kathleen's mad-eye-Moody eye makes me laugh but then, at the same time, these faces almost make me cry because I just love them so, so, so much.)

(We tried a lot of new foods... some good... some not so good.  Take a closer look at Merrill's face... I couldn't crop it out when I realized he's 'helping' Cami eat the crab.)

 Or, on an extra extra special night, we might let just a couple of the kids stay up past dark to look for ghost crabs with the adults.

(All four of these faces are priceless... excited boys and proud daddies.)

Yes, this beach is a special place.  Are Carolina beaches more special than most?  I don’t know.  All I know is that this is a very happy place for me.

And for my family.

We will miss you.

But, at least we left our mark.

Three Month Face

Life has gotten busier.

I think it has something to do with this adorable face.

I keep thinking that if I was just a little bit more organized, and a little bit more diligent, and if I had a little bit of a nicer of a day planner, that life would magically fall into an easy pace. 

Then I'd be able to exercise, and edit pictures, and blog, and play forty games of Uno, and snuggle TK's warm body, and read a half an hour each night to each kid, and help with homework, and make a delicious breakfast, lunch and dinner for the family, and keep the house meticulously clean for all the home-buyers out there.  And take a nap.

But really, I'm kidding myself.  I think one of the biggest tests in this life is in learning how to balance.  In learning how to choose the necessities and to prioritize the rest.  Blogging is such an important part of my life.  I love to do it... I love to take and edit the pictures... I love to write.  And there are so many things I'd like to write about.  I get frustrated when I can't put as much time into this as I'd like.  I would like to write about everything... record all of my thoughts and feelings about all of my experiences. (Which... while maybe boring for you... would be so fun and fulfilling to me!)

But... then I see this beautiful face and remember that this season of my life is dedicated to him.  Sometimes I can't kiss those cute chubby cheeks and write about it.  So I have to choose.  Turns out I'll take kissing the chubby cuteness every time. 

He's ticklish.  Really.  It's about the cutest thing I've ever seen in my life.  I'm pretty sure none of my other babies giggled this young in response to a tickle.  A small grunt of a laugh, maybe.  But not giggling.  It might be my favorite thing about this little guy right now.  Though, picking a favorite is pretty tough.  Boy do we sure love this little guy.

Transformation

It happened.



It happened as if something like this always happened.  When, actually, it's never happened.

"Can I hold Timothy?"  Miles has said this sentence before.  Just a small handful of times.  Two? Maybe Four?  But before we can even respond with a 'Sure' his request has always been rapidly retracted.  "Nussing (nothing)!  I didn't say anyssing.  Nussing.  I didn't say anyssing."

In fact, the last time Miles held Timothy was the same time you heard about... back when Timothy was five days old... And, you may remember, Miles received two pieces of gum as a bribe for that one (and watched Brian almost the entire time he was getting said gum).

Since that day we've rejoiced in the small successes that show that Miles is loving his little brother.  A glance here.  A smile there.  A pat on the head at the end of the day.  Last week when Miles came to give me a hug and kiss goodnight, he stopped and gave Timothy a hug and kiss as well.  That was big.  And then today, before I wiped the sleep out of Timothy's eyes, before I changed him out of his wet pajamas, Miles asked to hold him.

"Why, sure," I said calmly and slowly moved to transfer TK from my lap to his... fully expecting the retraction.  And then... it didn't come.  Ever!  I made it all the way to Miles's lap and even removed my hands.

And it only took three months, two weeks and six days!

Knowing I wanted a picture, but not wanting to ruin the moment I said, "Oh, would you like me to take a picture to show you what you look like when you hold Timothy?"

"Okay."

I only took two pictures to try to keep the happiness around.  But, that's all I need.  Looks like the friendship is starting...

Spring was here

*The Spring Birthday Fairy came.

First for Brian.  Man, we so love this guy.  His birthday was a little more tender for me this year than it has been in the past... I blame the heart attack.  So glad you got to blow out 33 candles this year, my love!

And then for me,

Turning 30 was so fun for me last year!  I spent the first few months of being 30 with a smile on my face - loving the growth I could see when I compared myself to being 20.  But then hard things started happening.  One... then another... then another... and another... and I found myself blowing out the candles on my 31st cake with the wish please, let this breath blow away all the hard times of this past year and let me start my 30's over again. Thankfully, I have this beautiful clan to help me move forward.

No pregnancies or heart attacks in year 31!  All agreed?  M-kay.


*The monkey is up in her tree again.

 
This picture just screams Spring Break to me.  Not having a lot of kids in the neighborhood, these three are best buddies.  McKenzie sat up in that tree for an hour, collecting anything the boys sent up to her in that blue basket.  Their treasures included clumps of grass, twigs, rocks and an occasional giant ant.

*Popcorn is (was) popping all over the trees

I'm not sure how I'm going to survive without a NC spring in my life.  For some reason I don't think the palms in Miami are going to fill me with the same shocking brilliance that a row of well manicured fruit trees does when they explode in the springtime.  I suppose a walk on the beach at sunrise might do it.  It's just that... I'd have to get up at sunrise to see it... and it doesn't stick around all day.

I suppose watching the crisp, clean waves crash on the beach might do it.  But, oh, how I'll miss these trees.


*Lots of walks

Do you still call them walks when everyone has wheels attached to them somehow?

*Cinderella dressed in yellow went upstairs to kiss her fellow.  Made a mistake and kissed a snake.  How many doctors did it take?

My kids have a different version of this little jump-rope song.  It goes like this:  "Cinder...  oops. Let me try that again.  Cinder... uggg... Cinder... hmph...  Cinder... Geez!  This rope keeps getting all tangled up!"

But they seem to have fun anyway.  Also, the buds came out on our apple tree. 

And McKenzie took Timothy for his first tree-swing ride.

And Miles peed in the forest.

How was your spring?

A Beachy Sabbath

A couple of years ago, when my kids were enrolled in soccer, a make-up game was placed on a Sunday afternoon.  When one of the mothers of the team heard that we would not be able to make it she asked, "Oh, does the game go right through your church services?"
"No," I truthfully replied, and then my brain and my words got stuck.  Surely I couldn't just leave that 'no' dangling out there with no explanation... but I could not think of a tactful way to explain our family's fierce devotion to keeping the Sabbath day holy.

Living in the south, I am surrounded by good, honest, wonderful people who love Christ, love the Bible, and respect the ten commandments given by God to Moses.  Sometimes I forget that we all belong to different religions.  We all seem to be spinning around to the same music, enjoying each others company when all the sudden two bodies collide and we remember, we are different.  Different in the way we worship; different in the way we interpret the Bible; different in the areas of life to which we give our focus and attention; and, sometimes, different in the way we live those ten commandments. 

I could not explain to my friend on the soccer field that day that the people in my religion believe in keeping the Sabbath day holy because, most likely, the people in her religion believe the same thing.  We just interpret those words a little differently from one another which creates a fertile breeding ground for sounding judgmental and/or for taking offense, of which I wanted neither.  Hence the sticky brain.

But as I said before, I could not leave that 'no' dangling out there, either.  So, as gently and tactfully as I could I said, "... we just like to keep our Sundays quiet."
"Ohhh," she said nostalgically.  And, dropping her shoulders as if she were missing a dear friend continued, "we used to do that."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah.  I loved those quiet days.  But it seems that life has just swallowed those up into its hecticness and now Sunday is just like every other day of the week.  Just one more day to get the shopping done and the house cleaned."  Her eyes turned and gazed out over the soccer field and she said, mostly to herself, "I should try doing that again."
"We love it," I said.

And we do.  It is hard to say no sometimes, though.  Sunday birthday parties are the worst.  The kids feel disappointed, the parents sometimes feel disappointed and that makes me feel disappointed, too. But as I've sat reflecting in this occasional disappointment, I see that so many blessings, so many, have come from staying true to the way I interpret this single commandment.  One full day a week is spent in reverence.  Quietness.  Family togetherness.  We talk of Christ.  We build our unity.  We sing and play together.  We worship and recharge.  And we rest from the cares of the world... for just a day.  I love it! And the happy feelings that come from it are worth that occasional disappointment for me. 

And, when we're spending a week at the beach and Sunday rolls around, we try to treat that Sunday with as much reverence as other Sundays.  Though, it certainly doesn't look the same!  Walking on the beach... letting the waves lap up over your feet... writing your name in the sand... all these things can be done with reverence and quietness.  Boogie boarding and Frisbee five-hundred?  Maybe not so much.  So, we try to guide our kids' activities in the reverence direction by simply saying, 'no swimsuits today.'

But kids don't mind getting their clothes wet.  Even their church clothes.

So we add a little extra by saying, 'try not to let your clothes get wet.'  But we know, and they know, that it's a very soft rule and that they can bend it pretty far before it breaks. 

I'm sure they go to bed talking amongst themselves saying, 'hey, remember when our Moms and Dads told us not to get too wet?  That was funny.'

This particular Sunday happened to be Mothers' Day, too.  And what better way to spend Mothers' Day than on the beach with your dearest friends, husband and kids?!  Watching our husbands busy themselves around the kitchen making a delicious meal for us added to the magic of the day. 

Especially because we got to sit and chat while they did so.

 The kids were delighted to see they were having octopus for dinner:

 And we adults had salmon, asparagus, rice pilaf, a gourmet green salad, and fruit and sherbert for dessert.  So delicious it was all eaten very quickly.

There is something magical about spending quiet Sundays on the beach.
I'll have to do a lot of it in Miami next year.
If only I could take my friends along...

Remembory

Dear Miles:

Being a grown-up is hard sometimes.  You have to make scary decisions about lots of things.  Money, children, jobs.

Sometimes you have to move away from a beautiful, beautiful life and into the darkness of uncertainty.  You have to say goodbye to friends and places that have become such a part of you that you hope and pray there will be enough of you left to continue when they're no longer there.

You have to carry the weight of family decisions and you have to think, a lot, about how to protect your kids and family from all sorts of trouble.  You have to work, even when you're sick.  And you have to do the dishes every day.

You have to spend a lot of money and you have to save a lot of money and sometimes you can't do both and you have to choose.

You'll be a grown-up someday.  And I hope that when you are, you'll have a little kid just like you who will help you remember that, even though being a grown-up is hard sometimes, life is still so, so beautiful and you can have this. much. fun. playing a simple game of 'Membory'.

Camera vs. Face

Isn't he beautiful?  Even with a gash across his nose?

I let Miles use the camera.  That was the first mistake.  Truthfully, it wasn't even my camera to let him use, but he asked so excitedly, and his red curls have that magic tendency to pull a yes from me.  I'll deal with the reprecusions from McKenzie later, I thought as I handed her prized purple camera over to the eager hands and watched him run down the hall.  Minutes later I heard a solid thwack and Carson came stumbling out of the bedroom with his hands over his face, crying out in pain.  

Each of my children deal with pain differently.  McKenzie has a tendency to collapse to the floor and roll around moaning if her hangnail pulls in a funny direction.  If she doesn't get attention, the moans quickly escalate to a frantic loud panting, whimpering, and eventually end in deep screams.

Miles largely ignores pain.  The kid has more bumps and bruises than I can count, but I rarely hear about them (unless he remembers that Band-aids exist in this world and then he'll ask for several).  When I do hear about his pain, however, it's big.  Jumping up and down, shaking hands and screaming big.  His face goes pale and gigantic tears course down his cheeks.  (One time he even turned blue and passed out before he took a breath from the initial (hard) impact.  Scariest. Thing. Ever.)

Carson braves his way through it.  He'll try to hide his tears by blinking them away quickly and fool the world with a closed-mouth smile until the shock of the pain wears away enough for him to tell me 'It's okay.  I'm okay.' 

So when Carson stumbled out of the bedroom crying out in pain, I knew something was probably broken and it got the 'run down the hall' out of me.  (Do you really ever run in your house?  Funny that kids seem to run from room to room to room but, even if I'm in a hurry, I only walk briskly.)  I wrapped him in my arms and asked to see his head.

"Mooooooooooommmmmmm!" came the call from McKenzie.  "You let Miles use my camera and he just threw it at Carson's face!"

Whoops.  Sorry, Kenz.  And sorry, Carson.

Carson let me look at his forehead while he rubbed the tears from his eyes (sometimes I think he's thinking that if he just rubs his eyes hard enough, the tears will stop).  It looked fine... I couldn't even see a bump.  Weird, I thought.  "Well, it looks like everything is fine, Buddy," I said as I stroked his hair.  "I don't even see a bump."  He nodded and walked away, still rubbing his eyes but not crying anymore.  

A minute later he came into the bathroom I was cleaning to ask a question.  I looked up at him and immediately felt like Mother of the Year because, obviously, that deep gash that was crossing the bridge of his nose and dripping blood must have been there when I inspected his forehead for any bumps.  Guess I forgot to check for gashes.

Closer inspection revealed that the gash was deep enough to need a bit of attention and, thankfully, I remembered that my husband had brought home some Derma-Bond (think Super Glue for the skin) from the hospital for just such an occasion.  No ER visit for us!  Even so... Carson was feeling nervous.

He worried that the glue would sting the open wound and all I could say was, "I don't think it will, Bud" because I've never actually glued my skin back together.  McKenzie was delighted to take over the camera and capture Doctor Mommy in action.

Thankfully the cut closed perfectly when he scrunched up his nose... so his job was to scrunch his nose and not move.  Mine was to glue him back together.  Miles's was to sit in time-out.  Timothy's was to be happy without being held.  And Kenzie's was to capture the moment.  We all did awesome, if I do say so myself.  Fantastic shot, Kenz!

Genius who invented Derma-Bond?  You are a lifesaver.   Taking four children to the ER or Urgent Care is something I'd like to avoid.  Forever.