Favorite Foto Friday - Beach Fun

This year's beach trip to the Outer Banks in North Carolina was one of our best vacations.  I'm pretty sure that is because the kids are getting older and therefore it is a lot less work for me getting ready and once we are away.  But whatever the reason, we all had so much fun!  We go every year with Mark's family and there were 12 adults and 11 children (ranging in age from 15 down to 14 months).  The house we stayed in this year (as well as last year) was a block off the beach and had a pool.  So we were able to spend a lot of time swimming in the pool (day and night) and then take trips to the beach (pretty) easily.  We picked a beach front house for next year and I'm really excited because you can see, smell and hear the ocean from the decks.  I have always wanted to live at the beach and these trips allow me to pretend for one week that my dream has come true...

Here are some of my favorite pictures from our family vacation.  

Grace doesn't really like the beach, too sandy and way too loud I think.  But she was able to spend some time walking on the sand with her shoes on and then would take breaks posing on the blanket.

We took the boys to the sand dunes.  Which if you have never been to OBX are really hills or small cliffs of sand that you hike up and then run down.  Super fun but exhausting.  We always take a bunch of pictures before we get to the part where you run down the hills.  I thought this was so cute of my two favorite boys.

As I said, it gets tiring.  So Luke got a ride on daddy's shoulders for part of the walk.  He calls this a 'piggy bank ride', instead of piggy back ride and I'm just not going to correct him right now...

One night we get Go-Kart racing.  I'm in the yellow car with Luke being lapped by Mark and John again.  Luke and I were more out for a Sunday drive than racing but it was fun and at one point he said 'am I doing that' when I sped around a corner.  

We also went to the NC Aquarium on our one rainy day.  We took our nephew Mitchell and the kids all enjoyed themselves.  It  is pretty small and hasn't really changed in the three years we have been going but the boys seem to love it, so we went again.

Most of the rest of my pictures are of the boys swimming or playing on the beach and I have been strongly encouraged not to post pictures of my boys with just their swim trunks on due to the number of creepy people on the internet.  So I will end with that picture and wish you all a great weekend!

I'm linking up to Hannah's FFF on her blog here.