Family Reunion

My 3 sisters, our spouses and significant others, all our children, and my mom got a beach house in North Carolina for a week in June. My brother, his wife and daughter lived about 40 minutes away, and my dad was less than 10 minutes away. It was the first time in 9 years that our entire family has been together (and there were a lot less people back then!). My aunt also got to come spend a few days with us! In total, there were 13 adults, 9 children under the age of 10, and one still cooking. We spent a lot of time at the beach, which Claire just LOVED. She would run into the water, sometimes fall into the crashing waves, and pop back up yelling, "Woohoo!"

This is what poor Max thought of the beach/ocean.





Ella never once ventured to the water. I remember one day where she didn't want to go to the beach, and when I asked her why she said, "Whenever I go to the beach, I always get sandy,"
After a long day of sun and surf. I managed to spend two weeks at the beach without Claire getting a tan, woohoo!
We had a little "girls" night where Momo, Kristin, Nicole, Kelli and I took Tessa, Ella, Halle, Claire and Max (sorry Max) to Fort Fisher for a concert and we also painted nails. Max did NOT want to be left out, it was so cute, and he held perfectly still!
The girls were playing so cute together, and then I think Tessa decided Ring Around the Rosie was for babies, so she made up her own words


Claire rocked out at the concert all by her lonesome


We went to the pool a few times and Claire borrowed some arm floaties from Halle that she loved a little too much. She would get out of the pool, run around and jump in without waiting for me. Luckily, I'm pretty fast (or someone else was) and those arm floaties worked really well.
I was very impressed that she didn't pee in the pool, but asked to get out every time to go.
One night we went to the boardwalk and got wristbands for the rides. The kids were in Heaven (the big kids too, coughcough, Hyrum and Sean). Claire would go on any ride we would let her, and never got scared no matter how fast they went. She usually cried when it was over and we had to take her off. One of them she started screaming right away, and I thought it was because she was scared (so did the guy running the ride because he asked Hyrum if he should stop it), but the screaming was because Hyrum was holding onto her so she wouldn't jerk around/fly out of the seat!
Kelli got some ADORABLE pictures and videos of Claire on the merri-go-round that I can't wait to see. Here are a few though. She was obviously a fan :)

Claire and Max rode this train at least a dozen times each. At this point, with only the two of them on it, we didn't even have the guy stop it, we just asked him to keep going!


This is the Claire show at around midnight one night. We had late nights and late mornings. I love spending time with my sisters!