YAY for WARMER WEATHER

And yes, I mean it so much it is in all-caps!!

Oh, how we needed to see the sun again. And the warm. Oh what a great weekend we had.

"Now wait," you say, "I read Mama Hobbit's blog post," you say, "that can't have been great. Six kids. Never spent a night without their parents before. You're fucking nuts."

OK, so I'm halfway fucking nuts. We've known this family for over three years, the entirety of both of our middle-childrens' conscious existence and almost the actual entirety of our youngests' lives. We're no strangers, for sure. And yet, I get that special you're-not-my-mama-so-I'm-not-sure-I-can-piss-you-off-without-you-blowing-me-off treatment. Plus somewhere along the line, ~L~s three year old decided that I was the bestest most funnest person ever (where that came from I STILL don't know).

Anyway, it all went off without a hitch. We had a decently smooth evening and did homemade angelfood cake with strawberries and homemade whipped cream for dessert, before an also-smooth bedtime. We woke up and ate breakfast and packed up obscene volumes of food, blankets, and first aid supplies for the beach, realized we were missing sunscreen on the first really sunny day our pasty-white selves would be spending on the beach, and decided to head off to Target. This might have been the only stressful thing about the whole weekend, taking 6 kids into Target (two of them CRYING, WTF 3yos).

But then we spent 8 hours at the beach. 8 glorious, uninterrupted, child-fight-less, fun in the sun HOURS.

So, without further ado, PICTURE TIME:

Initial explorations:



Oooh, BIG driftwood! Here it's a rocket:



I think it's a pirate ship here:



They're nuts, they really are. And they really wanted me to come in too. "It isn't so cold anymore! It got warm!!" Right, kids. Riiiiight. Even the three year olds aren't THAT stupid.



They've never NOT known each other:



Girliness spent a lengthy chunk of time (over two hours, maybe over three) making an aquarium with little habitats for various creatures she'd found:



N got in on the fun about halfway through:



ACK, I can't believe they picked some of this stuff up!



When it was time to leave, they carefully placed their critters back where they found them, without complaining. YAY kids!

And this is what I did the whole time:






So we left the beach when it was getting dark, had a whirlwind of bathing and haircutting and dinner preparing and movie-watching and complete zonkness-ing, and day 2 was successfully over.

We woke to not-so-nice weather on Sunday. The kids were stoked to go to the beach anyway, but this was vetoed. Bribes (peeps) were offered to any children willing to play outside, and before we knew it, ~L~ and her DH were back.

It all went so smoothly that I told ~L~ that if she could GUARANTEE me another day that nice, I'd do it again.

I am so, so happy that the cold and wet are over. I don't care if it comes and goes for a while. I'll be out in the sun the second it shows up again.