The first frolic at Singleton Beach (May 7)

When we got to the condo, I watched the very littlest people...

...while everyone else unloaded the vehicles and carted everything up to the condo. Hello, down there!

And then while Andrew went grocery shopping, Grandpa and I took the kids to find the beach. Our condo boasted a "short walk" to the beach via an accessible boardwalk. We were a little surprised to find the boardwalk was nearly half a mile long! (I guessed a quarter of a mile earlier, but I measured it on Google Maps and it takes a full half mile to get from the beach to our condo, though the boardwalk is a bit shorter than that since we have to walk through the parking lot, which is large).

A half mile really isn't terrible...until you're carting babies and boogie boards and beach chairs and coolers to the beach. Then it starts feeling pretty long. 

Later we'd discover (and make use of) a shuttle, but first we just walked out there. 

It was rather late in the day, approaching sunset, so the kids weren't going to get in the water. They were just going to look at it. But knowing my children the way I know my children, I made the ones I can make do stuff get into their swimming suits and left the older kids to make their own choices. So, Alexander, Zoë, and Benjamin headed down to the beach in their swimming suits. Rachel and Miriam headed down fully clothed.

They all ended up soaking wet. Of course.

I loved the symmetry of this picture, with my, Rachel's, and Grandpa's long shadows angling toward the center of the picture and the light beams shooting off into the sky. That's Miriam and Zoë making their way across the little "tide pool"; the boys are already halfway to Morocco—if you look real close you can see them out in the ocean proper.

And here we've caught up with them:

I didn't bring any towels or anything since we were just doing a quick exploratory stroll:

I should have brought towels.

Look at this gorgeous Rachel-girl:

I don't know what we did to deserve a kid like her, but she's pretty great:

Grandpa wasn't very impressed with the gentle waves lapping the shore:

He suggested we might need to research some different beaches so we could be sure to get some good boogie boarding in; but although the waves were quite tame on this particular evening, the sea was much more aggressive on subsequent visits, so we got plenty of boogie boarding done right here.

Soon we dragged those soggy children from the waves and, cold and dripping, they waddled the half mile back to the condo:

Pulling them away from the water really took some doing; they kept running back in:

And then we got caught up at the tide pool again:

We were glad to be down at Hilton Head this weekend—and not up at the Outer Banks where they were having some wild weather! A couple of houses fell into the sea over the weekend at Roadanthe (very near where we stayed back in 2016).

As an aside to my aside there, the post about our OBX vacation begins with a very messy blowout from baby Zoë, which is funny because our trip to Hilton Head ended with a couple of massive blowouts from baby Phoebe. I guess that's just what happens when you travel with babies.

Our weather was really pretty great. It was unexpectedly cold for May over the weekend, but we got a couple of lovely, sunshine-filled days at the beach in before it started raining on our last day.

Anyway, we succeeded in leaving the beach, as I mentioned...

...and made the half-mile walk back to the condo feeling cold and wet...

Phoebe was so exhausted from the wind blowing in her face that she didn't complain about going to bed at all, which was nice. 

Here's a view of the sunset from the fourth floor (it's still so strange to me that the sun sets away from the ocean when I feel in my heart of my Westcoast-Girl heart that the sun should set over the ocean):

And, lastly, here's this weird photo that showed up when I imported my pictures. I think I took it by accident, but I like how it turned out (it's kind of trippy):