Emerald Isle

After Brian’s meetings were over Saturday, we drove to Emerald Isle, NC to meet with the Summers for a week at the beach.  Brian and Kyle grew up together and are still good friends.  Kyle’s boss owns a house right on the beach, so we were able to stay there for the week.  We had such a great time!

Georgia, Elna, Emma, Ava, Clara, Oliver, Hattie, and George

Kyle’s wife, Lindy, is really crafty and productive, so she made a bucket, filled with beach toys, for each kid—8 kids between our families.  Elna’s face here is making me laugh—she was bugged about something sweet little Georgia was doing.

How could you be bugged with that face?  Ha!

Elna picked up and kept every single shell she saw on the beach.

Favorite picture of Harriet maybe ever!  Her little spirit shines so brightly through her eyes and smile

My girls love Emma and Ava--they were so nice to my girls!

George and Hattie--I just couldn’t pick one of these—look at Hattie’s smile!

Georgia rocks sunglasses!  She loves loves wearing them!

Lindy brought craft supplies and the girls were in heaven—crafts are my girls’ love language.

This was my crew coming back from the beach—I stayed at the house while Georgia was napping.  You can see how close we were to the water.

Elna had the best time riding the waves.  She was so brave and adventurous!

On one of our days we went on an excursion to Fort Macon.  It was beautiful and very interesting.  This sign was great too!

I loved the wood tile flooring throughout the fort.

All eight of our kids.

Kyle, Lindy, Clara, Georgia, me, Brian.

Gorgeous!

Just being good dads.

Cute Summers family!

Elna was in heaven!

She’s happy, in case you can’t tell.

After our Seaside beach trip in April, I kind of figured Hattie wouldn’t like the water here—but she loved it!  Probably because it was pretty warm.

Harriet was copying Georgia’s crawling and Georgia thought it was hilarious.  I kind of love this picture because all of the Harris girls are accidentally in it—Elna is way back there in the background.

Elna buried in the sand.

This was our last night there.  We stayed out there pretty late to soak it all up.

Building castles and waiting for the sun to set.

Lindy tried to get a shot of me and Brian, and Harriet wanted to be a part of it—love it!

Our trip home was loooonng.  We left the beach around 11 a.m. and drove 3 hours to the airport in NC, then flew to Chicago, where we had a 3 hour layover—brutal!  It was about 11 p.m. eastern time when we left on our final leg back to Portland.  The girls were exhausted, obviously!  Luckily, we were so blessed to be able to get a spare seat next to each of our older girls so they could sleep.  All 3 girls slept the entire 4 hour flight back home.  We didn’t get home until around 1 a.m.  We had the best time on our trip, but we were so happy to be home!