May 28, 2023 - Sunday


Man, vacations are hard. Today was filled with so much whining and crying (not mine, although I wanted to too!) that I was just emotionally exhausted by dinner time. There were a few times that I just wanted to say to Ben, "I'm having a terrible time here." But I didn't. I kept it in and, instead, made it obvious I was having a bad time. I'm not very subtle. 😅

Despite the bad weather, we did a lot of fun things. We went to Huntington Beach State Park in the morning and visited the nature center there. We also walked for a little while to see the alligators. And we did see lots of alligators! Here is my thing: WHY DO THEY LET US WALK SO CLOSE TO FREE ALLIGATORS??? Like, are they just that confident that we won't get attacked? Alligators are actually dangerous animals. I'm not just making that up, right? And they're fast. Way faster than me. Nonetheless, we were like 10 feet from lots of them on this walk. Or, maybe, alligators don't like crawling on the rocks they have between the sidewalk and the swamp? I don't know. But I spent the whole walk thinking about how I'd fight off an alligator if it ran up to eat one of my kids. Good times! Atalaya was beautiful, as always. Lots of good opportunities for photos there! Sadly, there was a group of very annoying children that were at the nature center, who then followed us to Atalaya and seemed to be everywhere we turned. It started raining really hard and they gave up and left, but WE stayed, and we were finally free of them!!! But we were in the rain, so I'm not really sure we won. 

After that, we had lunch at home and then went down to the beach. It was STILL raining and it couldn't have been more then 65 degrees. I was wearing a jacket and pants and all of the kids and Ben were in their swimsuits, jumping through the waves. 😂 Troopers! We hung out for a while until the rain got too heavy, then it stopped again so we went into the pool. Well, I didn't go into the pool. But everyone else did! 

We got in, got dressed, and headed out to dinner early. It wasn't great for me. We went to Bubba's, which is OUR spot for a beach dinner, but I got something I've never gotten (unpeeled shrimp) and was very disappointed that the shrimp were also not deveined. Super, super disgusting deveining all of the shrimp myself. They were also overcooked and tough. Not a great dinner! Ollie only ate lemons and Clem just had a house salad. Everyone else was happy with their meals though! 

I escaped to Walmart by myself in the evening and then we went for a beach walk, which restored my soul. The kids were all so wonderful and beautiful and happy and we had so much fun. I needed that, after a long, hard, whiny day. 

I wish that I could attach a dozen photos to this post, but the internet is SO slow here that it took 10 minutes to upload just that one...after several freezes. So this is it for now!

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