The Davenport Family: Beach Trip 2010

This past week was spent at the Beach Club in Gulf Shores (Fort Morgan Road technically). This is our fourth year in a row to go with my parents and brother and his family. It was a lot of fun and the weather (although hot and steamy) was really perfect for the beach.

Wearing my old Gulf Shores tee - It definitely is better at Gulf Shores!

He could not stop giggling at Pawpaw and his crazy noises!

After all the reports about the oil spill, I was curious to see for myself what the beach looked like. So we went down Saturday after we arrived. The beaches mainly looked the same, but felt WAY different. We figured that it was much softer/cushy because BP had to constantly dig through the sand to get all the tar balls. There were tar balls on the beach, but nothing too bad. The water looked the same as it always has. With the drop in tourism, it was much easier to get an elevator and the pools were pretty scarce, which was nice.

This looks worse than it really was...

Here are the tar balls. We actually got pictures of BP's crew cleaning it up.

Nicholas spent practically the whole time chasing after Lilly (8) and Elizabeth (2). He was particularly interested in pulling out just about every flip-flop they brought to the living room. We had a great time playing bunco, uno and pool games. We also had some pretty intense games of foosball. I also brought our baby name book and tried to assist Ryan and Nancy on picking a name for baby #3.

How cute are they!

He really seemed to like the beach

It took Nicholas a day or so to get used to sleeping in the pack-n-play. It was also rather difficult because he was sleeping in our bedroom and is a rather light sleeper, so he woke up a few times when we went to bed or when I woke up coughing. All-in-all he did pretty well considering his nap/bedtime schedule was completely off. We also did something that I had sworn I wouldn't do - Nicholas slept in the bed with us for a few hours one morning. I didn't want him to wake up the rest of the family and it was around 4am, so we let him get the rest of the mornings sleep in the bed with us and surprisingly we were able to get some sleep as well. Another issue that screwed up his sleep habits is he cut several molars this past week. Of course I didn't have any Orajel with me, but we did give him some Tylenol (again the non-Tylenol brand).

Dad's birthday was Friday, so we celebrated that with some brownies and family pics.