All About Me in 28 Days (The Finale)
Wow! The finale. It’s a little bit bittersweet, I’ll admit. I am proud of myself for following through with these posts and being honest even when being honest with myself wasn’t so much fun. But, now I will have to create my own content again! Just kidding, folks. I actually like that part.
I really enjoy that this meme ends on a happy note. This is the photo that will always make me smile. Now, in all honesty, this is probably not a photo that would make anyone else smile, but it just brings back the best memories for me to see all these kids. This photo was taken just before all parties packed up to return home. The kids had fun until it hurt and they could barely hold their eyes open to take the picture!
Each year, we do our very best to vacation with friends in Jekyll Island, Georgia. It’s just a magical place for us. We invited my friend Karen (you may remember her from the Day 21 post) and her hubby and family to come along and see the island.
That’s all she wrote. From that fateful week (where we weren’t sure how the kids would do, etc.) we were permanently intertwined in this adventure! Each day, we would do new things which would end up being amazing traditions that would carry over from year to year.
The house we stay in is right on the North of the island, facing the Atlantic Ocean. You have to climb over the breakers to get to the water. When the kids get rowdy, an adult will say, “wonder where the tide is, can somebody go and check?” And the kiddos will go (together, of course, that’s the rule) to climb to the top of the breakers and check out the tide. They make fanciful determinations about whether the tide is coming in or out and try to describe how much beach is showing. Now, we can watch all of this from the window and we know that they are safe, but it buys us about 20 minutes (several times a day) of relative peace!
This is only hysterically funny when you realize that we print out a tide table that covers our vacation stay and hang it on the refrigerator–every year. We know exactly where the tide is BEFORE the kids ever leave the house. The kids know this. They know how to read the tidal charts. They even refer to it on occasion, but they never question us, trotting like happy little campers out to the rocks, each and every time.
Karen keeps a small book each year that she fills with funny things that the kids say or do. It’s pretty simple to fill it all up during that one week. The kids are hysterical, and much like Karen and I, once they see each other, it is as if they have never been apart for a moment. Our hubbies are the same way.
It’s just a big ol’ love fest that I look forward to all year long! It’s all about the kids. We play, hang out on the beach, go for walks, chase lizards, frogs, ghost crabs, what have you. We go and purchase new lantern flashlights each year (because the old ones never seem to work) and the kids spend an afternoon coloring the lenses with a red sharpie for our famous turtle walks. Between 10 pm and about 4 am, (if you are lucky–and we have been a couple of times) you can watch endangered Loggerhead turtles lumber up the beach to dig their nests and lay their precious eggs. It’s simply amazing to witness that. To witness that with a passel of wide eyed kids (well, nerdlings might be more descriptive) is priceless. In late summer, you can see the babies struggle to the water where only 1 in 100 will survive.
The kids even volunteer to show other kids that they meet on the beach what to look for and where the best spots are. They tell the adults, too. We have made new friends almost every time we have gone out, from other tourists, to locals, to the biologists in charge of protecting the turtles. It’s amazing!
Then you walk back, in awe, chasing ghost crabs on the beach and shooting them with water guns.
Life is good. Life on Jekyll is better. And don’t get me started about the shrimp…
