Heavenly Cape Cod

The sand makes it taste better

Catching crabs at low tide in the tidal pool

Even cloudy days can be fun!

Out for a hike in the wild forests of Yarmouthport

Who doesn't love a trampoline?

We took ladderball for the boys to play in the backyard

Brandon on his birthday with the lego cargo plane that he built -

this was his big present from Chad and I, and he played with it all week

Breaking for watermelon. $20 says there's a

hermit crab fighting to get out of that green bucket.

I include this picture solely because I look exactly like Brandon in it...

I'm totally making one of his faces

Can you go wrong with pirate-themed mini-golf?

My baby is 5! and can put away alot of pancakes, eggs, and sausage

If you love the beach like I do, then Cape Cod is just heaven!! So many beaches, so little time. We got home this morning from the most amazing family vacation in Yarmouth, which is mid-Cape. We rented a house for a week, which was great... gave us lots of room for the kids to move around, a kitchen to fix meals in, and a separate bedroom for the boys. Here's a quick rundown of our week of sun & surf...

Saturday: arrived, got unpacked, bought groceries, and caught part of a Cape Cod Baseball League game (college players make up the majority of the teams, and the games are free!)

Sunday: 5 hours of beach fun. Afterwards, stopped at a park for a while and then went out for ice cream!

Monday: Brandon's birthday! We went out for breakfast to celebrate. A man's gotta have his pancakes, eggs, and sausage when he turns 5. Played mini-golf, then went to a cool beach with lots of tidal pools at low tide, and then great swimming at high tide. Cool place - lots of crabs & hermit crabs for the kids to catch. And a wooden boardwalk that bridges out across part of the water to go for a walk on.

Tuesday - Went to our favorite beach of the week - great swimming, tons of crabs, hermit crabs and horseshoe crabs. Chad and I did lots of snorkeling and brought back any creatures we found to share with the kids. Spent most of the day at the beach and then went to a playground for a bit. After that, we drove to Scargo Tower - a small tower on a hill that you can climb up and get a great view of the Bay side of the Cape.

Wednesday - Kind of cloudy and cooler. Went to a trampoline park in the morning, then after lunch at home (nice to have a break from the pb&j sandwiches that I packed for our lunch every day that we went to the beach), we went hiking in Yarmouthport. Then, went to another play

ground for a while. Then, we decided to drive to the Cape Cod Potato Chip Factory in Hyannis (all the towns in Cape Cod are super close together) for their free tour. LAME! The "self-guided" tour takes perhaps 3 minutes... you just walk down a hallway and look through perhaps 6 windows to the factory floor. The hallway ends in a "gift shop", where they were charging $3.50/bag of chips! Please, I can get them cheaper than that at the grocery store on sale. No discount for being right there on site? What a joke. We did get a tiny little sample bag of free chips. Rah-rah. The funny thing was, that place was PACKED! There were so many people there for this ridiculous free tour. I was really disappointed. On the plus side, the kids loved it, as they got to eat chips which I typically don't ever have around. Still, the rest of the day was awesome!

Thursday - rainy! Our only rainy day, thank goodness. We actually had fun though - drove to the town of Chatham and visited their Railroad Museum, played on a fun little playground (yes, in the rain), went to the Chatham Light house and saw the break that formed in a big storm about 20 years ago - swept away much of the beach and created a little island off the shore. Then, we went to the Chatham Fish Pier, where you can watch the fishing boats come in and unload their catch. Not for the faint of heart! Apparently, they gut the fish at sea, so we got to see them send the guts through this elevator/chute thingee, with blood and goo flying everywhere. Then, they sent the rest of the catch off to the side for sale. We saw them unloading monkfish, dogfish, and the biggest lobsters I have ever seen. There were also seals swimming around the pier, looking for scraps, so that we pretty cool. I must say, very gross, but very interesting. Does not make me want to become a fisherman. After that, we grabbed some sandwiches and played a little mini-golf (only slightly raining at that point)

Friday - We decided to do kind of a "best of Cape" day - went to the beach with the tide pools in the morning so that the kids could catch more crabs and then went to our unanimous favorite beach for the rest of the day to do some swimming, build sand castles, etc. And of course, we wrapped up our vacation week with more ice cream!

Brandon is pretty tired from our big week of adventures, but Parker is EXHAUSTED! He could barely function when we got home today, although we did get out to the pool and for some bike riding for a while. He was asleep by 6:30pm! It's going to be painful to wake him up in the morning, but we'll have to because I have a race. I feel very out of my normal routine, but hopefully, that won't hurt my performance tomorrow. Anyway, the week on the Cape was unbelievable, and we can't wait to go back again next year!

In other happenings, I received the wonderful news of two more pregnancies this week! My beautiful sister-in-law Kelly is pregnant, as is my captivating friend Rebekah! And Sheri-Lynne is due in early January. I am surrounded by pregnant ladies!