Weekend at the beach

Once we returned home from the wedding hoopla, we switched gears and did the final prep for a youth retreat at the beach the following weekend. We stayed at Gulf Shores Beach Retreat, and I'd recommend this place for any other church groups that want to do a beach outing. The facilities, location, and staff were excellent. The weather wasn't exactly ideal, but the sun showed its face for a decent portion of our time. It's amazing how much bigger our kids looked and acted at the beach from last year. Here's a couple of my favorite snaps of them. Although Eli started walking earlier in the week, he gave up trying his new steps at the beach and just took off crawling. He liked the sand but kept putting sandy toys in his mouth so we let him have his paci the whole time we were on the beach. Zach thought that being buried was great fun. He didn't stay buried very long, but he thought it was the coolest thing. Sam really understood his dad's role in the weekend. He still gets a little intimidated when Doug is around all the youth, but he sure enjoyed watching everything go down the whole weekend. It's so nice to be able to take the boys along on a weekend like this. It always ends up being more crazy than I think it will be. Between preparing meals and keeping track of three little boys it's hard to have real conversation at any point which is always frustrating to me. However, it goes with the territory and I'm thankful for what I can do to partner with Doug in youth ministry even if it doesn't look like I'd prefer.