Visit to Leanne and Richard's land

Our good friends Leanne and Richard let us visit them at their house and land last week. It's a beautiful place and we really enjoyed ourselves.

Alex driving the gator.

Leanne and Richard .... aww, newlyweds. So cute!

Brian and the boys in a canoe on the lake.

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!

Here's a picture Brian took with his camera phone of our table before it was attacked by four hungry people. You can tell that we should have cleaned the camera lens first. :-)
I just wanted to post this because so many of you, my wonderful friends, asked what we were doing for Thanksgiving, and I just kept saying that we're staying home and not doing much. I realized later that it might have sounded like we skip the holiday altogether, but not so! Every year I cook a full Thanksgiving meal, and it was quite enjoyed! Actually, it's still being enjoyed -- thru leftovers! Have a great cold and rainy weekend!

Second Post with Beach Videos

Their idea was to be like the show Dirty Jobs...
"I'm Alex, and this is my job."
"I'm Sam, and this is my job."
Then Sam ad libbed: "We've been doing dirty jobs since we were kids."
So funny and adorable!

Alex flying his kite, oh, I mean, trying to hold his body board in the high winds.

Brian did a lot of body surfing. However, they were hard to catch on camera. Here I caught a video of most of his wave surfing.

Beach Videos!

Here are some of the videos we took at the beach. Some of them are very noisy, sorry about that. That's because it was an incredibly windy day, with winds around 25-30 mph. These are my first attempts at posting videos, so I hope you enjoy them.

Here's a video I took from our balcony. I start facing east, towards the beach, which is the Gulf of Mexico. Then I panned left, to the west, to show the Laguna Madre Bay. I did this to show the narrowness of South Padre Island. We're surrounded by water! :-)

Sam and Brian. Waving and Surfing.

So many seashells on the beach that you can hear them when the wave comes!

Sam feeding the seagulls. These birds know where their next meal is coming from!

This is Sam attempting standing-surfing, like the big boys. He's so cute!

More South Padre Island

This is the deck of my hotel. You can see how close we are to the ocean.

Beautiful sand dunes further up the island, with the ocean in the background.

High winds made for great surf.

The view from the cabana on the deck of the hotel. This cabana can be seen in the webcam.

The boys and Brian climbed up a real lighthouse in Port Isabel, at the beginning of the mainland. Behind them is the bay and then the island on which we were staying.

In the lighthouse.

This is the beginning of the bridge over the bay from the mainland to the island.

A picture of the bridge, taken from on the bridge.

This is for Kim and I, some great shirts they had at the heath food store on the island. The white shirt shows the front of the shirt, and the blue shirt shows the back.

There are LOTS of shells on our beach.

House Improvements

The bedroom was repainted and rearranged this weekend. I painted it, but Brian did most of the work: all the blue-taping and all of the furniture moving! Thank goodness for big strong husbands!

The walls are now a mid-dark sage green [Behr: Olivine], which is what I meant to paint them the first time (about 3 years ago). Last time I used the color two shades lighter [Behr: Spring Hill] thinking it would look like it looks now, but it ended up looking like mint ice cream. I'm so glad it was finally time to fix it.

The bed is now in the "back" part of the room, with walking spaces on both sides, which we didn't have before. The bed area is a lot more spacious than it used to be.

We also keep two desks and two computers in the master bedroom, which is why arranging the room is so tricky. Now, after the change, we have both desks along walls, leaving the large space behind them open for movement and kids.
Plus, the pictures, curtains, desks, and everything looks better with the darker paint color!

Here's the view from a few steps in the door.

Brian's area, though he hasn't had a chance to put everything away just yet.

As we started painting the darker green color, I had a little fun with the boys...
Here you can see the first color, a much lighter green.

And here's the other one.

Here's a picture from last year, showing the prior arrangement and paint color.

And other one showing the different desk arrangement. We thought this would work, having the desks facing each other, but it really just compartmentalized the room, and made moving around very difficult.

Painting, in progress. You can also see a little bit of the remaining really-dark-green color that we also considered.

Brian upgraded the kitchen last month. We didn't really have time or money for regular upgrades, such as redoing the floor, cabinets, countertops, or adding cabinets or countertops. But, we did need more space, so we got the restaurant-style shelving units [Metro] from The Container Store. There are two here, flanking the window blinds in the center of the picture.

By moving items here, we made them more accessible. More importantly, we doubled our available cabinet/storage space by moving half of what was in there, to here.
The countertops are also much less cluttered because the microwave and other counter-top tools and appliances were moved to these shelves -- giving more counter room for food preparation, which we were very low on before.

The second shelving unit also includes a homeschooling shelf. Now the homeschooling workbooks, paper, pencils, and much of the other equipment can be kept near the kitchen table for convenient use. The shelf below that has a metal mesh basket for shoes. Now the shoes and jackets are close to the garage door, which helps with organization and with things not getting lost.

Having the dishes out is surprisingly nice. It's made setting the table much easier.

It's also nice not needing to bend down to lower cabinets to get bowels, towels, and other small appliances so often.

A view of half of the kitchen, from the dining room. Note how the small amount of counter space that we have is less cluttered and more usable. :-)

Us at the Beach

A few weeks ago, we went to spend a week at the beach at South Padre Island, Texas. Here are the pictures of us there. In the future I'll post the scenery-only pictures.

Alex, Sam, and Brian waiting to surf the perfect wave.

After a few waves, our chair was well secured in the sand.

Sam helping with the castle building.

Making sure the moat is fully filled.

This is the view from our hotel balcony. Amazing!
It's actually not an expensive hotel, at least not at this time of year. This view is great because there are no buildings on this side of the hotel, just beach and sand dunes.

As soon as you pull food out of your bag (you know, to feed yourself with), you will have the undivided attention of every seagull in sight. :-)

Alex and Sam preparing to surf.

Playing in the intertidal area.

Nice beach pose.

Brian and the boys made a wonderful sand castle with their new castle-building tools from Aunt Bridget.

Sam, where did your feet go?

Alex returning from a successful wave ride.

Sam created this wonderful sink hole and wanted me to take a picture of it.

It's hard to see, but Alex and Sam are walking along the dunes in this picture.
Also, you can see the great empty beach that we have to play in. That's
our hotel, with no buildings next to it, so we have lots of beach to ourselves.

Brian and Sam happy and tired after a full week of sand and surf.

Sam climbed a sand dune.

Resting (and playing Nintendo) on our last night in the hotel.