Orange Beach, December 2008, Part Two

Tuesday night, after our fun day out at the beach, we had a little family birthday party for Lawson. This is the first time either of the kids has had enough family around to actually have a birthday party with only family there! It was great! We ran out and bought a few decorations and a cake, then after dinner we surprised Lawson with the party!
The day after Thanksgiving I scored a GREAT deal on some RollerBlades for Lawson's Bday present! He had been asking for roller skates for months now, and I saw these on sale and decided if he wanted them that bad we'd get them. I figured if we spent all winter practicing then he'd know how to skate when the weather warms up! He was SO excited--he loves them! He loves putting them on and walking/rolling around on the living room carpet to practice keeping his balance!

This was the first time I had ever met Jon's Uncle Mike and Aunt Lucy. They live near Houston. I really enjoyed meeting and spending time with them. All of us ladies at the beach took turns preparing meals, but Lucy is a great cook and loves being in the kitchen and fed us a TON of yummy food!

Jon, kids, Great Grandma and Uncle Mike

Jon's mom had just celebrated her birthday the week before our vacation, so the next night we had a little celebration in her honor--complete with Lucy's homemade KeyLime Pie!!! I got a couple great pictures with Nana and the kids:

It had rained all day and night Wednesday, and Wed and Thursday were soooo cold! It went from 70 to 35-40! After it had stopped raining Thursday morning Jon, Papa, Uncle Mike and Lawson drove over to Mobile to see some battleship. They had a great day, even though it was FREEZING!!

Thursday afternoon we went out to the sand for a few minutes, but it was so cold we came back in! The kids dug around and found some more sea-shelfs!

Stuck playing inside, this is what they came up with: a bridge 'across the water'! They played on this for a long time--walking across, hopping down, running around then hopping back on the other end!

They also watched WAY more TV and movies than they are usually allowed to watch! We wanted to spend some good time getting to visit with the family we hardly ever see, and we wanted the kids to get to do more of something they love to do too while we were on vacation. This is how they looked most of the time we were inside the condo:

Thursday night Uncle Mike, Aunt Lucy, Jon and I went out to the beach late to see if we could find any shells that had washed up during Wednesday's storm. The water had finally started to calm back down a little and we found lots of 'storm victims':

This pretty fish didn't make it...
Neither did this crab...at least I think it's a crab...

We saw TONS of these Man-of-Wars, Mans-of-War, um...Men-of-War---let's just call them 'blue jellyfish' that washed up! Jon had gone out barefoot--so he had to be extra careful not to step on their tentacles!