Day Eight : Westerly again :)

We woke up in Weekapaug!  Well technically, Westerly, but close enough :}  Uncle Rick made us some delicious pancakes for breakfast, along with bacon and fresh fruits.  Cousin Chris and his fiancée Meghan joined us for round two of breakfast [they don’t have small kids, thus they don’t get up at 6:45am.  Gotta love being really far east in the summer time!].  After breakfast, we met up at the Weekapaug inlet.  Rick and Cheryl had to run a quick errand on the way; Coleson, Chris, and Meghan drove the kids; and I ran there, hooray!  There was a small farmer’s market that morning and one of Cheryl’s friends told her about the sandcastle building contest.  Thus Rick and Coleson left in search of shovels and other necessary sand stuff.  We were able to stroll right onto Fenway Beach, even without a beach tag, by telling them we were there for the sandcastle building contest.  The contest was supposed to start at 9:30, but we saw no signs off anyone building.  We strolled for awhile and climbed the rocks.  We found some really cool snails – they were slithering on a rock just under the surface and you could see the paths they were leaving in the sand on the rock.  We also saw fun shells and mussels.  The kids loved Chris and Meghan and Cheryl and took turns hanging out with each of them.  And they are all so good with the kids. 

Rick and Coleson made it back with all the new sand toys and we set to building.  We were still confused by the lack of other people building; it was close to 10:30 by now.  Suddenly Cheryl said it’s not Saturday is it?!  Oops, we were off by a whole day!  Oh well.  We still had lots of fun building and judging our own castles.  Rick and Coleson and Chris has some pretty serious castle-building going on.  Walls and castles and dolphins and all sorts of details.  Cheryl and the girls specialized in drip castles, and Ryan and Meghan were working hard on a castle with a moat and a bridge and a snowman.  I was really happy to see Ryan having so much fun with Meghan!  Since we hadn’t planned to come down to the beach, we were all in clothes and without sunscreen.  We decided to head back to Rick and Cheryl’s for lunch and to regroup.  Cheryl had some awesome sandwich making ingredients, including an avocado hummus.  We changed and headed to Rick and Cheryl’s beach – Seaside.  Around here, you belong to a beach club, there’s not much in the way of public beaches.  Seaside is just across the beach from Weekapaug and is very nice.  Rick and Cheryl have a huge locker for keeping all their beach supplies right there, and there’s also restrooms and a snack bar.  The water was COLD, but the kids went in anyways.  Chris and Meghan and Coleson went all the way out with Ryan and Abby to help them boogey board.  They had some good waves!  They went in a couple of times, but didn’t last too long- they’d start to shiver and their lips would turn purple and we’d have to tell them to come in from the water!  The kids and I sat in the sand playing for a long while.  [our setup was a couple of rows back from the water, so they couldn’t really play alone].  We buried each other and built drip castles.  Cheryl came down and we chatted for awhile.  She and Rick are both great and so easy to talk with; I really enjoyed visiting them.  At some point, Rick and Cheryl and Coleson and I walked the jetty with the girls while Ryan dug in the sand with Chris.  Abby loved all the rocks and jettys around the area.  We saw a huge rock in the jetty that had been misplaced by Hurricane Sandy; hard to imagine, those rocks are huge and must weigh thousands of pounds!  We sat around and enjoyed the beach life a little bit longer before heading up to the house.

An outdoor shower and warm, dry PJs for the kids, followed by some Octonauts.  The kids ate an early dinner of burgers and dogs, mac and cheese, and strawberries.  I loved all the home cooked food we were treated to the last two days!  Thanks!  Chloe was asleep by about 7pm :)  Rick’s lifelong Weekapaug friend, Mark Barber, joined us, and we had a very nice adult dinner on the porch after the kiddos were settled.  Cheryl had bought us swordfish and some nice sides from the market.  We also had corn on the cob and wine.  It was a beautiful evening on the porch – it felt like fall at home, jeans and my new sweatshirt, but still barefoot :)  We enjoyed spending some time with Chris and Meghan.  We talked about the upcoming wedding, about life in New England [as awesome as the summers are, the winters are cold!  Chris showed us pictures of Boston covered in snow, no thanks], work and travels, and a few other things.  It was a nice, relaxing evening.  Two glasses of wine, and I was fast asleep!     

A couple of classic Abby statements while I’m thinking of them :

...In reference to Brady, their awesome little white dog : “He just loves me soo much”
...When she woke up Saturday morning: “I was like Chloe get your whole self off my head” 
             At Cheryl’s we had the whole upstairs – two guestrooms with a full bath.  The kids were all together; Ryan in a bed with the girls sharing an air mattress.  It was a very nice setup.