Our Summer (A Recap)

So, I'm back from the dead. I decided it was high time to update the old blog. Sorry I've been dragging my feet. So anyway, our summer started out with a move. We actually moved out a few days before school let out and went in to temporary housing (a furnished apartment) for a week or so. My parents came and helped with the kids and let them finish out school and teeball while Clayton and I jet-setted to Miami for his work. We went to Key Biscayne for a long weekend and enjoyed time with his colleagues and their spouses. I can say this about Miami though.....I'd never been, now I have, and I'm not in a hurry to return. Just not my kind of beach I guess. On the up side we stayed in the Ritz so that was nice.

Anyway, we were homeless for about a month and a half. We couldn't close on the house we were buying until the first of July and with the holiday the movers couldn't deliver our stuff until mid-July. So we did what all people do when they're homeless.....we visited. We stayed with my parents a while and then with Clayton's parents a while and then we vacationed a while and then we came back to Texas to take care of business. By the way, thanks to all of the above-mentioned parents for letting us crash for weeks on end and for feeding us and taking care of us. I don't know what we'd have done without y'all.

We took our yearly vacation to Seaside (before the oil arrived) and had a fantastic week of sun, seafood, bike riding, and loving on our kiddos. If we could afford it I'd opt to spend every summer there, all summer. We love it that much. I didn't have my camera for our vacation so I borrowed my dad's and snapped our annual bench pics of our family in Grayton.

So fast forward to July 12th, the day our furniture got delivered and also our eldest son's birthday. The movers show up, late, and start unloading. I notice that they are leaving some things outside after unloading but I don't really think that much about it. I get my rug and start getting it rolled out in the living room and notice it smells really ripe. I just thought, it's the heat. We've never stored our stuff before so I really didn't know what to expect. By the way, Clayton's company paid for us to move and paid to have our stuff stored in a climate-controlled warehouse. So hours upon hours pass by and they're bringing in boxes and bringing in boxes and I notice in one of my plastic storage boxes that they're condensation on the inside of it. So I open it up and the smell almost knocks me down and I look inside and the clothes inside are soaked, like I could ring water out of them. So I stop a mover and tell him what I've found and ask how it could have happened. And he told me, "oh, yeah, he's going to tell you about that." See, the driver is a contractor for the moving company usually and he hires a couple of guys to help him. So I find the driver and repeat myself only to find out from him that we've had some water damage and he's sorry, but it's only a couple of boxes....there was a leak in the trailer.

But our stuff was supposed to be in warehouse storage I say, only to find out that he picked up the trailer from and empty lot. Okay, so I'm trying to keep my cool. He starts bringing out damaged boxes that seriously aren't even boxes anymore. I mean, the stuff in them was beyond ruined. Still I"m keeping my cool, call Clayton and put him on alert for when he gets home from work. I put him in charge of contacting the moving company, etc. Okay, long story short everything in our house was ruined. There wasn't a box that hadn't been touched at the least by moisture. See during our month and a half of storage was when the hurricane hit Texas and we got a ton of rain from all that.....nice. All our furniture, minus a few pieces had water damage. Our dry cleaning bill alone was over 13K........yeah, for real. Anyway, we've been back and forth with the moving company and have almost settled with them for everything. We're still waiting on a few items. Needless to say, it's been a chore. So as of now we're sitting around enjoying our Rent-a-Center furniture:) I did meet with the decorator today and have gotten the ball rolling to put our house together. I'm a bit of an optimist but I'm shooting to have it all done by Thanksgiving.....or I may just be dreaming, probably the later, ha!

So that's been our life as of lately.

Oh, as a last minute trip before school started my cousin Haley and I took the kids back down to the beach to try to capture the moment and I had my camera for that. I just have to chase this rabbit for a sec.......Haley and I loaded all five kids in the bus and headed for the day to Grayton Beach. We get there and it's hot hot hot and cloudy, as we had run into some rain on the way down. So we snapped a few shots before feeding the kids. They did not cooperate without food. I think Henry cried the whole time. Now, I am a little OCD when it comes to the picture taking. I would not give up. So we undressed the kids, fed the kids, redressed the kids and headed back out for another session. We got them seated just so and the bottom dropped out of the sky and soaked us through and through. So we ran back to the bus, undressed the kids again so their clothes could dry and waited out the storm. As soon as it quit we redressed the kids and headed back out to the wet sand and tried again. And all that paid off b/c we got some really great shots. Then we undressed the kids again and suited them up for the ocean and let em go at it for an hour or so. There was red flag so they couldn't get all the way in but they had a blast playing the sand/edge of the water. Then we loaded up and headed back to my parents. I must say that I have the best cousin in the whole wide world for trekking out in public with me and my crew. The kids had a blast though and fell in love with Haley (who can blame them?). All I can say is Haley and I enjoyed a good shower at home and probably slept better than we had in months b/c we were t.i.r.e.d. after all that fun.

And here's some peeks of what we captured:

And here's our annual family vacation to Seaside:

MC:

MA:

We do what all normal beach-goers do, lay out -- NOT! We chase kids and play in the sand:

And our annual bench pics in Grayton:

Our family of seven:

use your imagination or turn your head sideways (I couldn't figure out how to turn the pic) I'm so techno friendly.

Brotherly love: