Mustang Island

And this is where we were supposed to go all of Thanksgiving weekend.  But I'm glad we didn't go till Friday, we would have froze.  Saturday was beautiful.  Back up in the 70s.  The kids had a blast playing at the beach.  Friday night was not that wonderful though.  Nicolas did NOT sleep.  Or if he did, he was attached to me.  Yeah.  That kid was weaned the next day.  Errrr…..  Leo did get him to sleep once too.  It was just horrible.  I don't know if the little bit of rain kept him up or if the ocean waves crashing or the wind that was blowing like crazy for the first half of the night, but it was torturous.

So all of Saturday I morphed into Monster Mom who was snapping at everyone going, "Why are you so whiney!?!?!" etc. etc., when really I was just extremely sleep deprived and nauseous.  Leo felt bad because he would normally have been playing with the kids the whole time, but instead he sat in a camping chair, trying to keep his eyes open.

And then I burnt breakfast--we cooked over a fire on the beach.

And then I burnt lunch. Yep cooked on the fire.  But in my defense, I fell asleep on the picnic table and that's when it burned.

Nicolas in Sebastian's swimsuit.  We had some packing hiccups.

Leo did catch a live crab which was cool.  And the kids found a starfish.  And there were washed up jellyfish on the beach. Okay, the last one wasn't so cool.  And I didn't get pictures of any of that, because I was too blurry eyed.

You can actually camp right there on the beach, well, further down from the picnic table area, but we didn't.  We camped at the part that had water and bathrooms.

Basically we had the beach to ourselves, except one other LDS family.  We both had BYU apparel on. Sweet!

So the other packing hiccup was that we forgot to pack the girls' swimsuits.  They only had long pants. Oops.

Elena's sand castle.

This is where we camped, basically a big parking lot with cars and trailers crammed like sardines.  Our neighbors had a Great Dane--our kids loved him!  I don't think our neighbors loved us though.

The road running through the barrier island was right behind us, and you can see a lot of the bridges and skyline of Corpus Christi from our campsite, but at least it was mostly empty land, which is a nice change from Galveston.  Anyway, we survived the trip back to Houston, and Leo managed to stay awake.  Which was good.  And Isabel threw up.  And we sang Christmas carols.  And then we got home and I bathed the kids and Ana and Leo unloaded the van, and then I took a nice relaxing bath and went to sleep. I think camping trips need to be longer than just overnight.  They are so much work to just pack up spend only 24 hours, and then have to do all the laundry and cleanup after. Plus today I had to set up our tents again so they could dry out.  Anyway, I hope the kids thought it was fun despite Leo's and my exhaustion.