This summer my parents decided to rent a beach house in Galveston for two weeks....we had a wonderful time. Being so close to Galveston I think we forget that it is a good place to go visit and enjoy what they have to offer. And to be honest after Ike, we did not know what to expect. There was still a lot of areas that needed work, but it seemed like for the most part people were working very hard to restore their homes and community. The neighborhood that we stayed in seemed typical...some homes were done, some were still being worked on, and some seemed abandoned.
The kids had a great time. The first day Ivy had to stop a dozen times on the walk to the beach to dig in the sand. She did not quite understand that if she would just walk past the next house there was all the sand she could ever enjoy.
Izaac developed quite a love for boogie boarding. He would convince Papa to take him out into the serf and then shove him and the board ahead of the "perfect" wave. They would do it until Papa had to rest:-) Izaac never seemed to get enough.
It took us about half of the trip to realize that there was wonderful crabbing opportunities available to us. We attempted the 'ole string, chicken neck and a net procedure, with no luck. Then one night the neighbor came over to give us a bag of left over crabs. He was catching so many that they could not eat them! So then, we adopted a different way of crabbing, and had major success. Every night after we ate crab. And in the mornings when we would ask Ivy what she wanted for breakfast, her reply was always, "Crab."
The crab had to be something like 5" in order to be legal...the string in the picture is 5"...
We also ended up catching so many crab we could not eat them in one sitting. Here is a picture of the craziness in the refrigerator.
This summer while we were Galveston the kids and I took one day off from going to the beach and we headed to Moody Gardens. We saw the 3D Shark movie and then went to the moving dinosaur exhibit. We were pretty disappointed in the animated dinosaurs and the kids spent most of the time digging in the pretend excavation site.
The kids took turns being buried in the sand.
One of the first days we were there a small lagoon formed and Ivy had a blast.
It took us about half of the trip to realize that there was wonderful crabbing opportunities available to us. We attempted the 'ole string, chicken neck and a net procedure, with no luck. Then one night the neighbor came over to give us a bag of left over crabs. He was catching so many that they could not eat them! So then, we adopted a different way of crabbing, and had major success. Every night after we ate crab. And in the mornings when we would ask Ivy what she wanted for breakfast, her reply was always, "Crab." 
We also ended up catching so many crab we could not eat them in one sitting. Here is a picture of the craziness in the refrigerator.
Since I have been so bad about keeping up with what we did this summer I thought I would start adding random pictures. These first two are of the kids at Gran and Papa's pool, on just one of many swimming afternoons.
A neighbor had a fish fry...neighborhood kids played like crazy on a water slide. This was later that night, they actually took a break for popsicles.
Izaac was old enough for "Take your kid to work day" and he was so excited! As you can see in this picture they set up a desk for him and he took it really seriously. He played office for days afterward, and if you got his pens out of order...watch out! Future engineer?
This was a picture after a birthday party, not even sure whose it was at this point. But they LOVED the silly glasses!
Well, we finally bit the bullet so to speak and decided to have someone come in and do our floors. We had a hard time deciding what we wanted and where it would go. The first thoughts were to have wood through out alot of the down stairs. But, our rooms do not have very good divisions and we were worried that there would be too many transitions. So to solve the problem we decided to tile the whole thing. Turns out we really like it!
These pictures are just showing some of the mess we had to deal with and actually still are. The company wanted to tile right up to the baseboards and then put shoe molding in to cover the transition. But we did not want that because our already short baseboards would be even shorter. So Tobie tore out the base boards and we replaced them with taller ones.
The study got the wood, but this picture was taken before it was put in. I will add more pictures soon. The house is so different now. We have painted the walls and Tobie is in the process of putting in chair railing and crown molding in the dining room...
