My Lucky Stars: Our first beach vacation.....

Vacation??!!!! More like boot camp!!! Oh holy hell was this a crazy trip. We booked a beach house in ____near Point Pleasant with our good friends and neighbors. They have 2 girls - so the house was 4 adults and 5 kids. Unfortunately BJ had already taken his vacation time for the year and they were opening up their new Toms River office that week - so he was going back and forth from work to the beach house. So that left ME to try and manage the kids at the beach. We tried it on Day #1 and never again after. It was DISASTER. I realized there was no safe way to watch each child at the beach. We discovered Addie had a true phobia of the ocean and screamed bloody murder if you took her anywhere near the water. She wanted to stay in the dry sand area at 90+ degrees and just lay in the sand. Harrison loved the idea of the ocean and wanted to be very close to it - but he required being held at all times. Lennon would not stay in any contraption that I bought to keep him out of the sand - so he kept sticking his hand in the sand and eating the little pebbles.... Poor Erika and Craig were really trying to help me out - but they had their own children to worry about. And to top things off - the workers on the beach were still trying to reconstruct the beach after the hurricane last year. While we were trying to "play" on the beach - their were bulldozers moving sand back and forth. And wouldn't you know...Addie, in her attempt to run away from Mr. Craig and get away from the beach, ran up right behind a bulldozer that didn't see her and was about to crush her. Thank God he saved her and I have never seen him so mad at her not listening or her so scared out of her mind.... Yep - that did it- I would wait until BJ returned 3 days later and we could all go to the beach together -ALL that work and preparation for going to the beach that morning (and thank goodness the house was across the street) and it blew up in my face. I realized that my pipe dream of relaxing in a chair at the beach with a baby by my side happily playing in the small pool I bought for him with Addie and Harrison merrily making sand castles by the water - WAS a RIDICULOUS notion!!! There is no relaxing here. And basically all my kids hate the beach. So then I realized that our "beach" trip had turned into Mommy figuring out how to entertain the kids at the beach house and/or find some good parks nearby to keep them entertained because it was going to be a LONG week and my husband was not going to be around for most of it. I think I did more stressing out, more cleaning, more laundry, and more yelling on that beach trip than I would have at home. The best part of each day was putting the kids to bed and then having drinks out on the back screened-in patio and collapsing into those comfy chairs. Maybe we can revisit this in 5+ years :) But the kids really had fun playing around the house and loved the boardwalk immensely