Captiva

We spent Thanksgiving at the beach on Captiva this year. On the drive down we had the best barbecue ever (seriously) at Reuben's Smokehouse in Fort Myers. While in Captiva we spent a lot of time at the beach. While not at the beach, we took a spin in a small surrey (cue the song...) and Eric caught us Spanish mackerel which we ate for Saturday dinner. Thanksgiving dinner itself was a feast at the Old Captiva House at the Tween Waters Resort. All was wonderful!

Thanksgiving week fun at Busch Gardens

The boys and I enjoyed Christmas on Ice, Elmo's Holiday Wish, and lots of Christmas cheer this week in the lead up to Thanksgiving. Seems slightly premature but we loved it anyway. Especially the ice skating show which was really a lot better than I expected. We look forward to going back in time to celebrate Thanksgiving later this week!

Parent update: SCUBA!

The kids got to spend some extra time with Gama over the last few weeks as we got SCUBA open water certified. (Thanks to Eric for this as my birthday gift! Yes it took a few months to get it on the calendar.)

The Sandbar

We took advantage of amazing November weather to rent our own pontoon boat for an overnight beach camping adventure. We brought Ernie.

The day was great fun. We enjoyed being on the boat, we fished, we swam, we explored. Ernie did a great job not having any accidents on the boat. It was lovely.

I should probably have been concerned when I noticed that the sandbar where we were to anchor and camp has Google reviews. Literally. Things like "My favorite place to hang out." And there were a ton of boats anchored there when we rolled up about an hour before sunset. People were doing whatever tailgating is called when it is a boat and there is no football game to speak of. People were friendly, and we were delighted to discover that the sandbar has no vegetation and as a result no bugs. Heaven!

All the boats rolled out before it was fully dark and we were roasting marshmallows, telling scary(ish) stories and watching lightning on the distant horizon when the first party boat arrived. They kindly agreed to lower their blasting music when I asked them to. By midnight there were probably 20 boats blasting music and I couldn't keep up with my requests for music. I couldn't even count how many drunk people were staggering all over "our" sandbar and not even really respecting the fact that we had a tent set up.

By sometime in the middle of the night, we heard the last boat pull away and still managed to get some sleep. The dawn was worth it all. We thoroughly enjoyed a quiet morning and then headed back out to the open seas, where we discovered it was too windy to do much else but go home and have a nap. So that's what we did.

Happy Halloween

The boys picked, designed and carved their own pumpkins this year (Ethan had just a little assistance on the actual carving) and they turned out great! Ethan's is the taller narrower one and Emerson's is the one that is glowing.

This year the boys got to dress up twice - once for 'practice' around the little downtown area and then on Halloween night for the real deal around the neighborhood.