Myrtle Beach

This post will mainly be about our recent family vacation to Myrtle Beach but I will also add the recent winter news from around here. Not because I am complaining about how bad it is or because I want people to feel sorry for us; but because I want to remember it when I get caught up on my scrapbooks :) Which right now I am over a year behind.....so it could be a while before I get to this and I forget things easily!

The last time I posted we were living at my parents while they were gone. Well when Tyler came back to check on our house on Tuesday we had no water! We went to my parents on Sunday and no one had been to our house from Sunday to Tuesday. So we were hoping things were OK but couldn't get out on the roads until Tuesday. Our water lines had froze due to the cold weather. I know I'm crazy but I kept track of the temperature while we were there and lowest I recorded was -14 degrees with a -40 windchill!! This was off my parents weather station so I'm sure other people have different recordings but either way it was cold!! So it was no wonder why our pipes froze. Tyler and my grandpa tried thawing out our pipes on Tuesday but couldn't get any water to flow. So they tried putting a heater blowing into our crawl space. Tyler came back to my parents and a little later grandpa called and said he shut the heater off because he was afraid of leaks and if they thawed we would have a muddy mess! If they had to redo all our plumbing they didn't want to work in a mud hole :) So Wednesday morning Tyler and I both went home and we had water!! They thawed out on their own! Tyler crawled under the house and we only had 1 little leak! We were SO thankful!! Grandpa was able to fix it for us and we moved back into our house Wednesday evening before my parents got back! 

So that was Wednesday, fast forward to Tuesday morning and we left at 3:30 AM for Myrtle Beach!! It was a much needed break! We had a 13-14 hour drive down there so we wanted to get an early start so Blake would sleep the first several hours. We bought a portable DVD player for trip and it was a very good thing to have! That was about all he did on the way down and the way back! We got to our hotel and checked in around 5:30 that evening. We didn't do a lot of stuff while we were there but we stayed busy and relaxed a lot. We checked out some state parks that were in the area. We went to a Bass Pro shop and then walked around a mall that was connected to the Bass Pro. We went out to eat about once a day at different places that we found. We went to a Ripley's aquarium that was there. It was a lot like the one in Gatlinburg but smaller if you have been there before. Anywhere we went that had a beach we would walk and look for shells. Blake loved to play in the sand so he did that while Tyler and I looked for shells. We went swimming in our hotels indoor pool a couple different times. We went to a couple flea markets and checked out a Children's Museum but we both agreed that it was a little more like a kids activity center. Blake really enjoyed it though! They had a lot of different things for kids to do and Blake could have spent all day in there doing the different activities. We went bowling one night at our hotel. We had a lot of fun! Blake got fussy and actually fell asleep while I was holding him and bowling at the same time. It was quite challenging to be holding a 30 pound kid and bowl at the same time. Thankfully we were able to lay him on the floor after a little bit and Tyler and I had good evening with just us since he was sleeping :)  That pretty much sums up our vacation! We left our hotel Sunday morning around 8 and drove until 7:30 that evening then stayed in Louisville for the night. Then on Monday morning we went to Cabela's then headed home. We got home around 1 in the afternoon. We were very thankful for the time we were able to spend together!! As you will see in pictures we didn't have just overly warm temperatures :) But it was warmer than what we would have had at home!! I don't know if it got over 60 degrees at any point of our trip but it felt warm compared to the week before though! Now for an overload of pictures :)

The beach right out our hotel was very nice! It was the beach we spent the most time on.

Blake had fun trying to catch the seagulls, he never got one. He would come back to us and say "uh oh".

This is his new face he likes to give us a lot :) 

Blake really enjoyed having Daddy around for a whole week!!

My 2 boys! Blake never let daddy get very far from him.

Swimming at our hotel. Blake started to like swimming a lot on the last day :) He had fun jumping off the side to us in the pool.

Petting the sharks at the aquarium. I missed it on camera but Blake actually did touch one!

He enjoyed sitting in a fish mouth and sliding down the tongue.   

One morning we woke up early to go to a state park and look for shells. It was 33 degrees that morning so Blake and I watched a movie in the envoy while Tyler looked for shells. I got out a couple times though to get pictures of this beautiful sunrise!

They had a train station at the museum! It didn't take Blake long to find it.  

A big bubble maker that Tyler had more fun with than Blake did :)

An example of daddy couldn't go to far. Anytime Tyler would walk down to the water Blake would be running after him yelling "dadda".

Tyler digging a hole as Blake fills it in :)

Blake enjoyed bowling for a little bit before he got fussy!

Then this is how he looked for the rest of the night :)

This is looking off the balcony of our hotel room. We could see the ocean through the trees.

During the warm season Blake would love this place! Our hotel had a big swimming area for kids outside. 

This is our hotel. Our room was on the part that sticks out on the left of the picture.

The last night on the beach before heading home.

That sums up our vacation, now onto this past week. My parents left for Grand Cayman a couple hours after we got home from vacation. They picked pretty good times to be gone didn't they?! :) My sister is home this time though so we get to stay in our own house. But that doesn't mean we didn't have troubles :) We had a pretty normal week until Friday. Yes it has been cold, windy and snowy which isn't always fun but on Friday when Tyler was home for lunch he went to wash his hands at the bathroom sink and there was no water!  Yes our pipes had froze again!! Our house doesn't have the best heater or insulation anyways so we have always had a couple space heaters floating around the house. There is always one upstairs for Blake's bedroom and there is one that stays in the toy room because those windows don't latch and there is a breeze through there when its windy. But we have 3 other ones that we use where ever they are needed. So we turned one on in both bathrooms trying to warm things up. Thankfully the kitchen sink always had water but we put one in the kitchen to try and keep it warm so those didn't freeze too. We have two bathrooms and between the two of them we had one toilet and one sink. Neither shower worked! The sink that worked was in one bathroom and the toilet in the other bathroom :) On Saturday morning nothing more had thawed out. So we washed our hair in my kitchen sink for the day :) But by mid morning everything had thawed out by itself! So since Saturday we have had constant water running out of every faucet and shower that are in the house and I flush the toilets every 20 minutes to keep those from freezing :) It is only supposed to get colder these next couple days so we hope that nothing freezes again but with water running it shouldn't.  On Saturday Tyler and Josh piled snow up along the whole south side of our house trying to insulate the crawl space a little more so hopefully that helps. We are also very thankful that no pipes had leaks this time!! We keep the space heaters on as needed but they aren't always on. Then to top everything off last night we lost power :) Around 9:30 Tyler and I were heading out to do the chickens and the house went dark. We went back in to be with Blake so he wouldn't be scared as much. He doesn't like it when it is dark. Tyler headed back out to do chores while I sat with Blake because it had flickered about 4 more times before going out for good around 9:40. Thankfully our natural gas heaters still worked with no power. So we all stayed warm. Blake ended up sleeping in our bed for the night because he was certain there were bears in the house and wouldn't get too far from one of us. We had 60 mile an hour winds at our house so it was a nasty night to be out of power. Around 1 this morning we got our power back on! I am very thankful for the workers who were working up in a bucket truck in the winds on the telephone poles that were beside our lane!! When I got up to check stuff out once the lights came back on they were just leaving.
I think that is all the interesting stuff we have had this winter so far. I know it is hardly any trouble to most people and a lot have it worse than we do!! I just wanted to get stuff wrote down for the scrapbook so I figured I'd do a blog post about our winter so far and vacation. Off to flushing the toilets again :) Have a good week and stay warm!!