OK, no masterpieces this year. Here are the pumpkins that kids designed and I (attempted to) carve:

Lauren has a game next week, but Jake and Beth both had their final game of the fall season today.

Jake and Beth talked me into taking them to the playground at church this afternoon while we wait for Lauren at Sunday school. They had a ball playing.

We’ve had perfect weather this whole trip. There’s a red flag on the beach today, but we’ve got lots of other stuff to do anyway.

What would a Florida trip be without an alligator sighting? Fortunately we came upon one while we driving around looking for a place to eat dinner.

We went for a walk along the nature trail and on the tiny island need our condo. The kids liked the playgrounds that we found more than the nature trail.

It’s awesome out on the beach at night. The kids loved to be the “destructors” of any sand castles they found and that they deemed not worthy of preservation. Then they decided to make their own. There are lots of dead fish washing up on the shore.

We all went for a bike ride today. Beth was a little cranky about it at first, but eventually even she had fun.

We had a beautiful day in Destin today. We swam in the beach, played in the sand and went for a nice walk and even had a boat ride. Not a lot of pictures, but here are a couple:

We made it to Destin today. We arrived around 3:00 in the afternoon, so even today we could spend some nice time outside:

The Brentwood Y (our “home” pool) hosted a swim meet today. It was a little disorganized, but the kids did very well. The biggest surprise was right at the beginning when the kids were being organized into medley relay teams and I heard someone tell Jake he was doing the breast-stroke leg of the race. I couldn’t get to anyone in time to say that he didn’t know how to do breast stroke, but then lo and behold, when it was his time to go, that’s exactly what he did.