YAY for the Brandon and Sarah Cushing Family- Part One

This past week Brandon and Sarah and kids came to visit, YAY! We had such an amazing time with them and Owen is for sure going to go through withdrawals without the kids here after we drop them off on Monday :(.

Anyway, we obviously want to remember their visit so I'm going to post everything about our trip. I don't want to bore the few readers I have to tears with every detail of every day in one post so I'll just do a few posts that are per day or two.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday:

This is how the trip started:

That's a picture from my car window. As you can see it was pouring rain and we were going 0 miles an hour. Poor family was sitting at the airport just waiting for us to arrive. Once we did arrive though (only and hour after their plane arrived... oops) we were so excited to see everyone and luckily by then, the rain had cleared up.

I could not wait to wake up on Tuesday and take the kids to the beach. They had never seen the ocean before and  I couldn't wait to see their faces when we hit the beach. There reactions did not disappoint. So excited to be there. Such a good day spent making sand castles, playing in the waves and finding sea creatures. Way fun.

Brandon and Zack building the Star Castle

The whole fam playing in the ocean

Aren't they a cute couple? Really though...

They loved it as much as I hoped they would.
That night we decided to head down to this place. I got everyone pumped to walk through the mangroves and check out the dollar museum (costs a dollar, not an actual museum about dollars). We pulled up to the gate and... who knew? Closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Weird. Luckily we had a backup plan. We took them over to Hollywood beach to walk on the boardwalk and play at the park and sprinkler park. Obviously we didn't know the kids would be playing in the sprinkler park since we didn't know we would end up there but we made do without their swimsuits and they were troopers walking around soaking wet afterward.

The babies were loving these little horses. Oh and I loved that I caught a pic right as Cam was falling off the thing in back. Action shot.

Cam and Zack's (twin nephews) birthday was at the end of August and since we couldn't be there to celebrate with them on the actual day we decided to have a birthday party here for them. We got out the banana cream pie (requested by the boys, guess I've got some nephews who don't like cake) and lit the candles.

So funny, apparently I didn't read the package when I bought the candles and we ended up with trick candles. Not a good thing when you've got babies sleeping and the smokey candles are right under your super sensitive smoke detecter. Tyler was trying to wave the smoke away and this happened:

If you can't tell, he broke off the smoke alarm. oops. Oh and Brandon, terribly sunburned. He doesn't typically walk around with his shirt off.

Once we got all of the candles out for good, we went to cut into the pie and it was totallly still frozen inside. Another little oops.  Cam had the idea to stick a piece in the microwave for a minute to unfreeze it... maybe a bad idea? The Birthday boy had this for his piece of pie.

You may not be able to tell what's happening but it's completely melted.

Don't worry, I cut a new one for him and dug right in to the melted peice. I'll tell you what, melted banaa cream pie... yummy.

Wednesday morning we were heading to Shark Valley. Since we had visited Shark Valley a few times before and seen about twenty alligators within the first fifteen minutes of getting there, I'd been telling the kids all about how they were going to see so many big live alligators as soon as we got there. When we were pulling into the park I asked the parking attendant if we were going to see Gators... his response "I can guarantee you'll see some babies.", not a good sign. We walked in the gate and did immediately see these little guys:

Pretty cute right? But no big gators to be found protecting these babies. I figured we'd keep walking and would for sure run into some gators soon enough. Well I didn't think things through very well when I was bringing a family that is used to the dry Utah weather to a asphalt covered walkway in Florida heat at 12:00 in the afternoon. We had been walking for about a half an hour without seeing a real Gator (not that the babies aren't real but you get what I'm saying) and I'm feeling like it's the perfect weather for a walk (some cloud cover and a breeze- you couldn't ask for much more in a Florida summer) when I start to realize that the Utah family I'm dragging behind me is slowly melting. Kids are starting to have small meltdowns, babies are crying, etc.

 I'm praying my little heart out for a gator to show up since we just spent an hour in the car to see one when all of the sudden I hear Sarah yell "Hey guys! Get over here, I see one!". We all run over there and it's just lying on the ground. The kids were so super excited and I was excited for a photo op so I'm telling the kids to get closer when it get up on all fours and does this: Sorry in advance for the shakey video. I guess I shouldn't be the one on camera duty.

Scary right? Ok, maybe not super scary, it wasn't charging at us or anything but it could have. Come to find out there were like 20 little babies sitting right next to the Mama and she was all about protecting them. We got out of her way in plenty of time, no lost limbs or anything.

Luckily seeing the big gator turned the kid's mood right around and we decided to end it on a good note and head back out of the park. Right before we left we spotted this guy.

When we got out to the gift shop place, the guy informed us that September is probably the worst time to visit Shark Valley and expect to see Alligators. I guess because the rain makes the water so high, they are hard to spot. We felt super lucky that we left having seen two big turtles, about thirty baby alligators and two big alligators. The kids loved it.

That night we decided to head back to Hollywood beach, this time with our suits and hang there for a while. So much fun.
We hit up the ocean:

Yummy Greek Restaurant:

The Park:

The sprinkler Park:

And a free concert where we danced our little hearts out:

Dancing to a really bad but super fun cover band

Such a fun day and there was more to come.... to be continued....