Funnel Cakes

This morning my family headed out to Santa Cruz! It was the first time our family tagged along with a youth group trip, but they were gracious enough to invite us along knowing our summer was wrapping up before we had a chance to get to the beach. My husband volunteers with the youth group and was happy to get to spend the day with the youth group kids and his own kiddos. I left armed with Sudafed since my body decided to get sick just prior. I figured I can hang out on a beach sick just as easy as hanging out in bed sick :) We got to the Boardwalk at exactly the time the church bus made it there...so we all headed onto the beach with coolers, games and a lot of beach gear! Poor Shannon ended up carrying the BBQ! I don't know how she ended up with it. ha ha The boys played in the freezing cold water without caring about the temp and played baseball on the beach too. I remember when Landon would scream and cry with fear of the waves and now that fear is totally gone! Liam, though, was the one in the water the most...so I had to keep an eye out for him and the sneaker waves. Loren was happy that his cousin, Lenny, was along with the youth group and he got to spend a bit of time with him. They had a nice volleyball game started, so my husband made attempts at playing with a hurt back and did quite well. After dinner of hamburgers and hot dogs, we loaded up all the gear and put them in the church bus and our van. We attempted to get sand off the boys while they changed in the van.

Then it was off to ride the rides on the Boardwalk. We spent alot of the evening together as a family, but once we had to wait in long lines for rides, we ended up splitting up. That way I could go with Landon on the kiddie rides and Gary took Loren and Liam with him on the bigger rides. We ran into some of the youth group throughout the night, but they enjoyed having their own space to do what they wanted as well. We came together at the end of the night and got the boys their much anticipated funnel cakes. Loren has been wanting one since we visited Discovery Kingdom and hadn't had a chance of getting one that time. He was VERY VERY happy to have his with strawberry topping. Although I had MANY pictures I took today at the beach, I chose this one for the blip photo because this made Loren the most happy :)

We didn't leave until 11:30...so by the time we said goodbye to the youth group and had left the parking lot, Landon was already asleep in the car. Luckily our motel was only 5 minutes away. We got into our room around midnight and the boys passed out! Ironically, our motel room number was the same as our address....bizarre.