West Palm Beach Sand Christmas Tree

We gave a few neighbor gifts to our wonderful friends in our little corner that we see walking to and from school every day and that have started knocking on our door to come outside and play after school. I love it. The kids did so great with these pretzels and we had a merry little Christmas time listening to music and dipping these...and eating a lot of them.

It's only been a week but everything is already getting blurry. But I'm pretty sure it was the Friday before Christmas and we headed down to West Palm as a family to enjoy the sand castle Christmas Tree called Sandi! It was a night of perfection---the weather was incredible, the city was beautiful (I've never actually gone into downtown West Palm even though we've lived here six months), and the kids were.....awful. We didn't get our intended pizza and went home and fed them PB&J and sent them straight to bed without any stories. BUT in all fairness, for some reason with the beautiful city and gorgeous weather, Sterling and I held onto our sanity and actually thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. We can't wait to go back on a date!

He's seriously the cutest, happiest kid around.

This theater was phenomenal. It reminded me so much of our beloved Hale Center Theater in Utah. But smaller, newer (although Hale just got renovated, we just haven't been there) and the nice guy saw me poking around trying to get a pamphlet of what they were showing and he brought our whole family inside and gave us a complete tour. It was the cutest, most fun thing!

The whole area was fun like this.

My kids love trolleys. They call them 'charleys' no matter how much I enunciate it to them.

Christmas cheer on a beachside restaurant. I am in love.

The sand tree was right on the waterfront, so naturally we had to go out on the pier. Sterling might have gone prematurely gray watching our kids stand right on the edge (somehow that doesn't bother me) but we had a good time.

Ruthie was a good sport. Will walked in front of her four times while we were getting after him and trying to have her take this picture (like we said, our kids were not well-behaved on this particular night). But she caught one! Thanks Ruthie!

Will really liked this boat a lot. Until he saw the yacht, then he was won over.

An old lady was very concerned about Molly jumping off this table. I should be more concerned I think. It's just that she is constantly jumping off things that are ridiculously high and so far no broken bones. I figure eventually we'll have a broken bone and it'll probably be from falling out of a chair or some other benign thing.

There were lots of little sand castle creations all around.

It wasn't too bad that we cancelled our pizza idea because Sterling and I had a babysitter set up for that night (the secomd one since we've had Russ, the first one we went to the temple when he was about two  months old) so we could do some stocking shopping. So instead of eating PB&J we got sushi and chicken at Publix instead. Then we still had some babysitter time left so we grabbed Wonder Woman from Redbox and watched it on our dvd player in the van because Russ (we brought him with us because normally he would be sleeping but he hadn't been when we were leaving) was asleep in his car seat. If ANYTHING defines marriage with kids its a date night in your minivan with the volume down because you have a sleeping baby. But...it also felt amazing. 

Which reminds me of a little story. I'm used to pretty much every comment you could get as a young mother herding lots of children around. I get less of them recently since I usually run errands while Ruth and Will are at school (on the days Will has school) so I only have two kids. Which seems much more reasonable to people. But walking around with only Russ? Oh my goodness-the world was in LOVE with him that night! Obviously, of course, because who wouldn't die of cuteness overload just looking at that chubby little soft guy! This is not the point of the story. The point of the story is that when Sterling was dilly dallying around trying to decide if he wanted spicy sushi or a sub sandwich a middle aged woman came up and was oohing and aahing over Russ. And of course, because he has a grip of steel on anything that comes within grabbing range, he grabbed her finger and she was over the moon about it. She talked about how he just made her want another baby, even though her babies were something like 18 and 20. I agreed, I said he makes me want a couple more too. She said "Oh, of course! When you make babies this cute you have to have more than one! He is just perfection!" And then, after she had gone on for more than a usual amount of passing-supermarket time, I said "well, we have to get home to our other three kids at home, thanks!" and she literally froze, did a complete 180 with her train of thought and ACTUALLY said out loud "Four? FOUR?!?! FOUR!??!" and then to Sterling "Four?! You have four kids?" and then to me "Oh sweetie, cute as he is, I think you've had quite enough."

Uh. Thanks. Thanks for that. Luckily, Sterling was there so we just laughed about it. Not so luckily, a couple days after another woman said a pretty rude thing (I had all four by myself) and it kinda stuck under what I thought was thick skin. No WORLD I don't know if I'd had enough, and I don't think four is crazy. It can be crazy. It can be amazingly awesome, and someday (right?) they won't throw tantrums in the store and I will have grandchildren and people to come visit me and I won't be lonely in the world. I will have a boisterous and wonderful family. End rant.

To recap, we had such a lovely evening watching Wonder Woman with sushi in our minivan. I wouldn't have it any other way.