Callaway Gardens

A trip to Georgia wouldn’t be complete without a visit to Callaway Gardens, so we packed up the cars and took Mike, Desirea, and Tayleigh to one of our favorite spots.  We love to have a place so nearby to play at the beach, take bike rides, go on hikes, see butterflies, and enjoy nature. We enjoyed one of the last weekends that the beach was open for the season. It was great, just like I remember last year being at this time-not too busy, beautiful weather, and refreshing water. This was Scott’s first time at a “beach” with sand. He loves the pool, so I figured this would only be a step up. He was so fun to watch as he explored the sand. We would sit on the edge of the water and he would grab a handful and then watch it slowly dissolve back into the water. I was so surprised he didn’t even try once to eat it, he just scooped it up again and again.

As soon as we let the other kids loose in the water, they were off in their own little worlds. As usual they were so busy playing that nobody wanted to give me the time of day to get their picture taken. I was able to sneak a few out of them. This picture of Abby cracks me up. It’s a cute picture, but look at her hand under the water. It looks huge!!! She has fingers like elastigirl or something. So funny!

                                       

        While everyone else was busy splashing around Brooke was content playing by herself building her own sand castle. 

                                

After swimming for awhile we convinced Mike to let us bury him in the sand. We buried him and he got an additional “fin” as well. You can’t see it, but the kids wrote, “Mike the merman” in the sand.

    The sun when in his eyes when we took the picture, so he looks a little more like a pirate instead of a mermaid.

“Hey, who’s makin’ fun of me merman fin?”

“I’ll get you for that”

AHHHHH!

After that everyone wanted their chance to be buried in the sand. Brianna with her big muscles, and Abby as a little shrimp.

                      

Brooke, Erika, and Tayleigh’s was so cute. They turned out to be a three headed octopus.

  

       

                                        

Before going to Callaway we had got online and tried to figure out how to make our bubble making experience bigger and better than we had the day earlier. Their was a U-tube video clip of people making huge bubbles-ones that were bigger than our van big! We watched it over and over again trying to figure out how we could make a contraption to make bubbles that huge. After many ideas we came up with something we thought would work. We found a backup big bubble maker at Toysrus and of course had the trusty bubble sword. We were able to make a few big ones after a while with the one we bought. The one we made didn’t work quite as well as we had imagined. We may have to tweak it before our next visit to Callaway.

 

                

The girls would run back and forth from the water fountain filling up water bottles and coming to dump them in our bucket to keep it full. Then they would put there hands and arms in the bucket and get all soaped up. They would hold their hands up and let the wind blow and it would blow bubbles from their hands. Abby had so much soap on her, we scrubbed her for five minutes under the water, and she was still soapy. You could come up and rub her leg a little bit and bubbles would float off into the air.

As the sun started to peak back out from the clouds, Austin was having fun with Tayleigh’s bubble sword. He would run back and forth on the bank while Erika chased behind him trying to pop the bubbles. It was a perfect picture to sum up our fun day. Ah..summer fun! I always hate to see the summer end. Long days, playing at the beach, fun picnics, staying up late, catching fireflies, cold icies on a hot day, …and now beautiful bubbles at sunset to add to our list of summer favorites.