4th of July in Maggie Valley, North Carolina

We just got back from our trip to the mountains and hopefully we are home for awhile. It's been a busy summer so far! Jeff had a continuing education class at Lake Junaluska and we tagged along with him. We got there on the 4th and found a festival where the girls played, got faces painted and watched fireworks. It was lots of fun. Kaylin enjoyed the fireworks very much although she did cover her ears from time to time. I was proud of my scaredy cat big girl. Annlee absolutely hated the whole thing. She buried her face in Jeff's lap and cried the whole time, I think. We would have left, but figured it would be over by the time we got to the car anyway. Maryella loved it but said it "scared her ears and her toes and her toenails". HA!

VBS

I just realized that in my rush to leave for the beach, I forgot to post about VBS. We had that the week before our beach trip. The theme was Jerusalem 30 AD, Holy Week. The kids learned about life in Jerusalem at that time. It was a great VBS. Here are a few pictures from the week. The kids really got into the "dress up" part of things!

Other pictures from the beach

These pictures are not "on the beach", but taken at other times during the week. I wanted to share these too!

Visiting with friends from Apalachicola. The first picture is our girls with the children of a family from our previous church - Fred and Tamara. The little girl, Sara Beasley, is about Maryella's age and the baby, Dru, is 20 days old in that picture. The other picture is with the Willis family - our very good friends. Kaylin and Becca were very close when we lived there and they still love to see one another.

Playing on the beach!

Here's some pictures from the beach. The girls had a ball playing in the sand and water! We even had a pool set up at the house that they really enjoyed!
This first picture is one of my favorites. Kaylin worked very hard to set up her towel and she asked me to get her book. She wanted to lay out because "that's what you do when you're a big girl".