The Adventures of Chase, Owen & HATTIE!: A Great Vacation-Folly Beach, S.C.

How do you celebrate 40 years of marriage? You experience Charleston-Folly Beach, to be exact, with your family, of course! My parents celebrated 40 years of marriage this July. My sister's family, my parents and our family came to Folly Beach, which is on the ocean outside of Charleston, for a weeks vacation on August 4-11th. We had a wonderful day of flying on Saturday and met my sister in Chicago for the final leg of the trip. The boys did a great job overall but only slept the last 5 minutes of the descent into Chicago. We arrived in Charleston around 6:00 and headed straight to Folly Beach. We pulled up to our house on the beach and the exploration began. The boys call it our "new house" and love it! It's a great house-3 levels. We have the basement and Chase picked out his room where he and Owen sleep together. The main floor has a great kitchen, sitting room, dining room and spacious sun room, along with 2 bedrooms. My parents have the spacious and sunny upstairs room.

We were up and at 'em early Sunday morning. The boys played with Jeff while we went to the grocery store to buy food for the week. We went to the beach after that and had the best time ever! The boys were amazed at the ocean waves and the vast amounts of sand. They had a blast finding shell after shell after shell. We ran up and down the beach and saw a Man of War jelly fish-which looked like a piece of plastic so Owen touched it. Thank goodness he didn't touch the tentacles! It attracted a lot of attention on the beach. Eventually a local saw us looking and came over and told us what it was. That was right before someone almost threw it back in the ocean. After we found out what it was it was buried nicely in the sand.

Nana and Papa came to the beach and Nana, Jeff, Chase and Owen and I went out deep and jumped the waves. I held Chase and he and I got a lot of water to the face from those big waves! He liked to have the back of his head to the waves so I bore the brunt of the water. We had so much fun laughing, getting knocked down and enjoying the water. Jeff buried the boys and Owen had fun discovering how very fine sand can drip. Chase liked it when Daddy threw sand at him-hitting him right in the face one time. Oops.

Early in the morning cuddles with Daddy

Chase and Owen washing their feet off on the deck before coming in the house.

We went home to play and Jeff and I got to explore Folly while the boys napped. We walked around looking at the local stores-which were all the same tourist type stuff. We walked the huge Folly Beach Pier, which is the second largest on the Atlantic. It was a pretty amazing structure. It is 24 feet wide, extends more than 1,045 feet into the ocean and is 23 feet above sea level. It was raining lightly at the time so there were not that many people out there. There were a lot of fishermen though.

That night we went for a very nice dinner at Blu and enjoyed the ocean's best fish-grouper, swordfish, scallops, etc. We had great service and sat right by the ocean. After dinner we went to the pier again and the boys got to run out some energy. They loved watching the waves and surfers. Of course we all watched the Olympics that night-a special treat.