Holden 2022

This year's Holden Beach trip featured us, Mimi and Grumpa, Breezy, and Blake. We missed having the other Johnson siblings and extended Blood family around, but it was still a lovely beach trip. It was was well worth pulling the kids out of school for a week!

Isaac was baffled and then delighted by the ocean

This needs to be made into some album art

A major highlight of the trip was the food! Dinner our first night there was a seafood feast with lobster claws, bacon wrapped shrimp, steak, corn on the cob, and scallops. 

 

Blake made us his super nachos with THREE DIFFERENT SAUCES. 

This one is a sand boy!

 He's a fan of bobbing in the waves too. Unfortunately the waves were no good for boogie boarding this year. 

My favorite: hunting for sand crabs! We fried up a plate and felt cool about it. 

Best breezy laugh ever to be captured. We were playing fishbowl. I forget what word Dad was acting out, but clearly he was nailing it. 

Mimi was AWESOME about having crafts for the kids. She brought a thumbprint art book, magna-tiles, and blank art books for them to fill. They were all about it and were crafting at least a bit every day. The big craft was a shell mobile for Elliot and Annie! They spent days collecting shells that had little holes in them. The best ones were lovingly selected, painted, and strung up on thread to become awesome wall décor that is now hung up in their bedrooms. 

Finished shell art

two good looking goofs

Breezy had a birthday while we were there! Note the sign above her head lovingly designed by Mimi, Elliot, and Annie. For her birthday, we went out to a seafood restaurant and then watched an epic bollywood action movie called RRR. It had multiple tiger fighting scenes and a very intense dance off. It was a little beyond my violence threshold but excellent other than that. 

These two are great buds

Look at these too cool Kimberlys. It is fun watching Annie become more and more like my Mom as she gets older.

Elliot made a rock collection that evolved into a game requiring two color coded reference sheets

A huge highlight was a visit from my friend Kathleen! She was recently released from a 6 year prison term. We wrote fairly regularly during her whole sentence, and I managed to visit her once a few years ago on the way back to McLean from Holden. It was wonderful to spend a day bobbing in the waves with my old friend and hearing her stories in person. To me, she is a wonderful example of hope and repentance and trying to make the most of a difficult situation. 

The Knells were awesome enough to make the 2.5 hour drive to spend a day at the beach with us! Whenever we are together, it is just like old times. I think that the Knells are the easiest to talk to friends we have ever had, and I never get enough of the good conversation time. 

The last night at the beach, Annie had a stuffy nose. She kept waking up and screaming because she couldn't find a tissue (they were right next to her). This was a problem because she was sharing a room with Elliot and Isaac. I ended up sleeping in her full size bed with her. Needless to say, we were all quite tired on the flight home the next day. 

Annie asleep in the airport

Isaac slept the entire first leg of our flight