Birthday/Clamming/Easter weekend

As usual, we're not busy at all ;) This pas weekend was Easter weekend, but more importantly it was MY 30th birthday. So I dropped the kiddos with my mom on Friday & headed to the ocean with our best friends! It was PERFECTION. Absolutely beautiful & just what I needed - a peaceful getaway!

We stayed in the middle house shown below:

It was a beautiful house - 3 bedrooms for 3 couples. Brandon & I got the master suite since I was the guest of honor, which had its own deck looking out to the ocean. This was quite literally a getaway since there was no cell phone coverage for 25 miles, no internet, and no home phone. Luckily there was also no emergency! Yikes! Once everyone arrived on Friday we enjoyed a steak dinner and games. Then everyone announced it was bedtime since we needed to get up at 7:30am to go razor clam digging!

When I woke up Saturday morning, I came downstairs to find a completely decorated house - Pirate

Theme! I have the BEST friends in the world. They made me feel so very special! I believe they chose pirates because we were going to be digging up "treasure" on the beach. And I have a thing for Johnny Depp. My sweet friend Angie even remembered all of us for Easter & made each one of us a special Easter basket - complete with a pirate flag, hoop earring & eye patch, of course.





Angie made a big jug of Sangria & a big jug of rum punch - calling hem "grog" which I guess is a pirate term. They were so tasty & didn't last long ;)

We ventured out to the beach to do some clam digging. The commute was so long - a whole 400 feet away! Clamming is kind of a big deal as it turns out. The WA department of fish & wildlife has to test the clams/water/beach and determine it's OK to clam. They have set "approved" dates for clamming and a limit of 15 clams per person. Being as this was everyone's first time clam digging, we actually had to ask a kind mannered stranger to show us how to do it. Once we got the hang of it though we found there were plenty of clams for the digging & we had SO much fun! Within an hour everyone had already caught their limit. That's right. we had 90 razor clams! Woohoo! Or so we thought woo-hoo. Until it came time for shucking/cleaning those suckers. Oye! 3 hours later with 4 people constantly doing work on the clams at a time, we finally got them all shucked & cleaned & ready for frying and clam chowder making. I think we learned our lesson about catching your limit in razor clams. Aint nobody that needs that many clams!

Meg & Jenn butts

Jenn supervising our clam gun skills

Our group, sans me.

So. Many. Clams. This was only half of them!

We went into "town" for pizza for lunch, because after clam digging & cleaning, nobody was in the mood to cook lunch. Came back & spent the entire afternoon outside.

Jenn, Me, Angie

My love

Angie & Adam - a couple of my favorite people!

Before getting back in the kitchen to cook up a clam feast, us girls decided to get in the hot tub. We'd been in for maybe 5 minutes when Angie's husband announced there was a sea lion! on the beach right in front of our house! Of course, we did what any responsible 30 somethings would do...we jumped out of the hot tub, no shoes, no shirt, just towels & ran to the beach! It was so cool to see wildlife like that! I'm sure it was taking a rest for some reason, so we made sure not to get too close or bother it. Still, very cool! Those things are HUGE! And then we realized we were very cold, because we were in wet bathing suits & towels standing on the beach at the Pacific Ocean at 5:30pm. So we ran back to the hot tub :)

We fried up the clams & made a giant pot of fresh clam chowder and we feasted on our hard work! After that we sat out on the deck and watched the stars and everyone was exhausted after a full day of fun. I couldn't have asked for a better weekend! I feel so blessed to be at this point in my life and have the friends that I do in my life.

The girls had an equally perfect time with Nana and enjoyed Easter. Abby got me a birthday present - "A tiny robot that will clean the house for you". She's an angel!

I've been spending lots of quality time after missing them for a couple days. We went to the park yesterday & since no blog is complete without pictures of tiny humans, here you go...