The Beach

Seth and I went to Gulf Shores with my parents and my aunt and her family a couple weekends ago. It was sooo nice to be able to just relax and be lazy! About a year ago, I booked us a 3 bedroom condo at Phoenix West in Orange Beach. Thanks to booking so far in advance, I got like 30% off the normal rates, so we got a pretty good deal! This was our first time to do the condo thing...usually we go the hotel route...so we weren't totally sure how we would like it. It didn't take us two seconds when we walked into the condo to realize that we had hit the jackpot! It was amazing!! The decor was beautiful, it was extremely spacious, and it had a gorgeous view of the ocean! After this condo, I don't think we'll ever be able to go back to the hotel route.

Phoenix West from the Beach
Kitchen

Our Bedroom

The Living Room

We had a very nice weekend to be at the beach. There was some rain a couple of afternoons, but we still had plenty of good weather to enjoy the sunshine! For the most part, the beaches were very clean where we were at. Seth did find a few tarballs in the water. But the sand was white, the water wasn't oily, and there was no smell. We did see the crews out at night cleaning the beaches, but it was nothing that interrupted our fun. Here are a few more pictures from the weekend.

At Lambert's enjoying our rolls!

Luke devoured his!

Arrgghh!

The Nephews

A few weeks ago Eli told me that his "hair fell down." That translated to "he got a haircut." And not just a haircut, he got a buzz!! It actually looked good, but no more baby boy Eli. He looks like such a big boy now!! I love this picture of Eli and Gillian...such pretty smiles!!




Myles has been growing so much lately! Seth was trying to get a good picture of him the other day. How many times do you think it takes to get a 9 month old to look and smile??

Best Yet

I made a cake a couple weeks ago for Caleb's Off to College Party. I think it's my best yet! I guess I did learn a couple new things in the Hobby Lobby cake classes!

Fun in the Sun

We went to Henderson a few weeks ago to visit for the weekend. Since we missed my dad's birthday, I made him a tractor cake to make up for it! (a Ford tractor of course!) It was devoured within minutes, so I guess it tasted okay! This was the best picture I could get of dad with his cake. He is getting to be worse than Eli when it comes to cooperating for pictures...too busy cutting up! :)

So, what do we do for fun while we're visiting the folks? Well, when it's summer....what else would we do but go to the river?! It turned out to be a perfect, non-crowded day to go out on the water. Seth enjoyed getting tossed around some.

Mom and Dad even did a little skiing!

Happy Fourth!

This year to celebrate the Fourth of July, the Bowen crew headed out to the Huntsville Stars game. We chose to forego the usual family fireworks in the driveway and opted for the Stars' fireworks show. Despite the heat, all of us had a great time...except maybe for Myles. The heat got the best of the poor boy...he spent most of the game downstairs in the breeze of the walkway with whomever would carry him.

The fireworks were wonderful! I highly recommend going to a game that has a fireworks show afterwards!

I also made cupcakes for the occasion! I experimented on these with multi-colored icing. I think they turned out cute in a Captain America sort of way!

Too Hot for Yard Work...

...but we did it anyway! We don't have much time in the spring to get the big yard work done due to baseball. We have a few flower beds that desperately needed cleaning. So, a few Saturdays ago, Seth and I went and bought a truck load of mulch and got to work. We spent the entire day on two of the flower beds and they look tremendously better!!

Before:

After:

Before:


After:

Now we only have four more beds that could use the same thing! I think those will have to wait for cooler weather!

Bowen Baseball Roadtrip 2010, Day 3

Day 3: Philadelphia Phillies

It only took us about an hour and 45 minutes to get into Philly on this morning. We didn't have time to do any touring since the game was at 1PM and it would take us an estimated 2 hours to get back to Baltimore. We knew it would be a pretty rushed day with just the game because we needed to get to the Baltimore airport by 6PM to get through all the lines and make our flight at 8PM. (We believe in being early to airports. You just never know how busy it's going to be.) So, anyway...no touring, just a game for today. Which was totally fine with all the boys!

The Phillies ballpark was my favorite of all three parks we saw on this trip. It was very pretty and had some of the most delicious food!

We, as usual, got there in plenty of time to see batting practice. We were intently watching as a ball was hit toward Caleb in hopes that he would get it. When all of a sudden Seth hollers at Chad to look out.

A ball was hit right to him and since no one else was paying attention, Chad got the ball!

Like I said earlier, they had plenty of delicious food that we were not ashamed to stuff our faces with!

We had a wonderful time at the game and even got these two pictures that are definitely some of my favorites for the trip!

Now...if you think this is the end of the story, you are sadly mistaken. If you will notice in the picture above, we are oblivious to the fact that there are some VERY dark clouds rolling in. It was the 8th inning when we realized that it might start raining so we could just go ahead and leave...hoping to beat the crowds and make it to the airport even earlier. We got about halfway to our car and the wind picked up a little and a few sprinkles started coming down. Seth and Chad decided it would be best to run back to the car and beat the rain. Caleb and I called them sissies and continued walking. Just a minute later, it felt like a hurricane was coming for us! Of course, Seth and Chad were already in the car. The wind started blowing so hard that Caleb and I could barely walk, forget running! Luckily, we made it to the car right before the bottom dropped out of the sky!



This picture does not do the storm justice by any means! There were times when you could not see the car in front of you! Needless to say, traffic was at a standstill. Our only thought was oh well...it'll clear up in a minute and we'll get going. At this time, we had about 2 1/2 hours to make it to the airport by our 6PM plan. Well...it took us about 30 minutes to even be on our way to getting out of Baltimore...now our time was down to 2 hours. Which would have been okay, because remember it only took a little less than 2 hours to get to Philly. What happened next?? Traffic jam after traffic jam! I nervously watched the ETA on our Garmin as our minutes just melted away. Before we knew it our ETA went from 5:30 to 6 to 6:15...and we were still in traffic. At this rate, we knew there was NO WAY we would make our flights. I admit, I was not in the best of moods at this point, as I'm sure the boys will tell you. I just knew we were gonna be shelling out some serious moolah to get us on another plane home.

Finally, we broke free of the traffic and made it to the car rental place at about 6:45...and on to the airport by about 7PM. We thought we had a pretty good chance of making it until we saw the security lines. Booo. Luckily, they opened up a couple more lines and we were through there and to our gate with about 30 minutes to spare! Just enough time to grab some McDonalds and board the plane! Whew!

A couple hours later we were happily back in Huntsville! We love going on trips, but we also LOVE coming home!!