Summer Vacation – Block Island 2014!

Block Island is one of our favorite places to spend a week every summer. It’s relatively close (90 minutes to ferry, then 55 minutes across if you’re on the slow boat with a car), unpretentious and beautiful. The beaches have nice soft sand and the ocean is warm and clear. Most people know we got married there 5 years ago and overall it just has a special place in our hearts, especially now that we have children to take with us. So we went last week, stayed in an incredible house, and enjoyed the most perfect weather anyone could have asked for. We had all kinds of family with us but by far the best part was watching Ashton have the time of his life. He swam, boogey-boarded, hunted for frogs, fished for crabs, ate hamburgers and ice cream, built sandcastles, had a mini early birthday and got a shark tattoo. It’s permanent. Just kidding.

Here are some of my favorites from his many BI adventures this year.

Haha I love this one:

He and Grandpa were totally worn out from a long day at the beach. They were watching cartoons together 🙂

This was Alex’s first year on BI. Well actually, when we went last year, I was about 6 weeks pregnant with him so technically, his second year. You just can’t see him in the picture on the left.

This was standing in almost the exact same spot in the exact same bar restaurant. Let me tell you, nothing puts a damper on a beach vacation like no margaritas, so this year was significantly better in that regard.

Anyway, Alex had a great time too. Although you can’t tell by some of these pictures. Babies are hard to photograph, their faces always look so different from shot to shot. Like these first two:

Maybe I’ll do a post called “Is it Alex or is it not?” and mix in his picture with other babies and see how well you do. Ehhh, that would be boring. Not as boring as my mailbox post but still boring.

Where was I. Oh, Alex’s BI pictures.

After all those pictures of Ashton and Alex, we attempted some good Nill family photos…

 And actually took a lot of selfies, whether with Jason’s arm or the camera’s self timer 😉

First night:

 Last night:

With many, many more in between. You think I posted a lot here? You should see my iPhoto album 😉 I have three problems with my picture-taking that result in these photo-heavy posts.

1) A kid that moves at the speed of light, making 9 out of every 10 shots blurry.

2) No time to actually learn how to use my camera. And let’s be honest, no interest either. It is perpetually on the “Auto” setting, so I click and hope it knows what it’s doing. Because I sure don’t. 

3) FOMO (“fear of missing out”, for those not up in the acronym world). On not properly documenting so I can post it here, of missing an important milestone, of Ashton’s perfect smile or one of Alex’s firsts.

So for these reasons I take a gazillion photos and hope that a fraction of them come out well. Just in case. And I tell myself, I can always delete some, which I do, but thousands still remain. Oh well. 

The moral is, I hope you can tell we had a wonderful summer vacation. I think I took enough pictures to prove it 😉