7 Kids, the Tooth Fairy and the Longest Drive Home

We took a little mini-vacation this past week down to my mom's condo at Myrtle Beach. Mom took Emma down last Sunday, the other kids and I left on Tuesday and Paul finally joined us on Thursday. Our good friends Frances & Steven and their 3 girls also came down on Wednesday. So, in case you weren't counting, that makes 4 adults and 7 (yes, 7) kids ages 6 and under at my mom's 3 bedroom condo. Can you say chaos? Actually, it sounds worse than it was. The kids did pretty well with the exception of a few screaming matches, an elbow to the mouth, a kick in the mouth resulting in a lost tooth (more on that in a minute), a busted lip and a scraped knee. The "vacation" was fun though I wouldn't go so far as to call it relaxing. It's a lot of work to get 7 kids to the beach each day and home and clean! We did some swimming, played in the ocean a lot, went to Ripley's Aquarium, took all the kids to a couple restaurants and went to the new Freestyle Music Park on July 4th along with 11 million other people.

One of the more exciting moments of the week for Emma was when she lost her first tooth. The dentist had told us it was wiggly a couple weeks ago (though I couldn't really tell). Apparently Julia and Emma were playing around and Julia kicked Emma in the mouth. That was all the tooth needed to really get wiggly. Emma was so excited the tooth was so wiggly that she totally forgot about Julia kicking her. We go to the beach that afternoon and before Emma even got into the water her tooth fell out. Amazingly there was not much drama surrounding that. And, if you know Emma it really was amazing! She was just so excited to finally lose a tooth! We put the tooth in a bag and she insisted we had to take it home so she could use her tooth fairy pillow to put the tooth in. Well, yesterday Emma was showing off the tooth to all the kids and of course it turned up missing. Drama ensued and she was so, so upset. She finally decided that the South Carolina tooth fairy took and gave it the North Carolina tooth fairy and there would be money waiting under her pillow when we got home. Seriously. So we get home and Paul promptly runs upstairs and puts $5 (the only cash we had on hand) under her pillow. She found it about 10 minutes after we got home and I can't tell you how excited she was. So. Darn. Cute!

I hope you had a great 4th of July! Apparently almost everyone was at the beach as evidenced by the traffic on I-40 tonight. It seriously took us 5.5 hours to get home (we stopped a bunch but still..insane). And now vacation is over and school starts in 2 days. Yahoo!