We Got Our Vacation On: Beach Days

We got our vacation on...

...and it was truly a much needed, relaxing, prayer-filled, great trip. We headed off to Italy to spend a few nights "Euro-campin'," which is basically a nice, but cheaper, way to camp on the Italian beaches.  First, however, we broke down the travel time into two parts.  We spent the night in Austria on the way down and continued our journey the next day.

The drive was gorgeous to say the least!

But we also spent a whole lot of time in tunnels since we were going through the Austrian and Italian Alps...

Ah, the beach, oh how I had missed it.

E got to spend some quality time with sand and sand toys... 

And on the topic of sand, let me just note a few things I learned from having a baby at the beach:

1)  Getting sand out of a baby bum is far from easy...challenging barely describes it (thank goodness for spray shower heads :)

2)  Another, possibly even more challenging feat is lathering the sunscreen on a moving target, aka baby.  Tough, I tell ya.

3)  Eating sand is totally normal.  This girl took clumps and chunked that in her mouth (could be because she loves to eat, but I think it's probably just the baby way on the sandy shores!)

Whew, but it was much fun and she sported that lil pink polka dotted suit like such a cutie :)

Below, one of my new favorite photos of my two favorite people...

Then Daddy Boy decided to build a sandcastle for E.  As you can tell she was less than thrilled with it (he'll have to work on his skills, it seems)

But she cheered up after awhile.

We all thoroughly enjoyed the beach and Elise was a total champ.  We were pretty impressed.  She even cried one time when we took her away from the ocean (that's my girl!!!)

Squished in between our beach days was a day trip to Venice.  Never fear, we'll be back with pics of that in no time ;)