Boat Day with Friends

Nothing better than a boat day!!  Phil is still searching for the perfect boat at the perfect price, so until then we have to wait until someone invites us, or rent a boat ourselves.  So we were so thankful when our friends invited us out last Sunday!  Look at all these boys... our boys are almost the same exact ages and they all get along great.  It was such a fun day.

This is LB (Laura Beth) and Caleb... They own the pontoon rental place across the street from us.  I met LB last year through our homeschool group and discovered that we rent pontoons from them, AND they live really close to us AND our boys are close in age, so we have become really good friends.  I am so thankful for her friendship.  And we've started to hang out as couples lately, too, and Phil and Caleb get along well, so that's extra great!  

Our babies...

 We have a lot of fun together... Lots of laughing.  :)

It was like we special-ordered up some nature that day.  We saw so many neat things! First up was a bunch of dolphins everywhere!

That was in the bay... Then we ventured out into the gulf for a little bit.  We could not get over how beautiful the water was.

Boys heading up to the upper deck to check out the wildlife...

The dolphins were so close!

Lots of them!!

Then some people in a boat near us started yelling at us and pointing to the water and we finally figured out that they were yelling, "Manatee!!"  We couldn't believe it! How cool is that?!?

She/He went right under our boat!!  We were SO excited!  I took like 8,000 pictures.  Lol.

Then it was time for sliding... We took out the double-decker boat with two slides off of the upper deck and you can imagine how amazing that was for the boys.  The gulf was pretty cold, but that didn't stop them.

Even D didn't waste any time sliding down.  I mean, can you even believe that water???

Someone took a nice little snooze while we were riding along...

The boys were finding tons of live sand dollars on the bottom of the bay, and they found a few of these sea urchins, too.  J brought one up from the bottom and LB was showing them the little mouth in the middle of the urchin.  It was kinda creepy looking!

Phil really hates selfies.  Lol.

On our way home Caleb drove slowly in the shallows looking for stone crab holes.  When he spotted one he stopped the boat, jumped in, and dove under the water and stuck his hand in the hole to get the crab out so the boys could see.  He did it three times and everyone loved it, until he dropped the crab onto the floor of the boat once and the crab scuttled around and everyone screamed (including me!).  Lol.  It was funny.  

Emmett's hair was so crazy after all of that salt water and wind!  We had such an awesome day!  So thankful for our friends!  :)