The Outer Banks

In mid-April my friend Jason called me and asked if we'd like to join his family at a beach house down in OBX the week before Memorial Day. We jumped at the opportunity to take a much needed family vacation. The first few days were tough as TnT refused to sleep through the night in their new environment. Thankfully though, the rental house was spacious enough that no one else's sleep was disturbed...much. For better or for worse it rained steadily for the first two days which allowed Mayu and I to basically conduct shift work, alternating between sleep, feeding TnT and watching them. Luckily they finally hit their battle rhythm as the weather broke mid-week. We spent our days going on adventure walks, swimming in the pool and building sand castles at the beach. Aside from a few battles over toy planes, Reid, Taku and Taizo got along really well despite all the age differences. We were hoping Reid's eating habits would rub off on TnT because he could sit at the table for an hour eating peacefully, but no such luck. I would sell my left foot on the black market to get my boys to sit down at dinner like that. TnT loved Lila too, the Dalley's 9 month old baby girl.

On a personal note, I snuck in a few games of tennis with Jason which was nice because neither of us had played seriously in a few years (10-15). The nights generally entailed big dinners, drinks, dips in the hot tub, movies in the basement movie theater and "to the death" games of Wii bowling. It was hard to leave but we are looking forward to hanging out with the Dalleys when we move up to NoVa in the spring.

OBX '09 Slideshow