Holden Beach Day Five

Oh our fifth day in Holden Beach, I managed to sleep in until 8 a.m. and proceeded to have a very exciting, fun day.  While I was eating breakfast, the boys were down at the beach digging for a crab that they saw scurrying along the sand.  The crab must have been a fast digger because an hour later, Brendan was alone and still shoveling to find him.  Po was worried that Brendan would get too far in the hole and the water would join him, so he decided to go back out to help him.  Eric, Uncle Shawn, Liam, my dad, and I all also went outside to see if we could catch a glimpse of the crab.  I wasn’t out there more than five minutes before we saw him.  Po managed to get the crab we affectionately named Sebastian on the shovel before we hurried sideways into the crashing waves.  His eyes reminded me of watermelon seeds, and I couldn’t help but think about how good crab meat is when I saw his claws.  It was the first time I’d ever seen a live crab up close like that, and I think Brendan was proud of his efforts.  Once the crab excitement dispersed, Brendan and I came inside to discuss our honeymoon plans I’ve been laboring over since we got engaged.  I had just happened to stumble upon $550 roundtrip plane tickets from Indianapolis to Anchorage while I was eating breakfast, and we decided it would be in our best interest to purchase them now so we can plan ahead of time.  SO WE OFFICIALLY HAVE OUR PLANE TICKETS FOR OUR HONEYMOON!  After we were done finalizing that, we got ready, and then Nicole and I packed a picnic lunch while my parents were swimming in the ocean.  My parents, Eric, Nicole, Brendan and I drove the short distance to the pavilion on the island around noon, and we each gave my parents a little something for their anniversary.  Nicole and Eric made them a card that they had written.  Brendan gave them a drawing he had done of our view here, and I read them a poem I wrote for them. 

Because of my Parent’s Fairytale Romance

I grew up wanting love like the storybooks,

A man as swift as he is cunning,

Someone to save

The princess with a smile.

Men came and went,

None ever measuring up

To the standards created by

My parent’s fairytale romance.

I too wanted to marry my high school sweetheart,

To have prom pictures and graduation pictures

And high school memories together,

To have a song that was only ours.

I wanted my parent’s fairytale romance.

I wanted the trust, the understanding,

The “I love you” every time we got off the phone.

I craved the hand holding and the back rubbing

And the shameless good bye kisses.

I desired the simple excitement of a home cooked meal,

Of a date night consisting of only being together,

Wherever that was.

I needed the comfort of stability and

The selflessness of real love.

I yearned for my parent’s fairytale romance.

I want my kids to be an extension of our love.

I know I want to show my kids who God is and

What life can be like and how loved they are.

I feel the need to tell my kids that they can

 be anything or anyone they want.

I promise to attend all my kids’ performances

And concerts and sporting events.

I learned from my parent’s fairytale romance.

I want my husband to take our daughters out on dates

And buy them corsages for dances.

I want to see him outside tossing a baseball with our sons

And teaching them to open doors for ladies.

I want him to be their hero.

I want our daughters to model their future someone after him.

Thank God for my parent’s fairytale romance.

I want to be the kind of mother that holds her children when they cry,

That listens as they talk about their future plans

And smiles because I know better.

I hope to be half the mother and friend my mother is for me.

I am grateful for my parent’s fairytale romance.

I strive to shine, to become someone

Who makes my parents proud.

To twirl, to learn, to take hold of all my God given ability.

I discovered the person I am

Thanks to my parent’s fairytale romance.

I dream of twenty-five plus twenty-five plus twenty-five years

Of wedded bliss.

I envision family vacations and birthday parties and game nights together.

I save and spend and collect only the important things –

Hugs and love and friends and memories

Because of my parent’s fairytale romance.

I poked and prodded and waited,

Patiently and impatiently at times,

For the right man,

Someone who would treat me

 the way my dad treats my mom.

I finally found him, and now,

We will do our best to be

Every bit as strong as my parent’s fairytale romance.

I think my mom liked it because she cried as I was reading it, and the intention was to do a toast with wine, but we forgot the corkscrew opener, so we toasted with our bottled water instead.  We then took pictures and drove to Haley’s Ice-Cream before returning to our house.  Once we got back, I worked on more honeymoon stuff while Brendan napped, and then Brendan, Po, my dad and I took a walk on the beach, drinking mimosas and looking for seashells.  We found a couple buckets full and saw the most amazing sand alligator an artist about 100 houses down created.  It was life size and only took him an hour to create.  After our walk, we ate the stir fry Nicole, Eric and Julia made for dinner, and then Po, my dad, Brendan, Julia and I went to the talk put on by the turtle watch program at the town hall.  We learned all about sea turtles.  There are five kinds of sea turtles in North Carolina – the loggerheads, the hawksbills, the leatherbacks, the green and the kemp’s ridley.  Leatherbacks lay most on Holden Beach, and they lay from North Carolina to Florida from May to September.  The current hatch rate is 90% survival, but all sea turtles found in North Carolina are threatened or endangered.  Endangered turtles are almost extinct, and threatened turtles are almost endangered.  Female turtles begin to lay eggs when they’re 25 to 30 years old, and females always go back to the beach where they were born to lay their eggs.  1 in 1,000 female turtles survive, and only 1 in 10,000 makes it back to their home beach to lay eggs.  Full grown females can measure up to 6.5 feet long and weight up to a ton.  Leatherback turtles can control their body heat, which is rare for cold blooded animals, and to them, jellyfish are like candy.  The marks the mother turtle makes in the sand are called crawls, and when a whole nest of turtles hatches at once, it’s called a boil because it looks like boiling water.  Female turtles can lay up to 160 eggs at a time and the average lays 120.  Once a baby is born, it swims for 36 straight hours until it’s in the safety of a certain kind of seaweed in the Gulf Stream.  All the information we learned made us curious, so after the talk, we drove down to the 1100 block to see a sea turtle nest up close.  Babies only hatch at night, so we didn’t see any turtles, but we could see the place in the sand where the nest was hiding.  The Holden Beach Turtle Patrol Volunteer told us that today is the due date of the nest, so if we come back around 12:30 or 1 a.m., the turtles may be making their way to the water.  We obviously are now just waiting to make our way back to the nest.  We played a game of club euchre, and the group is playing balderdash right now to kill time.  I really, really hope we see baby turtles being born tonight.  It would be the perfect ending to an awesome day or a great start to another amazing day on the ocean.