10th Family Anniversary

For our 10th Family Anniversary this year we went to Grand Caymen for a week. We stayed at the Marriott Beach Resort. Our actual anniversary date was the only day we went on an excursion and left the resort. Before leaving the hotel we tried to take a family picture at the beach. This was the best one. We decided our big excursion would be to go to Sting Ray City and go snorkeling for the day.
On our ride to Captain Marvin's House.
Iguana
We waited for about 20 minutes and thought we were going to be the only people on the boat. Then all the cruise people showed up.
It wasn't packed full, but after being with the cruise people for the day we realized that we will probably never enjoy a cruise. I could not imagine being stuck on a boat with noisy, rude people who want to rush through everything 24/7.
We are totally addicted to the bright blue Caribbean Ocean! I'm addicted to these handsome boys too!
First stop was Sting Ray City. I was amazed at how large these guys are.
Everyone but Darin LOVED the Sting Rays! He barely stuck a finger out to touch them, and was definately not interested in holding out a squid to feed them.
Nathan was a natural and was the first one to volunteer to kiss the Sting Ray for 7 years of good luck.

Daddy even did it. Which surprised me. Ken isn't usually into lovin' on wild creatures (unless you count me:-). Ginger was pretty fascinated with them too.
Rose absolutely LOVED the Sting Rays. She loves the ocean, and really, really loved swimming with the Sting Rays.
I had to take a turn too! Surprisingly, they felt like the soft underbelly of a dog. Soft, supple, and leathery.
It was a very memorable trip!
I just love this picture of Darin and Rose playing Paper, Rock, Scissors. They were so cute on our family anniversary.
The thing that I really love about our family anniversary is that Ken totally laid down the law, that anything we did, had to be done together. It's so nice to just be with each other instead of the boys doing one activity and th girls doing another. Or Ken and I playing a game with just the boys, or whatever. We really did everything together. This really made Darin and Rose a whole lot closer after this trip.
We also went snorkeling in the middle of the ocean. It was AMAZING! Unfortunately none of our waterproof cameras turned out any of the pictures.

So you know when I said everything we did, we did together. I totally meant it! We totally took the girls out in the open ocean snorkeling too. Maybe I'm a little crazy, but they had life vests on, so Ken took Ginger and I had Rose. We threw them on our back and dived right in. It was AWESOME! The girls loved it too and since the water is so clear they were able to see all the colorful fish and coral. I never even thought, This could be dangerous, until a guy on the tour totally freaked out and almost drowned himself.

Thankfully we were all safe. And we had an amazing time together. Nathan was snorkeling with me most of the time. He was so sweet and would hold my hand so I would stay by him. It was a really great excursion.
After we got back to the hotel we swam a little more and then got cleaned up for dinner.
We tried to take some more pictures on the beach.
This is about as good as it gets!

Then there was some after dinner dancing!




And since we wanted to party every last second of our Family Anniversary, we took a midnight swim in the pool!
It was a great trip! We had so much fun together, made great memories, and celebrated our 10th Anniversary of being a Family Forever!