Gracie is 5!

Gracie turned 5 this year and it was a big deal. We went to Disney to celebrate. We had a family party for her on Easter, then went down to the parks a couple of days later. We did two days at Magic Kingdom, which is the girls favorite, and one day at the hotel pools. We were very lucky, we got to ride on all the rides we wanted, we meet all the princesses including Anna and Elsa. We had breakfast at Chef Mickeys and lunch at Cinderella's Castle. We even met with a friend from RI, Uncle John's granddaughter Jackie, and the girls had great fun treasure hunting with her. It was a great trip!

Gracie's FROZEN cake.
I made it, I think considering I didn't have a lot of time to do it, it came out well.

Her birthday morning at Chef Mickey's!
(I think she was a little overwhelmed here, or maybe still asleep)

She is into it now!

Turning 5 at the Happiest Place on Earth, what could be better!

Nice family photo without the birthday girl. She is pictured out already.

Meeting Anna and Elsa from FROZEN. So special for these girls.
We were lucky to have a fast pass, the wait was 4 hours. 

Maddie basically screamed "LET IT GO" at Elsa the whole time.
Maddie was beside herself.

Dumbo! We rode that a bunch of times.

Spring Break

The girls had a good spring break. The SC Aquarium had mermaids come to visit, so we went (along with everyone in a 100 mile radius) to see the mermaids. They were fun, but not quite as good as the mermaids in Denver (who knew you could find mermaids in the middle of the country?)

Our friend Cory was down renting a beach house at Wild Dunes, so we had her over for dinner one night and, surprisingly, her kids love FROZEN too! Other than movies, they had a great time playing together.

Not much happened other than that because we were getting ready for two big trips! Joe took a day off and did some stuff with the girls.

Celebrating mermaids and pirates!

Gracie, Leighton, Bancker, Anna, and Maddie frozen watching FROZEN!

Egg Drop

Gracie and Maddie getting ready for the egg drop contest. Gracie has protected herself, she just doesn't realize she needs a helmet instead.

Anna's completely intact egg.

Anna and her class celebrating the surviving eggs!

Anna had an egg drop contest at school. She did great! Her egg didn't break. Impressively, there were a lot of kids whose eggs didn't break. 

The requirements for the egg drop was that anything the students used had to be biodegradable. The item we used for the egg drop: a grapefruit!

The first weekend in April our friend Johnny, Anakah, and their kids, Fin and Lainey, came to visit and run with us in the Cooper River Bridge Run. We had a great time.

Then Joe, David Dabney, and their friend Jeff Gentzen, got to sail on Thom Bowen's Melges 20 for Charleston Race week. They had a great, great time and did well considering, this was the first time on the boat together only having a couple of practice sessions. David drove, Jeff and Joe were is crew. While they didn't place as high as they liked, they definitely showed potential and the other competitors definitely knew they were out there which is awesome considering it is a very, very stacked fleet with a lot of experienced professionals, a lot of money to throw at the class, and a lot of pro sailors.

Also, we got to see a lot of our friends from college and our friends from Rhode Island, which is always so great and so much fun. We really enjoy hanging out with everyone. And David Materne even graced us with his presence for an extra day and that was a lot of fun too!

Joe, Dave, and Jeff have the boat with the black spinnaker and are in 2nd place rounding the leeward mark

Bald Head Island

Aunt Jenny being brave at bath time!

southern girls make sand angels!

Maddie, Anna, and Doris (someday Doris will be part of the antics)

two Pitcavage cuties!

The last weekend in March we went to Bald Head Island because my brother-in-law Charles' parents have a house up there and they are kind enough to rent another house to invite extended family up to visit. It is a great island that is not too built up and has a lot of natural area. Plus, it has a great maritime forrest which is fun to see. Charles' stepdad, Victor, gave us a great tour of the island. It is fun to get to, only by ferry and only golf carts are allowed on the island, which the girls loved!

I forgot one!

Joe and I ran in the Catch the Leprechaun 5K, which is a fundraiser for Pattison's Academy, and we both PR'd. I am really not that fast, but Joe did it in 20:22. He is so fast! I think he smoked the leprechaun (they do have really short legs, unfortunate disadvantage and they get really distracted looking for rainbows).

March Highlights so far...

We went to the Charleston Food and Wine festival. Great, great event that gets put on each year in the spring. They have lunches, wine events, demonstrations, a culinary village, dinners, breakfasts, and much more.

This year we went to The Rarebit for brunch. Of course I turned my nose up at the menu first, (there was cow tongue on it!), and of course, as usual it was an amazing meal. They pared it with some cocktail that they use their own freshly squeezed juice and their homemade sodawater. So good.

Then we went to Pinot Envy, Uncorked! with some friends. It is a wine tasting for, you guessed it Pinot Noir, and it was at the William Aiken House  downtown. It was very good, there was a cute wine guy from Chile that had good wine and a great accent, I loved listening to him talk. We went to dinner afterward which also was very good and lots of fun. Needless to say I haven't touched red wine since.

That weekend Anna went to a vocal camp with one of her friends at Charleston School of the Arts, where they learned the songs from the move Frozen and did a performance at the end. She had a ton of fun.

We went to Miami to sail for a few days in the Lightning fleet's southern circuit. It was windy! I think for all three days we sailed it pretty much was a steady wind of 18-20 mph. We learned a lot and got some great heavy air practice in, and for once we were really fast downwind. The chute went "pop" and we took off! We did a couple of breakdowns, as Captain Ron from the movie Captain Ron says, "if anything is going to happen it, it's going to happen out there." We busted a jib track, literally pulled the everything including the washes through the deck, and we broke our boom vang in the last race. Oh, well, at least we know what was on the way out and it will be fixed for the summer regattas.

My mom took Anna for her peace project to a farm that grows food for organizations such as Lowcountry Food Bank, Crisis Ministries, etc. I think they had a pretty good time.

That's it so far! But we are up for a pretty busy spring!