Indiana Dunes State Park, Indiana (of course)

We took a break yesterday and while I shopped everyone else stayed home.

I'm pretty sure Hallie never moved unless forced by the need for food or because at some point during the day you have to relieve your bladder.

She was thrilled to hear that on Memorial Day weekend dogs are not allowed at the Dunes. Tasha was sad. She likes water, sand and the opportunity to fling, splash, make general chaos where ever my food or beverage might be. She's a pro. I was not sad to leave her behind.

When we got there, it looked like this:

Not really Shawn's cup of tea. But he is a trooper and helped set up "camp" by the water in the midst of these other thousands of people with the same idea. (Really glad we didn't bring the dogs!)

The water was a balmy 59*F today. The kids didn't care one bit!

Evan got right in, cooled off from our walk down the beach, and then set to work with his sand tools. :)

Kira dove right in and started swimming. She said it wasn't cold. (She was lying. I was standing in it up to my knees to take pictures of her) I would have changed and joined her in the water though had the storm not arrived to foil our plans. (yes really!)

Right about now is when they heard thunder and made the announcement that we had to get out of the water for at least 30 minutes. Great! We *just* got there! So I tried to make it happy and told them to come eat lunch and then by the time we were done we could go swim more.

(Have a little lunch with your sand there Evan)

Still no luck. So we had some Cheetos.

And the sky just kept getting darker...
Dang.

Then the wind picked up and it got ugly. Shawn wanted to stay. Kira lost her ever loving mind. (She is terrified (as in phobic) of thunder) We threw everything together as quickly as we could and that wasn't fast enough for Kira. She was really upset and walking ahead of us. She kept turning around telling us to hurry.
The beach looked like this:

Then it looked like this:

And then like this:

Everyone headed home. It was pouring shortly after and it rained most of the way back to Chicago and through most of Chicago.

Kind of a bummer. When we got home Hallie stole the Cheetos. She felt slighted. (That we didn't get her a good snack, not that we left her behind. Lets not kid ourselves.)

But aren't they cute anyway? (Can you see Kira already looking worried! Poor girl!)