I have returned

from vacation.

The deets?

18 people, which translates to cousins GALORE for the kiddos to romp with and only ONE night of cooking on my part. Well to be honest, I also assisted on the prep chef detail on several other nights because I wield a wicked fast knife.

And because my idea of fun is to hang with my BIL and SIL on their respective nights and drink wine and help with the creative process.

We all stay in one HUGE house on Hilton Head, my inlaws. It sounds impressive, but the reality is we only get to use it one week out of the year. The rest of the time it's rented out to pay the mortgage.

Equal parts sun, biking, beach and Bloody Mary's.

I am positively golden in color and glowing with plenty of sleep.

I slept til 8 AM every day! For a 6AM call girl that is my idea of heaven.

My kids also ate individual boxes of cereal every morning. So I didn't have to get up and feed them. The kind that comes in a pack of twenty and maybe only 1/3 are marginally good for you.

But hey....they only do it once a year. And the lack of circles under my eyes is a good trade off for the sugar ingested in that short time span....in my opinion.

And to cap it off, the last night? Me and my SIL's abandoned our kiddos to the tender mercies of their male parental units so we could take a LONG stroll on the beach.

and when it was completely dark?

We took off ALL our clothes and ran hand and hand into the warm salty water and flung our (temporarily immature)
naked not nekkid selves into the surf, giggling like the slightly tipsy nutcases that we were/are.

Note to those who MIGHT be worried about our bravado. We had cell phones and flashlights, we knew our beach path marker number and we marked the entrance by dragging a big ole discarded lounge chair as if to say "hey you nutcases...here is your crumb to the path home"

Also to be noted. The reason for all the responsible precautions is because I and a SIL not to be named, earlier in the week, had taken off for an after dinner stroll down the beach, without ANY of the above mentioned items. One hour and many arguments about the inconsistencies and loose ends of HP7 later, we found ourselves in the dark and unable to find our path home. Fortunately, "50A" was sticking in my mind. We turned off and I recognized the home of the parents of one of my hometown girlies and I knew we only had to double back 4 markers.

Our "responsible bravado" aside, I highly recommend this type of vacay for mommy types who have too many responsibilities and not enough time to decompress.

Naked on the beach.

It's not just a froufrou drink ya know?