Kyle, Meera, Owen – Harbor Island, Summer 2013
Over the past five weeks I’ve taken hundreds of photos that never showed up on the blog. I don’t want to just toss them all, or have them get lost in the nether-land of the computer hard drive — so many of them are family-photo-album-worthy, and each one represents a memory I want to try to keep. At the same time, I am feeling self-conscious about the blogosphere seeing all these pictures and hearing me go on and on and on about how wonderful our summer has been. The problem is that we don’t have any other way that we’re documenting our lives or saving our pictures — this blog is it (unlike many bloggers who blog primarily for their audience, I am blogging primarily for me and my most inner circle). So, please, those of you bored to tears from all my South Carolina posts, and/or those of you who are sick and tired of seeing photo after photo of all this… just disregard this little series of posts. These are for our family-memory-keeping. If you’re interested, go ahead and take a look. Otherwise, go ahead and skip it. Many of these were taken with my iPhone, and I’m posting them mainly unedited.
K, O, and M — this one’s for you! We have had a GREAT summer so far. The best summer of my life (and I am pretty sure the best summer of your lives too). Some memories to keep:
sunrise from the back deck of the beach house
Harbor Island Beach
Kyle in front of the Gantt Cottage, at the Penn Center (this is where Martin Luther King, Jr. would stay when he’d come to the Penn Center with other activists to plan their strategies for the Civil Rights Movement)
iced coffee on the beach
the back seat of the car, on the 5-minute-drive to Hunting Island beach
Meera at the pool — she made new friends almost daily
Kyle and Owen at the pool — they made new friends almost daily too
Owen and Meera on the dock at Port Royal (although the bambinos make friends everywhere they go, they are still each other’s first and foremost; and this summer was a summer of bonding for this fierce threesome)
Owen and one of his many favorite Lowcountry treats: stone crab claws
I sometimes got up early and went walking/jogging on the beach by myself. Those were amazing mornings for me. Spectacular beauty. Photos above, and several below, were taken with my iPhone during those times.
late nights watching Red Sox games
K & O at the pool
Meera’s artwork was hanging everywhere, all over the beach house
fruit on the beach
lazy mornings, playing
beauty everywhere
5 beach chairs and an umbrella
M, K, O — Harbor Island Beach
grocery shopping
Owen
ice cream at the pool shop
we lived by these tide charts
‘chillaxin’
Owen bike riding to the beach house, down Ocean Marsh Road
a brief rain at lunch = picnic in the back of the car
Kyle and Meera, Harbor Island Beach
cool as a cucumber.
the boys play chess
Meera tries the Beaufort clams — raw on the half shell
K & O spent hours and hours and hours boogie boarding
Meera and Heather spent hours and hours and hours making “dribble castles”
OMG. I LOVE THIS GIRL.
Papi reads a book
Mommy reads a book
Spanish Moss
never a dull moment.
a (rare) quiet moment
Hunting Island State Park & our 2013 car pass tag
playing in the tidal pools at Hunting Island
matching necklaces (I call them “starfish”; Meera calls them the correct name, “sea stars”)
football in the surf on a Sunday afternoon, Hunting Island
history everywhere
pure Owen
pure Meera
pure Kyle
wide open spaces
wide open spaces II
our go-to guide for the past 5 weeks
South Carolina peaches
Owen and Kyle at the top of the tower, Port Royal waterfront
Meera, pool float
in front of the lighthouse, Hunting Island
shrimp boat off of Harbor Island
riding in the golf cart
Meera & Braydon in Charleston
shrimp scampi — I was going to do a Food Friday blog post about this — how amazing the shrimp here is, and how incredible it is to buy it right off the boat, etc. I was also going to link to the best shrimp scampi recipe ever (I made this weekly while we were here: Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa Linguine with Shrimp Scampi) — click here!
I was also going to try to write a post about my observations of the reactions of people in the South (as compared to the North) to seeing/interacting with our black-white-adoptive family. But I never got to that. Above picture is precious to me: Kyle and Owen just very comfortably hanging out with an older black gentleman on the waterfront in Charleston. He let them feed the birds with him. And he talked with them, in depth, about God. Our boys are embraced by the black community (almost always), and it is truly amazing to watch and witness as an outsider-yet-their-mother.
I was also going to write a post about Owen’s newfound obsession (discovered on this trip) with pralines. His new favorite food.
I was also going to write a post about The Shrimp Shack. [I guess I never got around to a lot of the posts I was going to write.]
I was also going to post about fiddler crabs (above left), and alligators (above right).
I did post about hermit crabs! But I forgot to include this awesome picture in that post.
my summer “desk”
reading at the pool
Hunting Island
the bambinos in the hammock on the back deck of the beach house
* * *
It has been an amazing and inspirational five weeks. Tomorrow we leave and head north.
I’ll end here, with my favorite photo from the summer (Braydon took this with his iPhone one night when we went for a walk on the beach at sunset):
Saltus River Grill is one of my favorite restaurants in the world. I’m sure partly it is sentimental: it is a special spot in a very special place for us. But there are other, more objective reasons as well. The food is a fusion of Lowcountry/Sea Islands/Gullah and Haute-Cuisine American/French. This is my kind of place: a place that isn’t afraid to fuse grass-roots, hard-core, local/”ethnic” food with very high end cuisine, the most cutting-edge trends and techniques, and the highest quality ingredients. This place does not shy away from complexity. I also have a soft spot for any place that uses locally grown and seasonal ingredients. And… of course… there is the wine list. The wine list at Saltus is short and sweet. I’d prefer a short list of carefully selected bottles than a huge book of labels that lose meaning. Lastly, location location location — Saltus has a location to die for, right on the Beaufort waterfront, with a beautiful interior and even more beautiful exterior patios with gorgeous outdoor dining furniture. Oh, and the service is excellent. Basically, it is, for me, the whole package.
In the five weeks we’ve been in South Carolina I’ve done a lot of cooking. We have eaten out rarely on this trip, so we decided to splurge for one of our final nights here. Last night the five of us went to Saltus for dinner. I was hoping our kids would be able to handle themselves there, and that we’d not totally embarrass ourselves at such a high-end establishment. I was hoping it would be a lovely night.
It was lovely, dreamy, and free-of-embarassment. It was spectacular. It was, for me, a Top 10 night out with our family ever. I loved every minute of it. From meandering down the sleepy streets of Beaufort to wind our way to Saltus…
To the lovely conversations… (while we waited for our food the bambinos were able to come-and-go freely from the table and play on the playground at Waterfront Park; the playground is within eyesight of the Saltus patio– a win-win for the whole family!)…
To the family bonding… (these two, in particular, were especially lovey-lovey)…
The food…
The whole thing. It was dreamy.
After dinner we walked along the waterfront. The boys found some friends to play stickball with (of course). They could have stayed there all night — it was pitch dark when we finally pulled them away to head back to the beach house for our 2nd-to-last-night in South Carolina.
I know we should not feed the birds. And we don’t do it much. But after we ate our sandwiches on the beach today, Meera really, really, really wanted to give the seagulls the bread crust that she didn’t want to eat. I gave in and said o.k. She broke off teeny tiny pieces, one at a time, to make it last. And it was a really delightful moment for all involved.
Stone Crab Claws, Carolina Marsh Tackies, Boiled Peanuts
After a day at the beach today, and before dinner, we J-Ms had a little Sea Islands Cocktail Hour. We picked up some stone crab claws at a roadside stand on the way home from the beach (these are Owen’s favorite! dipped in melted butter! Heather too, but dipped in cocktail sauce). At the same stand we also bought boiled peanuts (a favorite of Kyle and Meera, who definitely take after Braydon — all three boiled peanut lovers). The bambinos had their favorite cocktails: ginger ale (K & O), and chocolate milk (M). And Braydon made our new favorite cocktail: The Carolina Marsh Tacky. This was a serious Lowcountry/Sea Islands Cocktail Hour!
We discovered this drink on this trip, and it has really grown on us. There is something really perfect about it on a hot summer’s eve, after having been in the sun, sand, salt, and water all day. If you’re up for trying a really unusual new summer cocktail, try this out!
Carolina Marsh Tacky
1 1/2 ounces bourbon
1/2 ounce fresh lime juice
4 ounces cold ginger beer
Lime wedge
Fill a cocktail glass with ice. Add bourbon and lime juice; top with ginger beer. Garnish with fresh lime. Serves 1. To make a pitcher: 1 1/2 parts bourbon, 1/2 part fresh lime juice, and 4 parts ginger beer.
P.S. The drink is named after the Carolina Marsh Tacky — a rare breed of horse native to South Carolina (click).
The South Carolina Sea Islands are a wealth of riches just teeming with life. These are not powdery white beaches with sun-bleached (empty) shells and crystal clear waters. We have had the privilege of spending time on beaches like that and they are exquisite and wonderful. The beaches here are exquisite and wonderful too, but in a whole other way. This is a different dimension of beach. And it is not for the faint of heart. In the five weeks we’ve been here we have rarely found an empty shell– there is something living inside just about all of them. And you can’t walk two feet without coming across something alive.
Everywhere — in every fraction of every square inch of every piece of the beach, there is life here. It is truly unbelievable. You can’t love this place unless you take a deep breath, breath in the salty air, and accept that there is stuff squirming, crawling, scurrying, living everywhere you look. The ecosystem here is healthy.
We have spent hours and hours this summer finding all sorts of things. But our three favorites are definitely hermit crabs, sand dollars, and sharks’ teeth.
There are hermit crabs everywhere on the Harbor Island beach. There are big ones and small ones and everything in between.
We’ve had so much fun finding them, playing with them, and then always leaving them behind on the beach to live their lives. Some of their shells are so beautiful, we’d love to keep them, but we have only twice in our five weeks found uninhabited shells.
And sometimes we’re surprised to find something inside that isn’t a hermit crab. One day Owen found this (below) — it is an Eastern Conch, otherwise known as a Whelk. Like I said… not for the faint of heart! (He asked me if he could pull it out and eat it. He was very disappointed when I said no.)
On both Harbor Island and Hunting Island, sand dollars are in abundance. In the five weeks that we’ve been here we have seen hundreds. But we’ve never seen a dead one. So, sadly, we have no sand dollar shells to take home. Happily, it means this place is alive and well — a place where sand dollars can flourish and thrive.
When the tide is high, Kyle and Owen love diving for sand dollars just off the shore. They find dozens and dozens of them under the water.
At low tide you can find sand dollars sitting on the wet sand, hunkering down, just waiting for the tide to come back up. During low tide Meera loves looking for sand dollars along the beach. She has become quite the expert at finding them, and has found many.
But our favorite thing to do is to look for shark teeth. On certain beaches (and really, in areas all throughout the sea islands) you can find fossilized shark teeth. Believe it or not, these are the teeth of sharks that lived thousands to millions of years ago! The beach at Hunting Island is our favorite place to look for them. When the tide is low, the bambinos love to walk along the water’s edge and search for shark teeth in the very shallow water.
You can find them scattered all over the dry beach too.
We find lots of them in all sorts of shapes and sizes. In our five weeks here we’ve been collecting them. Our shark teeth collection is now pretty large — we’ve probably found a couple hundred of them! Here are a few of the ones we’ve found:
The bambinos have found tons of other interesting things too. Lots of horseshoe crabs and jellyfish.
Kyle is fearless. He’ll pick up and hold anything. While his brother and sister squirm, he’ll hold every kind of crab he can catch.
And Owen is so quick that he can catch all sorts of little things in the water with his bare hands. He loves to catch tiny shrimp and minnows in the tidal pools at low tide.
And with nets and buckets the bambinos catch all sorts of crabs and shrimp and fish and who-knows-what-else!
This week the bambinos and I went tomato picking. Yes, tomato picking. We’ve been blueberry picking, strawberry picking, apple picking, pumpkin picking, and flower picking before. But tomato picking was a first for us.
I had seen the sign on the side of the road for the entire time we’ve been here. And I’ve been wanting to do it. So, this week we did. It is the very end of the tomato season here, so we were cutting it close, but we found a ton of tomatoes still on the vine, and had a great time doing it. The bambinos thought it was a blast!
We could have picked buckets and buckets full, but we limited ourselves to one small bucket (with only a week left at the beach house, there are only so many tomatoes we can eat!). We selected our tomatoes very carefully… there were so many to choose from!
In the past few days we’ve been eating these delicious fresh-off-the-vine, hand-picked, locally grown tomatoes. Of course, we’ve been eating them straight up. But we’ve also had tomato, mozzarella, and basil salad (sprinkled with balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper — this is one of Braydon’s favorite foods of all time). We’ve had open-faced cheddar and tomato sandwiches (on English Muffins; simply sprinkle with salt and pepper and bake at 400 for a few minutes; classic!). We’ve had BLTs (really now, who doesn’t LOVE a BLT in the summertime?!). And we’ve had the best of the best — the best ever bruschetta. If you haven’t tried The Pioneer Woman’s Bruschetta (click for recipe), then you’re really missing out. And made with our fresh tomatoes this week… it was heavenly (I don’t even have a photo; they were eaten up way too fast). Happy Friday!
Kyle has been determined to teach Meera to boogie board. Over the past couple of days they’ve been having great success… thanks to Kyle’s endless patience. He has way more patience than I do with her. He has spent hours in the water with her, carefully pulling her out, getting her set up, waiting for the perfect waves, and giving her good pushes — over and over and over. When she has a good ride (which is often lately), she is so excited… and so is Kyle.
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