Happy birthday, USA!

We celebrated America's birthday with a weekend trip to Port Aransas with my family. It was four adults, three teenagers, two dogs and a seventeen-month-old alllll staying in my mom's RV. Thanks to some very patient people who didn't seem to mind Arden's 6 a.m. wakeup calls, we all survived and had a great time doing it. It was Arden girl's very first trip to the beach! I would love to tell you she was a natural, but she actually just ran around like a crazy baby and made us all a nervous wreck. Arden is NOT the kind of girl who sits still and plays in the sand. I swear if you looked down for one millisecond, she'd be a mile down the beach just like that.

Even Emma made the trip this time!

Please take notice of the adorable red-headed stowaway in the little red wagon.

These crabs were BIG and they came right up to the edge of the pond at our campsite when we dropped cheese crackers into the water.

I love this campsite in Port Aransas! It's called Gulf Waters and it's so cute. Right behind that turquoise house at the end of the pond are the dunes and the beach.

I got the weirdest sunburn of all time on day ONE, so that was fun.

Drew, Arden and I came home Monday night. I'd taken Tuesday and Wednesday (the 3rd and the 4th) off, too, so I stayed home Tuesday and put together a master plan to turn our garage room into a backyard Air BnB.

For the Fourth we went to brunch and then spent a lot of the day in our garage dreaming about how much this kind of reno would cost and if it'd actually be doable. Basically the low down is that the previous homeowners converted the home's original attached garage into a bonus room and built a huge out building in the backyard. It has an actual two car garage and an attached workshop that we're currently just using for storage—we would only convert the workshop room side.

Back in the eighties the previous family installed a sink, a toilet and ceiling fans in the workshop, so the good news is that electricity and plumbing is already installed—it all needs to be replaced, but the foundation is there. The whole room is about 450 square feet. If we went for it, it would be a studio apartment space with a kitchenette, a living area, a small dining table, a bathroom, a queen sized bed, and a little garden sitting area in the back—which is currently just a pile of leftover bricks and weeds.

It's just a dream. We shall see. We have a contractor coming to take a peek the day after tomorrow to see what this kind of thing would cost. Probably roughly two million dollars, so stay tuned. Nobody's ready to commit just yet.