Winter Beach Trip

As has become our post-Christmas tradition, the Molloy and Wolfe families spent part of the week after Christmas hanging out together in Ocean City, Maryland. This year the group was a little smaller - as Aaron, Kate and Eamon had an amazing adventure at Disney World scheduled during this time - and while we certainly missed the young Wolfes, we had a lovely time spending some quality time with Oma and Opa for a few days.

Last year our family trip happened to coincide with a huge blizzard, tons of snow and freezing temperatures, which prevented us from leaving our hotel to take advantage of the local activities. This year the weather was beautiful - in the upper 40's and low 50's most of the time - and we got to experience tons of fun things in the area.


Ocean City has a winter festival of lights that is absolutely amazing and was a huge hit with the kids (and the adults!), as was indoor mini golf, and of course the indoor pool in the hotel.


The other awesome thing about our hotel is the ice skating rink in the lobby. For the past two years, this has been a big highlight for Elise who fell in love with ice skating here. This year, Lucas was old enough to have his first ice skating adventure.

I wasn't sure he would even be interested in doing it, but not only was he eager to try it, he was actually really good! Lucas had zero fear of the ice (in fact, he pretty much just skated out there and then kept telling Marty to go away and leave him alone) and pushed the trainer around like he's been skating his whole life. After about 10 minutes on the ice he was pushing the trainer away and then skating over to it by himself! Unfortunately his attention span is small so while he did really enjoy skating, he really only enjoyed it for about 15-20 minutes and then was ready to move on to the next activity.

Elise, who has only ice skated a handful of times in her life but has done so during this trip the past two years, was frustrated that she was not Debbie Fleming the second she skated onto the ice. She is very coordinated and she was good at it (and she is very used to being good at things which require coordination), but she didn't like that there were some kids on the ice who were doing better than she was. She did end up having a good time once she relaxed a little and stopped pressuring herself to be the best skater in the world. She did, however, ask for ice skating lessons so that she can eventually become the best skater in the world.

The kids took several long walks on the beach with Oma and Opa, collecting seashells and writing their names in the sand big enough for us to see it from the balcony of our hotel room. Another fun surprise that we could see from the balcony of our room was a bunch of whales in the ocean! There were a surprising number of whales swimming around not too far off the coast throughout the week and tracking them as they popped up out of the water kept us endlessly entertained.

We had a relaxing and fun trip - it was a great way to decompress after the craziness of the holidays. Thanks Oma and Opa!