It has been awhile.  No excuses.

Things are moving along in the Abrams' household.  Jake started basketball; Maggie is still swimming for the Stingrays, Scott is keeping busy with work and I've been attending more school board meetings than I thought possible.

Scott had a chance to sign up for a Continuing Medical Education (CME) course in the Bahamas, so we jumped on the chance.  His sister has lived there with her family for 20 years, so we try to get there when we can to see the cousins (and enjoy the ocean, of course).  It had been five years since our last trip, so we were very excited to be back.

We did very little sightseeing, but we did walk down to the Cloisters from our hotel.  It's ruins from a 16th century monastery from France.  It was dismantled in the 1960's and brought to the Bahamas and reconstructed.  Very random, I know.  It sits on some prime ocean-front property and seems a little out of place - it's nestled between some private residences.  But we had fun poking around and getting some pictures.

We also came across some lost children and took them with us.  I'm sure their parents won't mind.

We had great weather.  The first few days were a little windy, which makes the beach interesting, but there are tons of pools where we stayed, so no worries.

Thought we'd take some shots for our Christmas card.  This is about the way it went all day.

We told the lost children that if they didn't settle down, they'd have to live there just with each other forever.  That seemed to do the trick.

We all took a scuba diving class in the pool at our hotel.  It certifies you for 7 days to do ocean dives up to 20 feet.  Unfortunately, I flunked the pool test (not kidding) and these three went without me.

I sat on the boat.  In the rain.  Singing an old Veggie-Tales song.  (Scuba, scuba, scooby-dooby duba; here we go scuba, c'mon!)

They had a blast.

And found some interesting wildlife.  (It got put back in the ocean after pictures.)  That's a hermit crab (huge, I know!!)  Scott also brought a shell up and I was holding it when a baby octopus fell out of it and slimed my camera up.  Gross, gross, gross.

It was a great vacation.

We got back to Minneapolis and drove right into a monster snowstorm.  That was a Saturday night.  It was so bad, we didn't have school the following Monday.   We are thankful to be home safely!  Now on to Christmas...