ACK Recap

little known fact: a really bad case of hand foot and mouth can cause nails to peel off. EW. i had a minor freak out this week when i looked at my little finn's hands and saw three nails splitting off. then i remembered about a couple of months ago he had the dreaded HFM disease and apparently this nail thing only happens with bad strains and can occur 1-10 weeks after. how did we get so lucky and how gross is that?!

all of that happily has nothing to do with today's post however. we had such a great time in nantucket this year that i thought a recap might be a good idea. a lot of people asked about the house we rented and with good reason - it was awesome! some context - last year we were out in madaket at the very far west end of the island. literally the end - we were on the ocean. it was pretty and the location right on the beach was cool. we thought that we'd kind of get there and stay put for the whole week. but we found ourselves needing and wanting to go to town a lot more often than we expected. so towards the end our trip last year we spent a good amount of time scouting houses on streets closer to town and i think i reached the end of the internet with my rental searches - like hours and hours! - until we found a handful that of places that we were excited about. we then narrowed those down to the one we ultimately stayed in this year and it was a winner!! i called the realtor (the house happened to be through a realtor instead of vrbo or one of those) the day we left and booked for the following year.

in addition to location, one major criteria in our search was a pool. a heated pool to be precise. having that immediate entertainment for the kids is just so worth it.

another thing that we decided was important to us was the house itself. it's hard to shell out a ton of money for a crappy place. for us it just feels like more of a vacation when you're staying in a beautiful home. that was another lesson learned for us from last year when we didn't focus on the house itself quite as much and ended up with shower stalls so small you couldn't turn around and just some general deferred maintenance. rental rates on nantucket are flat out outrageous especially come july and august so we try to book right on the "shoulder" in june when the rates are lower.

i shared the downstairs of the guest cottage on instagram at our house but it also had such a pretty bedroom upstairs.

i got a snap of our neighbor's backyard from a window in the guest cottage at our house!

we passed this house on our walk to the beach every day...

and then while scrolling through pinterest the other day i randomly saw this image from mark d. sikes. it's the house!! so fun to see it in full bloom!

and speaking of the beach, we really loved steps beach. the water was calm and it wasn't super windy.

a few fun pop up stores are on the island for the summer like town pool which actually has two locations, the skinny dip, and beauty counter.

 the town pool location on easy st has an upstairs candy room and a tattoo chair which my boys really loved!

i could go on and on but it's like 1am and i need to stop somewhere. :) i hope everyone has a fun 4th of july weekend! xo