Beach Rules

This weekend we took Baby to the beach for the first time. We'd been working hard, logging lots of "Be Quiet! Hold Still!" hours for our poor squirrely boys so we all needed a little beach time. Wow did it feel great to just meander around with our toes in the water! We all needed the break. Welcome to a new season of beach weather!

At some houses a trip to the beach is a big exhausting excursion and sometimes it feels that way to us just because life is busy but, I do everything I can to make them relieving, simple times, even for Mommy and Daddy.

Here's how it works:

• Shoes stay in the car....wear nothing but your swimsuit and/ if you need it a t-shirt
• Shells, and sticks and rocks are the best toys...if I'm feeling really extravagant we bring shovels and pails. I don't feel extravagant very often.

• Build sand castles....out of sand...and rocks and seaweed and shells....that's it.
• Get really wet and sandy, its tradition!
• If you feel artsy, make sand sculpture...my favorite thing to make is pirates with seaweed hair and beards and dark shells for eye-patches

• Go for a long, slow wander down shore (or two...sometimes we can't resist)
• Collect things....my rule is that everybody carries their own loot but, pretty much anything not alive is game for pocketing.

• Look for cool living things to admire (at our beaches we have horseshoe crabs mating right now, lots of seaweed washing up and cormorants and other birds diving for fish as a few examples)
• Eat before romping on the shore because all the crumbs and sticky wash off in the water and sand
• Write your name in the wet-sand with a sea gull feather and watch the waves wash it away
• Skip rocks