at the Beach!

I'll start my 'beach blogging' with the beach! Jason is not a beach person. He says that he really doesn't mind being at the beach, he just hates hauling all the gear to the beach (of course he did most of the hauling this week) and then dealing with the sand clean-up afterwards. As for me, I could go from sunrise to sunset. I love to just sit there, maybe read a book (which I couldn't do at the beach because I was trying to watch five kids at once), listen to the waves, watch the people around me (which can be very entertaining sometimes), enjoy the salty breeze (unfortunately there was no breeze this week), etc.

We've only been to the beach a couple of times with kids, so it was hard to guess who would like it and who wouldn't, but I had a pretty good idea. Here was one of the highlights of the beach, riding the golf cart to the beach (doesn't Capps look excited!). This was a perk we've never had before. It was great because we could just sweep the sand off the cart and not have it in the van.

To start off each trip to the beach, Jason, Capps and Mac were under the umbrella. Jason watching the kids/reading and Capps and Mac sitting on the edge of a towel digging in the sand. Capps doesn't usually like to get messy, so he sat there until he got bored and then would venture out to the edge of the water (but only going ankle deep) digging holes that usually didn't last long and then back to the towel for a Capri Sun or to fill an old sprite bottle with sand and dump it out and fill it up and dump it out.... Mac was bribed to sit under the umbrella with crackers and juice (mommy was trying to avoid too much sun for my pale Scottish son) as long as he would sit. Once Mac got up he would just chase the water - running after it as the waves went back towards the ocean and squealing as it came after him again. Unfortunately, I couldn't get much of it on film because the humidity was so bad I kept getting a 'condensation error' message and it wouldn't work. UGH!

Daegan, Mollee and Tavis loved it all and were always going from one thing to another. From boogie boards to digging to building a castle to searching for shells to using the goggles to see the fish to whatever they could think of next. Daegan wore a vest, which made me much more relaxed as they went out on the boogie boards. He also was very involved in finding seashells. He spent almost an hour one day just digging up sand at the waters edge and sifting through it to find shell pieces.
Tavis loved the boogie board most of all

and Mollee (unlike brother #3) loves to get messy and was usually covered in sand from head-to-toe by the time we headed back for lunch each day.

We usually tried to get out to the beach by 9:30 or 10:00 (and it was already hard to find a spot) and then went back to the house for lunch. That was long enough, plus I didn't want to try to take lunches for everyone and have to fight the sand. We took snacks and drinks and that seemed to work for us!