Finishing up the beach pics

I'm not sure when I started the habit of only blogging when Josh was out of town, but the habit is officially set.  We're all glad he's been around much more during the last few months, but that also means that the blog has taken a bit of a hit.  

I'm dying to get the last few days of our beach trip posted.  I know you're all dying know if Silas ever decided to make peace with the sand.

As you can see from this picture, Silas started actually wading in by himself by the last couple of days.  This was shocking to us, but was a good reminder that young children need repeated exposures to things before they're willing to embrace it.  I believe we have fed Silas green beans 1,349 times so I'm not sure exactly how many exposures you need, but there's got to be a lesson in there somewhere...  

Giving him something to hold helped him forget how much he loathed the sand.

Walking with daddy also helped.  I loved seeing my boys go exploring together.

 As our time at the beach ended, there were fresh recruits - new families coming in just as we were leaving.  My girls LOVED playing with some of the new faces.

They kindly shared their beach toys with Silas.

As you can see, we basically had a massive stretch of beach all to ourselves.  That's the way a beach trip should be!

As I stood alone - all the kids were otherwise occupied - I stared into the vast emptiness ahead of me and could almost feel my soul take a breath.  I live in a city, in a country, that has so much visual noise. There are high rises in every direction.  And where there are no high rises, there are nature's high rises - mountains that fill the space and cloud the horizon.  There are no empty fields here.  No place where you can go just to look at nothing.  Perhaps that's why looking at a uncluttered horizon was such a peaceful thing to me.

The waves didn't really make an appearance until our last two days.  I loved the calm water we'd enjoyed for so many days, but having the waves to splash around in was fun for everyone.

Those are my people!  *Sigh*  I love them.

The night before we left, we HAD to make a sand castle.  It had been on our list since Day 1, but kept getting crowded out by other things.  

The first step was putting the girls in charge of collecting all the shells they could find.  

Oh, how Abby loved helping out!  I still think of her as a baby, but she's really starting to grow up.  [The other day, she made a picture that I could actually identify AND she put the lids back on the markers, without being told.  Is there a more reliable indicator than that to prove her big-girl status?]

We had a huge moat, a castle that was held together by our prayers, and a King Crab that was deposited in front as a guardian of any "fair maidens" that might be inside.  It was a family effort, and it was fun.  After we came home and wrote about our beach trip, the family sandcastle was the unanimous highlight.

We were leaving the beach, but still had more fun in store.  Emma's 7th birthday was only two days away...