Sat 2 Jul 2005
The kids took to digging in the sand. There were a couple of castles under construction and some others were digging what looked like an olympic sized pool (if these things are built to scale). I got involved first as the steam shovel then as the water carrier. There’s something therapeutic about jobs like these. It’s a great time to take an hour or two to connect with your kids in a way that’s not always possible in the usual hectic pace of life.
At the Sea-side
by Robert Louis Stevenson
When I was down beside the sea
A wooden spade they gave to me
To dig the sandy shore.My holes were empty like a cup.
In every hole the sea came up,
Till it could come no more.
This poem from one of our bedtime books came to mind more than once. They were too far from the water for their pool to fill up or even to hold the water we dumped in. The kids did some smoothing and finishing instead. In their imaginations it later became a bathtub. For the littlest one it was a quarry to drive toys around in. The nice thing about playing with sand on a beach is that there’s always enough to go around. If shovels are in short supply, there are plenty of stores nearby with that sort of stuff for reasonable prices.
Be sure to have at least one relaxing beach day in your plan.
You’ll be glad you did. Even though there are plenty of places to go nearby, we chose to keep this one to ourselves. Outside of parking, I can’t think of any thing else we spent money on at the beach that day. Since our beach day was at the start of our vacation, all of our supplies and energy were still high. We had fresh food to pack for lunch, the kids were seeing and doing something new, and we had all the essentials like sunscreen, towels and hats. Planning a day like this after a few days of vacation might be tougher since kids are more accustomed to having a new excitement every day and scenary alone might not cut it.