Beach commentary

I would have loved to have added some commentary to last night's post but it took much longer to edit and upload those 15 photos than I anticipated and so I simply ran out of sweet time. That experience will lead to a future blog post regarding professional photography but for now, let's talk about the beach.

Rich and I both really like the beach. I find the ocean calming despite its power. The girls enjoyed our first beach visit of the season despite some drama surrounding sandy bottoms. With each passing year, they have become more independent and able to self entertain. It's still a bit of work for the adults though, especially when a four year old needs to go potty and has to be carried uphill over rocks, which will hopefully be cleaned up and moved by the town soon. We keep the travel potty set up in the van and ready to go for times like these.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get too many pictures of Anna because she was slinging mud and I feared a sand splattering on my new camera. If you look at the pictures from yesterday again, you can see the mud on her - she's in the polka dots.

Emily kept me laughing with her sunglasses and that bikini is a size 2T so the bottoms are a bit large as I suspect they were designed to fit over a swim diaper. She's one little skinny mini. And that picture of Allie patiently waiting in the van was pure perfection straight out of the camera, which shows me how great that camera is if you know how to use it

I've seen quite a few questions on photography message boards regarding using a camera on the beach. The main issue is keeping the camera clean because the last thing you want is a particle of sand in your camera. I brought a separate smaller bag along with two hand towels just for my camera. When not in use, I kept the camera in the bag covered by a towel. There was hardly any wind so no sand was blowing around.

We didn't leave Grammy and Papa's house until after 3:00 and within five minutes, Allie was preparing to take a nap. I knew that they were exhausted but a nap in the van meant that they would be awake until after 9:00 so I climbed into the back with them and started a thinking game. I asked them questions such as, "What's the difference between a horse and a zebra?" and, "What's the difference between a pig and a lamb?" They loved answering the questions and after we had gone through every animal I could think of, Rich and I began making up comparison questions for everything. We also worked on letters, spelling and numbers.

Needless to say, they stayed awake for the entire ride home and promptly fell asleep once tucked into bed that night. That's the way I prefer.