A Week At The Seaside!

We have spent most of this Easter break either at Gerard's Mums house in Ballycastle (a beautiful Irish coastal town) or at my Mums mobile home in Waterfoot (a beautiful Irish coastal village).

We all enjoyed some much-deserved time off and some great quality time together as a family. It was the stuff that memories are made of.

Today my Mum and I took the kids to the beach for a few hours to run off some energy. The weather was great for an Irish April day. It was sunny and mild but not particularly warm.

We set off, buckets and spades in hand and began by building sandcastles, which Rachel wanted to decorate, Jake wanted to demolish and Daniel just wanted to eat. There was a lot of fighting, some crying and some gagging, but we worked it out by digging a mote around the castle and sending Rachel and Jake off with their buckets to get some water. For 20 minutes they watched the water disappear into the sand and ran to refill and pour again.

As the minutes passed, the children's clothes seemed to fall off! At first it was their socks and shoes, then they had their trousers rolled up, next the trousers were off, then the t-shirts. Before we knew it, both of them were running up and down the beach in their see-through white underwear, oblivious to the cold.

Daniel's first encounter with sand was hilarious. He freaked as soon as I took his socks and shoes off and he felt the sand beneath his toes and he tried to pull himself back onto my knee. Slowly he became more confident and began to touch the sand, then eat the sand and of course as Karen Walrond at Blogging Baby predicts he rubbed it into his eyes again and again and again!

When it was time to leave, I couldn't put Rachel and Jake's clothes back on as they were saturated, but as the dip in the ocean was rather impromptu I hadn't brought any dry outfits. So I hunted our van for some spare clothes, and my children ended up leaving the beach with Jake in a Batman dressing-gown, Rachel in a green top and purple skirt both of which were given to me by a friend and are at least two years away from fitting her. They looked like a pair of clowns.

They came home exhausted and hopefully they will sleep well tonight. I know I will!