the beach

Last year, on the first day of summer vacation, we went to the beach. This year, we did the exact same thing, but only a day late - to see why, see the previous post on the first day of summer.

It was a beautiful day - 75 degrees, not a cloud in the sky, no major breeze to speak of - a perfect specimen of a day. 

We, again, went to Metro Beach. It's just east of here, is pretty clean, and has lots of stuff for the kiddos to do. They have a squirt zone, a tot lot and, of course, the beach. We went to the beach part first - we were afraid that the squirt zone water would be too cold, and it was not quite 70 degrees when we got there.

Paige LOVED the beach. A GIANT sandbox. Right up her alley. She only tried to eat it once.

All the kids picked spots, and began digging. They had a plan. They were going to dig a series of holes and connect them by little canals, and then fill them with water. Quite an undertaking.
Paige tried to help out, but she was more like Godzilla attacking the neighborhood. 

BTW - if you look real hard in the picture below, you can see some outlying land way off in the distance. Towards the center, the smallish blob is the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit -home to the much bankrupt GM. The tall building off to the left, we think, is part of Henry Ford Hospital in Grosse Pointe. When we first moved here and came to this beach, we thought that was Canada.....Canada is actually more south of here. It's CRAZY. This is Lake St. Clair, by the way.
After a while, this is what they made. A "giant" lake, that was, according to them, filled with chocolate milk. Um, yeah....GROSS. They played in this for quite a while. When they were finished, they all looked like they had just completed their mud-bath treatment at the spa. When I told the extremely muddy Emily to go and wash off in the lake, she said, "Eww - the lake is gross." 

"Um, yeah.....like you are not the LEAST bit GROSS looking the way you do."

BTW - the lake at this time of day had a bunch of seaweed like stuff floating by the shore - not really gross, just not very appealing for swimming. It was all cleared up by the time we left.

 

I kept Paige away from the mud bath action by plying her with strawberries.

After a SHOWER, we changed clothes, ate lunch, then headed on over to the tot lot - aka playground - for some more energy releasing activities.

After the playground, they all wanted to go back to the beach to see if their hole was holding up. There was much disappointment when they found out it had been filled in. They immediately started asking if they could make another hole - maybe another day......the Moms were officially out of energy.

And that was the official start to summer vacation.