Beach Day X 3

Going to the beach is something that I highly associate with my childhood. Going to the beach, in my mind, equals Oceanside, "cul-ta-sac beach," and all of my mom's family: the cousins, the aunts, the uncles, the grandma (Grandpa usually stays at home, but we see him afterwards). "Going to the beach" does not just include going to the beach. Not at all. It includes maybe four or five hours of beachy-time, then piling into our respective cars, and hauling back to Grandma's house to use the outside shower, one by one, to was off all the sand (yes, there is a shower curtain, and no, I'm still not sure that the neighbors can't see it from their attic window. Not that they'd want to see anything we've got.) When we were babies/toddlers, the shower was omitted and instead we got to hang out in the blue, plastic baby pool and pull various shells, sand clumps, and dead sand crabs from our diapers. (Or sand-craps, as Stephanie, quite famously, referred to them.) Later, we'd all chill in the family room, lethargic from the sun and red-skinned from lack of sunscreen reapplication, telling Grandpa about the beach and recalling who got tumbled by the waves, who got the worst sun burn, what weird people we saw at the beach. Then we'd decided we were too tired to make dinner, and since it was around four or five anyways, none of us wanted to go home yet because traffic would be terrible, so we sit around and debate for at LEAST half and hour over where we're going to get food from. Usually, if we planned the day ahead of time, it'd be this massive, disgusting excuse of a pizza (and I mean massive, we had to tilt it to get through the front door) where one would feed at thirty-whatever of us. That or some sort of Mexican takeout.

THIS TIME, however, our beach excursion differed from the norm of my childhood. It was just me, my mom, Grandma, my Aunt Lynne and my Aunt Lisa (give or take on differing days). We went three consecutive days in a row. That's a lot of beach time. Typically, my mom/aunts don't go in the water, don't swim. They leave that up to us kids. But this week, for some weird reason, it was a reverse tide, so you could walk straight out forever and it'd only be up to your ankles. For some reason, this delighted the women of Harris decent, and they spent hours frolicking in the water, searching for sand-dollars (of which we found dozens), and talking to the other beach-goers about how fun the reverse tide was.

I must say, I am pretty beached out. Three days in a row is quite a bit. And I'm not going to lie, I was seriously waiting for my mom's cell phone to ring with one of my aunts... "So, what do you think about going to the beach again today?" And although we'd laugh at how silly we're being, and how many errands and chores we have to do, but we'd just blow them off and go again.

However, it's Saturday, all my other cousins are free from school, and it turned out that nobody wanted to haul themselves to the beach. Three days turned out to be enough. I really don't think I could have handled any more vitamin D, to tell you the truth. I want to sit in a cave for a few hours--- I got too much sun! Haha.

And that, my friends, is the story of my beach-week. The end.