it's been so long since I last saw you, beach.

When my Ma and siblings came down to visit, one of their requests was to visit the beach.

It takes a little longer than an hour to get there but it depends with all this awful Houston traffic.

When the husband and I lived in Florida, we were about one hour away from Cocoa Beach. We miss it.

I had heard horror stories of Galveston. But what I saw when we arrived, was beautiful-ness.

The sand, clean. The weather, perfect. The sun, shining. The water, cold but tolerable. It was game on!

We made a little trek and onto the beach we plopped.

Our place was set up, then we knocked off our flip-flops and...

...into the water we went!!!

I would like to introduce you to my little fish. His name is Jonah. We call him JoJo.

He wears whale swim shorts. He loves the water.

...and sand.

I started off with a sand castle of course, I am not a fan of the salty water or sand, but I shrugged it off and decided to get dirty and sticky with salty humidity. Once every 5 years is not that terrible =D

This was the first time to visit a beach for my boys. They have experienced 'fake' waves at Great Wolf Lodge and sand in playgrounds, but never the two together. I was extremely curious to what their reaction would be, and to my delight and theirs, they loved it!
Andrew asked me a couple of times to clean his feet because they were 'dirty' but I quickly told him at the beach, everything gets dirty so you just have to put up with it, son.

And Moomie sunbathed and played in the sand. She loved it as much as the boys did.

The boys wanted so badly to stomp on my castle. I told them they would get to, at the end of the day. Once or twice, I caught them out of the corner of my eye, roundin' about the castle, knocking off a little sand here and there. The urge to destroy it was hilarious!

My beautiful beach baby sister, gosh I love her.

and her beautiful pink toes.

At lunch time, we had Lunchables, cheetos, chicken pitas, and watermelon! Yum!

And soon we got air raided with poop from the locals. I was the only one hit--twice.

And James, this hunk of a redhead, had such a blast. He was Fish #1. Spending most of his time in the ocean while we others played on the shore. He almost got tailed by a jumping fish and kept creeping up on these crabs! And since he started baseball this year, we had a fun game of catch. He's got quite an arm!