Ball at the beach

Nicky brought up the beach Saturday. He brings it up quite a bit, even though we've only taken him twice in his life I think. The last time was last fall, so it's been a while. But Tom and I are done with our summer classes and have no homework hanging over our heads for a change, so we packed up Sunday morning and headed to Crescent Beach near St. Augustine.

We arrived around 2 or so. Nicky didn't fall asleep until about 4 miles from the beach but he woke up pretty quick once we got out of the car. We found public parking and a nice little entrance that wasn't too crowded. We slathered sunscreen on ourselves, spread out our gear and headed for the water.

Nicky had a wonderful time in the surf, and wasn't afraid at all, which actually was a little worrisome as we had to run to catch him waist deep in the water twice. If he'd fallen over he'd have been under in a second. We were right next to the lifeguard station, but still, I'd rather he have a little respect for the power of the undertow.

Most of the time we worked on digging in the sand and collecting shells. We took him out to play in the swells a bit, but the tide was out and it was only about 4 feet deep at the deepest point before the sandbar that was about 30 feet out. It was a really nice beach and Nicky had a ball wrecking Tom's carefully sculpted sand castle faster than he could build it.

Tom ended up with a sunburn on only one leg somehow. He hadn't put any sunscreen on his legs. I ended up with a raging sunburn on my shoulders, right on top of the one I got Saturday taking Nicky to the pool party, even though this time both Tom and I had put sunscreen on me. I think my blouse rubbed the sunscreen off my shoulders though. Nicky was the only one in good shape after 3 hours at the beach. I'd coated him twice and he wore a t-shirt to boot. Apparently though, for someone who really doesn't ever get any sun, me, an SPF of 30 is just not nearly good enough. Usually we use SPF 75, but it was running low and I had a huge bottle of SPF30.

My shoulders say I will not be making this mistake again though. Wearing a bra was murder today.