Tuesday, May 22, 2012

the beach!

We love the beach, especially the "quiet water" side of the barrier islands on the Gulf Coast. We've nailed down our favorite beach in Pensacola Beach, right at the entrance to the Fort Pickens area of the Gulf Islands National Seashore.

We spent some time there during the day to play in the water and dig in the sand. The bay side of the beach does not have regular waves like the gulf side, so it's perfect for small kids to splash around and fill their buckets with sand and water. There are lots of tiny little fish - the big ones are no bigger than my pinky finger - that nibble at your feet and ankles if you're standing still. The girls filled buckets with sand and water to try to build sandcastles but didn't get very far. We observed that if you put a lot of water in the bucket, the sand pile won't hold together very well.

The calm water is also perfect for small animals - when we went back to the beach in the evening, we found so many hermit crabs! Literally dozens of them. At one point, AC and Sunny had about 10 lined up along the edge of the water for a race - which one would make it back into the water first? And the shells they were in were beautiful! We were also collecting shells but we didn't fight the crabs for the good ones - we left them alone. We also found a huge starfish in knee-deep water - I wasn't in the water but I could see it just fine from the edge. AC grew up fairly close to this beach (about 20 miles away) but said that this was the first time he'd ever found any hermit crabs or starfish. And boy, we found the hermit crabs in spades!

As always, the sunset is beautiful at the beach!

Magnolia's first time at the beach at 7 months

the Florida sunset

Sunny and Birdie finding shells with Dad

Some of the shells had hermit crabs living in them.

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