• Beach Bits,  Bug,  Family Matters,  Life Lessons

    Sand Castle Festival 2010

    protecting her eggs

    Yesterday was the Sand Castle Festival at our local beach. I’ve blogged about it for years. We even entered it in 2004 but sadly those blog posts are lost. I have them somewhere on a CD but I’ve just never gotten around to re-uploading them.

    buckets and buckets Mr. Big Belly

    Anyway, the Sand Castle Festival is near and dear to my heart. I love it and try to visit it every year. I take horrible pictures every year too because it is just about impossible to capture on camera how fun it really is. I try and try but you just can’t crop out the people and all their junk and still show the hustle and bustle of it. Plus, sand is never as photogenic as it seems in your mind’s eye. I should probably use a better camera but it’s the beach and no matter how careful you are there’s that nasty sand that gets in lenses and breaks them.

    hybrid vehicle

    posing by octi

    Now I have a new problem. My new laptop has some color-temperature issues so I’m at a complete loss on how to color-correct my photos. I’m opting for not correcting at all. If you notice a difference in my photos as of late, that is why. They all look greenish to me. But if I correct them to my eye they’ll probably look purplish to you. Hopefully I’ll get it figured out soon. Maybe they’re not so bad.

    working
    Poor Bug. I should have taken a better shot of her with both eyes open.

    As usual when we visit the Sand Castle Festival, we got inspired to make our own castle. Everyone does. This year was extra fun for me though because Bug is really getting castle-building now. We certainly practice enough all year round. She doesn’t topple things over just when they’re perfectly built anymore and she’s great at fetching water.

    water girl very helpful

    If you know anything about anything when it comes to building sand castles, you know how important water is. If fact, in a proper contest you really have to spend a good hour or more beforehand soaking everything down. That’s the only way to keep the sand solid enough to carve without it crumbling into a flat mess.

    I'm soaked

    All that water fetching means somebody has to get wet and for some reason it’s always overcast on Sand Castle Festival day, and just the tiniest bit chilly. So of course we wear long pants, or in Bug’s case, what she wore to church. (What, doesn’t everyone go running around the waves in their pink puffy skirts? Insert eye-rolling here.) No matter how careful we are, there’s always going to be a wave that comes in faster than we expected and washes all the way up to our knees. We both got soaked, naturally.

    the stroller makes an appearance

    After years and years of living by the beach, sandy wet clothes don’t even faze me anymore. What can you do? It’s just part of life. Sand in your bed, sand in you hair, sand in your carpet…if you have a sand aversion, don’t visit me.

    tah dah! we're proud of our drip castle fortress

    It is all worth it when you have good times like these though. I actually came down to the beach in a bad mood. Something Toby had said or done had set me off and no matter what I did I couldn’t get the negative thoughts out of my head. I desperately wanted to hash it out with him but arguing with him during his work day means he loses valuable time, and he is always so busy and behind schedule. I knew I had to shelve it and work it out with him later.

    I hate shelving arguments. They just fester and fester in my head and I can’t think straight. I’m definitely the type who likes to confront things head on and not bottle them up inside. Unfortunately, I’ve had to learn with time that I can’t fight fight fight. I have to calm myself and there is nothing better than making a drip castle to do that.

    Squeezing the wet sand through your hand drip by drip by drip can be very zen. Before I knew it I was festering less and focusing more on the tiny drip towers each handful would make. My kid was happy, my mind was quiet, all was well with the world again. And then people started stopping by and telling us how cool our castle was. It kind of surprised me actually since there were castles everywhere to comment on. Why bother with ours? I’m sure my adorable pink-outfitted assistant had a lot to do with it but it got me to thinking…

    we take the water route home

    We’re good at this. Maybe we should enter the contest together next year, just Bug and me.

  • Bug,  crazy stuff,  Life Lessons

    I’m becoming a pretty good liar these days.

    kisses

    As you know, Bug is a wacky kid. I told you about the sandwiches already. Now she won’t eat bananas because she had a bad dream about eating a banana that was her friend. According to Bug, all bananas have faces now. If I even think of offering her one as a snack, her bottom lip quivers. It’s getting bad.

    I’ve taken to peeling and slicing them in secret and then sneaking them into her peanut butter sandwiches. So far sliced bananas seem to be okay. Who knows though. Tomorrow she could swear off carrots or broccoli.

    This is a regular four-year-old thing, right?

    Bug also gets attached to things. Silly things like leaves, flowers, sticks and rocks, old princess band-aids and candy wrappers that are pink. She has a large collection of dried monkey puzzle branches that looks like a nest of rat tails growing on our patio.

    Bug and her rat tails monkey puzzle branches

    That’s what these things are right? I have no idea.

    Every time we go on a certain walk, where these lay scattered on the ground, she must carry at least one home. That’s the same walk where she must walk on the clover with bare feet or all hell will break lose. But that’s another story along the lines of: if you do anything twice with Bug it becomes a routine and therefore must never be veered from until death. I hear this is also normal with four-year-olds.

    But sometimes I just have to be the mom and say, no. I can only put up with bits of dried leaves and sticks in her car seat and old yucky band-aids squirreled away in my purse for so long. So I’ve taken to inventing crazy fantastical stories for why we have to leave things behind or, gasp, throw them away. I tried tough love, I’ve tried explaining the logic until I turn blue in the face and it just doesn’t work. I’m tired of the hour-long meltdowns of tears. Bug is not a logical child.

    Now we leave the rocks and leaves and flowers behind for the fairies. The princess bandages are going into the trash so that the elves at the dump can use them to build a giant castle for all the toys that have been discarded. The eucalyptus blossoms that blew off the top of the car sunroof are going to be gathered by fairies and made into hats. When her temporary-tattoo monster washes off her hand (pictured at top and below), we’re saying that it’s fading away and going to its monster-land in the sky. You should see the wistful look she gets looking up, imagining them flouncing around in the puffy clouds.

    mommy eats baby

    It beats the tears, I’ll tell you that much. Now if I can just think up a good story for all those bananas that have faces on them…