Sand Before Time

Kiernan and I spent Sunday together at the beach, finding a way to get our minds off of the fact that Wendy was flying to Baltimore for work for a couple of days. There's probably a couple of pictures better than this one for starting off a post about the beach, but I just love the look on the face of that seagull behind Kiernan.

That bird reminds me of a bird from a trip we took to the beach last year. I can't find the post or I'd link to it, but the seagull during that visit grabbed Kiernan's fish toy and tried to fly away with it. Kiernan screamed and I chased the seagull until the bird dropped the toy.

During this trip we were keenly aware of the ever-present birds because Kiernan's precious dinosaurs were along for the trip. There was no way we were going to let one of those nutty birds abscond with one of the dinosaurs. No way.

If you look carefully at these pictures you will see a couple of things. You'll see the dinosaurs, of course. And you'll see Kiernan standing in a big hole.

This is the first time we have taken the dinosaurs to the beach. Basically that's because this is the first opportunity. Kiernan is crazy about dinosaurs right now. Crazy about them. And he has a ton of them. So, naturally, he wanted to bring them to the beach. I told him to choose which dinos came with us carefully. None with moving parts and certainly none with batteries should come along. He chose wisely, selecting a modest group of fifteen for the trip.

As for the big hole, well that has become a staple of our trips to the beach. Last year I would start to build a castle and then dig a hole. Kiernan would destroy the castle and jump in the hole. This year I made a volcano the dinosaurs could climb and then dug the hole. Kiernan did not destroy the volcano. Progress. Maturity.

The hole, as usual, attracted plenty of attention from other beach goers. The dinosaurs did too. Especially from two groups. Toddler boys and fathers. The toddler boys would slow down as they walked by the scene of the dinosaurs on the sand volcano. Their jaws would drop. Kiernan would ask, "Why is he looking at my dinosaurs?" The dads would just smile. One of them said, "Wow. What a cool prehistoric scene!"

I took plenty of pictures of the dinos. Here's my favorite. Dilophosaurus on the volcano.


Shortly after I took this picture we experienced a first. A little scary, but we weathered it. What was it? Kiernan's first bee sting.


I'll talk about that more in the second part of this post.