Beach Week

Beach week is absolutely my favorite week of the year. I look forward to it from the moment we pull out of our cottage driveway until we cross the bridge and I catch my first glimpse of the ocean again. Beach week is lazy mornings sleeping in (read 8:00 or even – gasp! – 8:30), long hours riding waves, building sand castles, digging for treasures, and lounging in the tide pools. It’s special dinners, snuggling under blankets, movie nights with buttered popcorn, homemade lemonade, outside showers, no bedtimes, having plenty of beds but opting to share your bunk with your brother.

And of all the days that week, Friday is always the sweetest. The unspoken realization that this truly is your last hurrah with the sand and the sea gives each moment even greater meaning. So you linger on the beach, watching the waves roll closer and closer as the tide comes in and listening to the happy sounds of your littles who, because they feel the bittersweet ache of the end, too, are a little kinder than usual as they try to soak up all this last day has to offer.

It’s hard to go, to leave vacation and go back to real life, but perhaps without the responsibilities of the everyday we would not understand how awesome beach week truly is. And it’s time. It’s time to turn our attention to multiplication and division, to strong verbs and quality adjectives, to chores and jobs, to schedules and routines…because all of that is good, too. And when we’re having a bad day, when fractions, or spelling, or an uncooperative student make us want to pull our hair out, we can instead close our eyes and remember our week at the beach…a week that’s waiting for us again next summer.

Highlights from Beach Week 2015: Emerson hanging for hours on the beach with the big kids and loving every minute, hide-and-seek gone wrong when Finn found himself hiding next to a snake, the never-ending entertainment that chasing seagulls provides, boys vs. girls dance-off, boogie board rides, Chopped competitions on the beach, inseparable birthday buddies, Will and his “crew,” watching “Home” on our last night, baked potato bar, laughing on the porch about mustaches, Eli falling asleep during his breathing treatments, Emerson falling asleep at the dinner table, Bean Boozled!, Emerson’s sudden burst in vocabulary (cup, cereal, cheese), Emerson cheesing for the camera, listening to Finn and Jake’s conversation about killing a spider (Finn’s weapon of choice, a knife, and Jake’s, a gun), Eli’s comment to his siblings at bedtime, “Goodnight, turds!”, American Idol karaoke, kids who are old enough to walk to the pier unsupervised, spending the week with my very best friend and 5 favorite monkeys!