summer beach trip

Well we had another summer beach trip. Very hot, but fun! Wiley and Archer decided they both want to be surfers when they grow up, so I have to figure out when we can take surf lessons. Archer learned to pedal his bike pedals and talked our ears off the entire time. Seriously, for some reason he talked and talked and talked. It was really great, just not his usual listening self. He told us about all the animals he saw, the places he'd been along the island, what he was coloring and why, his imaginary bear family, and on an on. He is so goofy too. He sticks his butt out and does a "cute booty dance." They were both really great during the trip, playing together, looking out for each other, and swimming and making sand castles. At one point York snapped at Wiley and Archer said something like, I'm not talking to you you are mean to Wiley.

One of the first mornings we went out Wiley, Archer, and I were standing in about knee deep water when I saw a fin! My heart stopped, but I didn't move and kept looking to make sure my eyes weren't playing tricks on me. But it was truly a fin, but luckily of a school (?) of dolphins, about 5-6 swimming by.
We also saw several jelly blubbers. That's what I call them. Some nice woman on the beach showed me that the entirely clear ones are called moon jellies and they don't sting, but the purplish ones with tentacles do sting.

Both the boys loved going out deep. Really deep. It was too hard for me to take them both out by myself so we didn't get to go very deep very much, but instead built lots of sandcastles and looked for little clams and sand fleas. Twice Wiley and I went to the beach by ourselves and went out deep, past the breakers. He wanted to go even deeper, but I wasn't super cool with that, so we stayed where I could stand most of the time. There were warnings about rip currents everywhere and a ranger told me that they mostly occur in deeper water so I was a bit weary of going out there too far. But I did manage to teach Wiley how to swim under the big waves and float over the others. He loved it. On about the 4th day some 5 year old girl got bit by a shark off Ocracoke Island (the beach slightly south of the one we were at, Frisco). I thought even so, our odds of getting bitten were still pretty good, but York asked that we not go out deep anymore and so we didn't. The ocean was really rough the last two days anyway, and so I wouldn't have gone out in it that rough anyway. Plus, no one else was swimming and I always try to invade the personal space of someone with an extra adult when I take him out that far. York went fishing one or two nights and didn't catch any sharks this year. Everything I read says that they mostly bite at dusk or early am.

Wiley met a nice French Canadian family on the beach, in fact, he tried to make friends with just about everyone on the beach. The Canadians told us they saw sting rays jumping out of the water, too! They are apparently more of a risk then the sharks.

We also played a lot of legos and trouble and guess who! And took as many cooling showers as we could!