At the Beach

We headed down to Little Gasparilla Island off the western coast of Florida, where Eric's mom lives, for the long Labor Day weekend. It was quite a long drive of about 14-15 hours. We stopped about halfway and spent the night at a hotel before finishing the trip the following day. When we got there, Steve met us at the boat dock and we headed out to the island. After dropping off our stuff and changing, we headed straight to the beach.

Jesikah enjoying some sun on the beach.


Jarem is enjoying a little boat.

Tessa spent awhile building a sand castle with a moat and all. She also had little people around the castle and, of course, horses. She put boats in the moat and she and Jarem carried water over to fill the moat, but it didn't seem to ever fill up. Jarem thought if they went faster they could do it, so he was running back and forth with his buckets of water. It was quite funny to watch him. But alas, they finally gave up because it just kept soaking in.

Eric playing a little football with Alex

Alex just loved being in the WARM water. The western coast where we used to live is beautiful, but the water is too cold to venture into the water much. He certainly would have never been in this deep.

Jesikah spent most of the first afternoon searching for shells. She promised her teacher that she'd bring her back a shell, and she wanted to find the perfect one.


Eric felt this beautiful shell under his foot while he was out in the water playing...the only problem was, it had a critter inside. The critter is trying to get out here, and Jesikah was scared and dropped the shell right after I took the picture. A little later, Alex found another one that was exactly the same, also with a critter inside. It was a hard decision...keep the shell or save the critter. We went to get a second opinion from Grandma and Steve. They thought she should throw them back, so Eric and Jesikah went back and threw them back. Later Jesikah found some nice shells and Grandma found her a very pretty olive shell. Jesikah knows all the names of the shells now.

This is a sand dollar that Alex found, but it was also still alive, so we returned it to the ocean.

Alex and Eric playing "ring-a-round-the-rosies" with Jarem. Jarem loves dunking his head under ever since swimming lessons this past July.

Eric and Jarem playing in the water.

A little boy splashing contest...

Tessa burying her feet in the sand.

Jesikah searching the sand for shells.

Here's some she found

Jarem and I having some fun catching waves. He'd get excited when he saw a wave coming. This beach has small waves, which was very nice because we didn't have to worry about the kids getting swallowed up in a wave.

The kids playing together

Jesikah and Jarem burying their feet in the sand.

Everything was going fine until Alex joined the party and a little sand throwing started...Jesikah is starting something that she may like the end of. Good thing it was about time to head home anyway.

Jarem with his feet still in the sand managed to avoid the sand throwing.

Eric's little treasures

After a full afternoon at the beach, we headed back to enjoy a dinner of freshly-caught mangrove snapper at Grandma Cindi and Steve's house. It was really delicious. After dinner and mingling, we headed back to our little beach house and slept well.