Glorious day by the Seaside

Digging

Friday dawned beautiful - we had clear blue skies and no cold wind - hurray!  Tom went off to nursery in the morning for a half day, the weather held, so I packed the car with stuff - bike for riding, swimsuit for playing in the splash park and bucket and spades for playing on the beach.  I picked up Tom and asked him what he wanted to do - he didn't hesitate - playing on the beach.  So off to Morecambe we went.

Tom has been short of sleep for the past week or two, meaning that he hasn't been the best to be around - we get sulks, refusals to do things, grumpiness etc.  As he had a sleep on the way home yesterday and a 13 hours sleep last night he was in good spirits.  In fact he was an absolute pleasure to be with yesterday afternoon - we were on the beach for 3 hours, and it just flew.

Having fun

He was bossy:
"Mummy fill the blue bucket with sand... stop, put stones in it now"
"Mummy tap the bucket three times...with the blue spade not the green one"
"Mummy make me 3 sandcastles"
"Mummy make a sandcastle and put it by the wall"
"Mummy dig my feet into the sand"
"Mummy find me some stones"

etc, etc, etc - I was certainly kept busy.

Carefully transporting sand

At one point Tom managed to get a lot of sand in one of his eyes.  I don't know how he did it, but his eyeball was completely covered, I've never seen anything like it before.  He obviously knew something was wrong and very calmly said "Mummy I've got sand in my eye".  He came over and sat still whilst I flushed his eye with water, then took a tissue to dig out as much as I could.  I then asked him to cry to flush out the remainder - which he did.  I couldn't have asked him to be any better and it meant that what started out as quite a horrific situation was dealt with quickly and without any raised voices or hysteria.  Once I had finished he gave me a huge hug and said thank you for making him feel better.  He then went back to playing in the sand and continued to flick it in the air (he hadn't learnt his lesson!)

We also played cricket (one session where he hit the ball every time) and tennis.  But generally we were playing in the sand and having fun.  Daddy didn't want to miss out, so got out his motorbike and met us at a very nice pub in Hess Bank for dinner.  There was a garden at the pub, so we sat outside and Tom played with some other boys who were roughly his age - this is a first, as he played with them completely off his own back something he has never done before AND he really enjoyed it.  Let's hope he does that again.

Anyway it was a really lovely day.