Showing me their sand pie creations 
I went back to the towel to put the camera away and told the girls to wait for me at the water. 
I relented and let them get cones, instead of cups, for once. They had fun trying to eat it before it melted, and they looked like they had a couple of chocolate goatees!
Yesterday I decided to be brave and try something I've never attempted before....taking the girls to the beach by myself. Bill was out of town on a boys' baseball road trip, and it was a beautiful day, so us three girls piled into the van and headed to Holland State Park to spend the day at Lake Michigan. Why I waited to try this until I was 6 months pregnant is beyond my understanding, but it actually worked out really well! Once we got through the looooong trek from the car to a spot near the beach (carrying my huge beach bag, a cooler, my chair, and a basket of sand toys, plus shepherding along two little girls who don't love to walk through sand), it was smooth sailing. The weather was gorgeous....sunny, warm, but not too hot, thanks to a vigorous and pretty continuous breeze off the lake. I was glad to be able to check out for myself all the stories I've heard about Lake Michigan having the warmest water temperatures it's had in years....all true! The sign at the beach said the water was 74 degrees, but it felt warmer than that. There were quite a few waves, but the water was so shallow, the waves only came up to my mid-thigh. The girls were tentative but I finally got them in the water. I pretty much had to carry Rachel in one arm, and hold Megan's hand with my other hand, as the waves came up to her chest or neck. I kept trying to get her to go out further since it didn't really get any deeper, but she wasn't overly willing. I think Rachel would have warmed to the idea of getting her whole body in the water more if I had been able to hold her with two arms instead of one (one of the downfalls of not having Bill with us!). Finally on our last foray into the water, Megan loosened up enough to "swim" around in the water's edge, with just her head above water.
It did take me a little while to convince Megan that there weren't any jellyfish here. (She's still traumatized by her jellyfish sting that occurred on our first day at the beach in Nags Head a few weeks ago.) Rachel, in an unusual show of Megan-like anxiety, was afraid to walk amongst all the white seagull feathers littering the beach, and did not like the seaweed that she could see floating in the water. Funny girls!
We enjoyed our picnic lunch at the shelter/concession area, and then spent some time on the beachside swings. The girls probably would have stayed on those all day, but I was getting annoyed because hey, we have swings at home in our backyard and can swing anytime, but this is the beach, gosh darn it! When they weren't in the water, the girls enjoyed digging in the sand and making "cakes." They amused themselves so well, I even got a few pages of my book read (in between testing "cakes" and fetching them water from the lake to make castles for them).
The highlight of the day for them, I'm sure, was probably the chocolate ice cream cones we got at the concession stand for a snack. Even though it wasn't super hot out, the ice cream began to melt really fast, and it was quite a messy race to keep the cones from dripping. Rachel was hilarious...she usually gets extremely agitated if anyone tries to eat even a spoonful of her ice cream, but today, she was actually asking me to lick it for her pretty often, because "It's drippin! It's drippin!" They looked so darn funny with their chocolate faces that I had to snap tons of pictures before I wiped them off. It was really pretty entertaining. Rachel kept laughing at Megan and saying, "She has a chocolate face!", not realizing that her own face was just as chocolate-covered.
I had planned to only stay a few hours, but we arrived at 11 am and didn't get in the car to head for home until 5 pm, because the girls were having so much fun and didn't want to leave! We had a funny conversation on the way back to the car. It went something like this:
Me: "I had so much fun with you girls today!"
Rachel: "It's more fun when Daddy's here."
Me: "Didn't you have fun with me, though?"
Megan: "Yeah, but Daddy plays with us."
Me: (somewhat indignantly) "I played with you today!"
Megan: "Yeah, but Daddy builds holes." (a reference to the epic hole digging that Daddy did for the girls on our vacation to Nags Head)
Me: "Well, you didn't ask me to dig you a hole!"
Megan: "Well, digging holes is hard work."
Me: "Oh, so Mama can't do hard work?"
Rachel: "No."
Mind you, this conversation is occurring as I'm schlepping all the aforementioned beach gear back to the car, trudging through 150 yards of fluffy sand while hugely pregnant. I have no further comment. Ah well, aside from my bruised ego, we all had a really fun day. Got home, had McDonald's for dinner, and washed all the sand and sunscreen off in the bath. Two very tired girls and one very tired Mama went contentedly to sleep.
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