Beach Day!

On Wednesday we decided to go to the beach. We chose Twin Lakes in Santa Cruz and it turned out to be a really nice beach. The kids and I were musing about how it might become one of our favorites.

This is all of us crowding in for a selfie... didn't really work. Em was happy with the result though!

Just me and Jake. These are my "silly glasses" but I sorta love them. Nice how you can see my hands taking the picture here, right? But mostly I love Jacob's smile.

The kids were all really excited about the shells. Elinor was really, really excited.

Caleb racing to greet the waves. I love how at the beach the kids always have something important to do.

These two stuck together for a lot of the time.

Jumping the waves.

Beautiful day, right? Look at that sky! (okay, really, it was barely 70 degrees and WINDY. But everyone still had fun.)

Kid project.

It took a lot of manpower and a lot of time.

Exhausted at the end of the day. Emily was covered in sand from head to toe. We brought home a LOT of sand with us! Next time I will make them lay on towels.

Speaking of beach towels, this beach trip was our first time using our new sand-free "multimat" and I am a fan! I'm not totally sure how it works, but it only lets sand through one way, so any sand that landed on top sifted back through pretty quickly and we had this nice sand-free oasis on this beach of very fine sand that really got into everything. I would totally recommend it to anyone going to the beach with any kind of frequency.

You can sort of see it in the back of this picture.

Overall, it was a great beach trip. We will definitely be going back sometime... but maybe not for a little while. This week of fun was very exhausting!