and we had a great time….
Now, going to the beach with 12 people is no mean feat. Especially when you are one of two bosses. Towels, sunscreen, bathing suits, t-shirts to wear in the water…..water bottles….changes of clothes….don’t forget the little brush to brush the sand off your feet before getting back into the van.
Using a brush means that you will only take 76% of the beach home and not 83%. So.much.sand.
The reason why we went to the beach was that we do this once a year for my daughter’s birthday….or at least we try to. There have been plenty of fails and having slight fails with this type of thing really IS a tradition.
This day started with us thinking that we really had to finally try to do something about one of our children who gets carsick and *always* vomits on long journeys.
So we went to Autobarn and bought one of those static strips that attaches on the underside of the back of your vehicle….or in our case…huge van. We also bought ‘seabands’ from Chemist Warehouse (they aren’t super cheap…like $20?)
Our daughter is only 4 so telling her they were wonder woman bands helped a lot.
Apart from looking a bit yellow at one stage NO spew! This is a huge success for us! However…….a younger sibling who *never* gets car sick…you guessed it….spewed. About 4 seconds after spewing she said “I’m ok. I’m not sick anymore”. Thanks!
Also, thank you to me for having the forethought to bring a spare outfit!
So we drove about 1 1/2 hours to the beach. Had one pit stop (for said ‘yellow’ passenger) and then went further but thought the beach didn’t look very ‘exciting’ so we went to Number 16 beach in Rye. TOTAL fail!
Apart from it now being the complete wrong time of day the waves were CRAZY! My husband who is normally very mild mannered was not ABLE to calm down for fear of one of the children drowning. We laugh now but it was just so intense it wasn’t even funny! It IS funny now haha!
Waves just slamming into shore. One after another…bang, bang……laughing kids sure, but fried nerves parents…..totally!
10 kids and 2 parents. One parent having to hold the baby at all times….. sharp, jagged rocks. Just.no!
So…..baaaaaaaaaackkkkkkkk to the second beach. Sand banks galore!
It ended up being a beautiful day. I even managed to stop at a garage sale!
What was especially amazing was….VERY minimal sunburns! Our new sunscreen worked SO well.
My main method of ‘sun protection’ is just ‘avoid direct sun’. You don’t really have that option at the beach so hats and sunscreen are needed. We used Goat’s milk sunscreen for the first time and it was SO good! Highly recommend!
We don’t even all own hats and my husband bought one for himself that morning but we all survived!
I hope that we can go to the beach again soon. It is so peaceful by the water.
We had Hungry Jacks for lunch, ice-cream and gelato and the kids had muesli bars and apples on the way home. I didn’t fall asleep in the van and got to read zero pages of my book but it really was a lovely day.
