Surfside Beach Trip 2006

Dada on the beach

For the second year we were invited to share a beach house for the weekend with this great group of families. We met them through our friends Marla and Andrea who went last year and invited us to join. This year there were eight families with kids ranging from 18 months to 11 years. We rented a big house right on the beach in Surfside Beach on the Texas Gulf coast, west of Houston.

This year it was just Eliot and Dada as Julie decided that what she really needed was a couple of days to herself after all the stress and chaos of the previous couple of months, not to mention that she hadn't had a full day off of mom duty since we got back from China last year. I was certainly happy to let Julie have some alone time and do a father-daughter beach trip.

We had a reasonably pleasant drive down. It's about a four hour drive and Dada slept for the first couple of hours or so. Toward the end she was getting pretty tired of being in her car seat (who wouldn't be) so we stoppped and shopped for the last few items we needed for the beach.

Finally we arrived at the beach house, got our stuff out of the car and still had enough daylight to do a little playing on the beach. Discovered that Dada really likes to stand in the waves with me either holding her or holding her hands while she stands in the water.

I love the water and was really hoping that Dada would too and it appears that she does. Last year she was too little to really enjoy the water but in the intervening year she's had swim lessons and spent a lot of time with us at the pool. We spent a lot of our time standing in the water and laughing with delight as the waves came in and splashed us. By Sunday afternoon she was running untethered into the water. I'm sure that next year it'll be hard to get her out of the water.

Unfortunately, on Saturday morning, while we were having our breakfast (excellent breakfast tacos--each family signs up for a meal) Dada got a nasty splinter in her foot from jumping around on the deck. It was right in the ball of her left foot. It wasn't deep but it clearly hurt. This injury put something of a damper on her activities as it made it hard for her to walk. So she ended up spending a lot of the weekend either hanging out on the sand or in my arms. Which was OK but wasn't exactly how I had pictured the weekend.

It was a little bit of a challenge to be a single parent at the beach--because of her injury Dada was a little more clingy than she otherwise would have been so I really didn't have any opportunities to get into the water myself, although the conditions weren't that inviting--there was a pretty strong wind on Saturday and the water was just cold enough to have required a wetsuit for surfing. And I could have probably tried harder to get Dada to spend time with the other families and parents but I didn't want to impose. But we had fun.

Dada got to fly a kite all by herself (in the sense that she held the string and managed to both keep the kite in the air and not let go of the string).

On Sunday, as I was trying to get all our stuff packed up, Tacia, another single parent, was able to get Dada to go with her and her daughter Riley (who is at least as cute and charismatic as Dada) and play on the beach, which was great.

Finally, after a final half hour of playing in the water together, she and I got in the car and headed back home. Dada fell asleep almost as soon as I turned the key and slept until we pulled into the carport.