shine on

These pictures are from the same day as my last post, in which I decided to stop halfway, because somehow posting 30+ pics in a single post seemed, I don’t know, excessive?  I meant to come right back and put these up the the next night, but you know how that goes in our house.  And then I find myself with interesting things to tell you but I can’t because I’m only halfway through with this day at the beach.  Never mind that the photos in this post all really happened a month ago, for some reason they must be posted in order.

Does your head hurt yet?  Mine too.  Let’s look at some pictures, shall we?

Early in the week we had some rain – nothing too bad, just a little shower here or there.  This was one of those days; the kids would troop down to the beach, the rain would start, they’d come back up, it would quit.  It turned into a joke, counting how many trips down they had made.  Finally, late in the afternoon, all the sketchy gray clouds moved away and the rain stopped and we all went down one last time.

You can see here that the oldest two have obviously given up on swimming for the day and changed back into real clothes.  Will, however, still stays in a swimsuit – well, until someone forces him to take it off.  Which is probably a good thing, since his adventures tend to be a little more intense than anyone else’s.  It’s good to be prepared.

Good thing for him, The Dude always loves a good beach adventure, too.

It’s such a cliché, but I really do love to see how all three kids can be so done with the beach for the day and then Bryan comes along with a net and they are all running after him again, like they’ve never seen the ocean before.  They are always ready to go where he goes.

This whole next series of pictures reminds me of hearing a National Geographic photographer named DeWitt Jones speak – he’s SO great on creativity, hear him if you ever have the chance – and one of his refrains was always keep looking, sometimes you just turn and see something from a different angle and it’s magic.  That afternoon, there was this mist still hanging in the air, left over from the rain, and as my crazy family went running off down the beach I turned to follow them and this is what happened.

There aren’t words (in my tired brain, anyway) for how much I love these pictures.  They somehow capture for me that very favorite time of day, when the sun gets lower and the light changes on the water and everything turns silvery gold, some otherworldly color that doesn’t even exist apart from sun and sea and shore.