The Sophster's First Big Beach Trip

Living in Florida, you would think that we would have had Sophi to the beach a hundred times by now, right? Wrong. We may live in Florida, where we are surrounded by many beaches, but the closest one is about a 45 minute drive, and our favorite one {the one we can drive on and has jetties and cool little tide pools} is even farther than that. So, we have never taken her.

We decided last Saturday, that it was time. We got up early and started loading up the truck with coolers, food, drinks, chairs, camping grill, sand toys, etc, etc. We decided to wait until after nap time to head out, since low tide was at 4:00ish pm and you do not want to get stuck on the beach in high tide! Oh no!

Anyway, we get there and start to drive out on the beach and Sophi excitedly proclaims, "Wow! Yook {look} MOMMY! It's a REALLY BIG SANDBOX!!". Seriously. She kills me dead. That whole kids say the darndest things? That's my kid, every day. So much fun!



So, we get out of the truck and meet up with our group of friends/family, I took Sophi to check out the tide pools, she sees a live crab, some sea shells, some barnacles on the jetties, she loved jumping around in the waves and making big splashes, but her favorite part of the whoooole day....chasing the "buwds"...the seagulls. We ran up and down that beach chasing those birds for hours. She just screeched and giggled like a crazy {happy} baby toddler!

Some other highlights?

Building in the really big sandbox


Sucking down the yummy ice cream that Aunt Lacey bought for her


Getting a silly moment in with my babe...please excuse the whiteness...it's our first beach trip in years! ;)


Oh yeah, remember how I mentioned above that getting stuck at beach at high tide is not such a good idea? As the tide started to come in, we all moved our trucks closer up to the dunes, as did everyone else....except this guy...



All we could do was sit and watch {Mitch even set up his Go Pro...he's so bad} as the tide came in on this car...the owner was nowhere to be found. We watched as the water got so high that the waves were crashing up onto the hood of the car. Then, all of a sudden, the dude comes running from out of nowhere, freaking out! Thankfully, a whole gang of people pushed the front of the car and he was able to get it started and back it up!



Dude's car was full of water, so my girlfriend, Kim, took one of Sophi's buckets over to let him use it to bail some water out. My sweet Sophi ran over to check the situation out, and then starts running back to her sand toys saying "I get anudder {another} one my bucket, too!" She wanted to help. I love her heart so much!!

Needless to say, it was an eventful and fun afternoon! I'm so glad that Sophi loved the beach so much and we will surely be going back again a bunch more this summer!

Also, I just want to put out there that I have started a new blog for reviewing all of the great goodies that I get for free {like the bathing suit in the above picture, from Old Navy} from websites like crowdtap.com, influenster.com, and bzzagent.com. I made the decision that, while I think getting a bunch of free stuff in exchange for a blog review is cool, I don't want to be clogging up this blog with it. Soooo...if you want to check me out over there and follow all of my reviews, just click here and you will magically teleport over to the other blog. Ok, not really...but it sounded cool, right? ;)