fun friday, 6.21.13...

In planning activities for our week with M&A, we knew that IKEA was on the list, and the boys wanted to golf, and the girls wanted to go thrifting/shopping, but we needed something special for the kids too.  I listed off a number of things to them including the zoo, museums, and a local chlorinated swimming beach.  As soon as I said beach they immediately said "E would love that!"  My kids would too, definitely, so for fun friday while they were here, we headed for the beach.

This beach is really a man-made swimming hole that is chlorinated, which is really nice because as most of you know the lakes can get pretty scummy in MN on hot summers.  So you have the clean water of a pool, and the atmosphere of a beach with all the sand!  This place gets pretty busy, so we made sure we were there right away in the morning when it opened.  And since it was cloudy and had rained the night before we had the beach to ourselves for an hour before people started trickling in!

We staked out a good spot under the umbrellas and headed for the water.  H was unsure...

...so he watched while E tested it out.

The big kids were super excited that Uncle M went right into the water and played with them.

Getting thrown in was big fun!

And E and H had a lot of fun playing near the shore with the sand toys we had just gotten at IKEA.

Another fun game which was by far C's favorite, was to back up to the building and run on the sand and straight into the water making glorious splashes!

C's splashing got a little too crazy at one point though.  He splashed H right in the face and H ended up getting a big red puffy eye.  He cried and fussed and wouldn't open it - we didn't know whether some sunscreen had gotten in it or whether it was sand and going to damage his eye.  But Auntie A wins the best auntie of the year award for her heroics that day at the expense of all the people at the beach thinking of calling child services on her!  H would NOT open his eye even with me trying to pry it so we could not flush it with clean water.  So A offered to throw water from my water bottle at his face if I could distract him enough to get him to stop crying and look up.  Sounds HORRIBLE, I know, and I will never forget the look on M's face (he was NOT in on the plan), but it seriously helped so much.  H's eye was still quite red, but he at least was able to open it without fussing.  THANKS SO MUCH A! 

As a precaution, since eye stuff is scary to me, I did take him to our pediatrician's office (which was only 10 min away from the beach), and they flushed the eye again and he was back to normal by the time we got back to the beach.  M & A did kid duty and everyone had a blast at the beach.  They even got hot dogs form the concession stand which my kids thought was awesome.

 All in all, I think everyone had a great time!

Then we headed for home where it was bath time, nap time, quiet time, (more golf time for M), followed by Noodles for supper.  What a great fun friday!!!