We have been in Baby Mode over here, following the birth of my first grandson, Henry, nearly two weeks ago.
As you can imagine, we are hopelessly smitten with him.
Thankfully, it is no work at all, however, to make sure his older sister, Mavis (who is 2 years old), still gets the same level of attention she is accustomed to.
It seems that her position with us is rather cemented in.
After so much sitting around, and cuddling of the baby, we were all getting antsy to get out and enjoy the summer, so I came up with a plan to go to the beach, and I offered to take Mavis along with us, so her parents could stay home and have some rest.
Yesterday was the day we had planned on, and by 10am I already had a text from my daughter asking exactly when we would be going, because Mavis had been dressed in her swimsuit, talking incessantly about it since 9am.
Mavis’ temperament means she is down for anything that smells like adventure.
She is not an indoor cat.
The second she heard me walking up the rock path to her screen door, she flung herself against it from the inside like a pitbull would if they saw an intruder there,
only, instead of growling and snarling her teeth, she was calling out loudly to me.
Her face was pressed into the screen mesh.
“I’M READY FOR THE BEACH, GRAMMY! WE WILL BE THERE SOON, WON’T WE?!”
I suspect she is capable of morphing her body like an octopus, because she was already off and down the path to stand by my car, blinking at me, when I’d only opened the screen door a crack.
For the 25 minute drive to the beach after that, she said, “We’re almost there” like an affirmation every two minutes.
She cannot help it. No one has ever loved the beach more than Mavis.
She’s loved it since the first time I took her there and she ate a full pound of sand.
We brought her home and promptly googled how much sand causes a gastrointestinal emergency, and then watched her closely after that.
Yesterday, when we parked after finally reaching our destination, she announced,
“I love the beach! It has so much sand to share!”
This is a fact that I can confirm, as it is now in my floorboard.
I just love taking kids to the beach.
I love watching them run and dig.
I’ll never forget going with my friend, Brie, and her two year old once, and how, when we got him out of the car, he looked around in awe and said like a tiny British gentlemen, “Please, Mother, may we explore this land?”
I love giving Mavis a chance to get dirty.
That is her main love language, I think.
Allowed to be covered in dirt and sand up to her eyeballs, fists full of rocks.
She ate a peanut butter and jelly, (which is inarguably the very worst beach food) grit sticking to it and all, and looked as happy as a clam.
I think she likes being with me because my motto as a Grandma is “Just let her.”
If she’s not harming anyone or herself, I just go with it.
Stomp in that mud puddle. Pick up that weird bug. I think I got desensitized to the things that toddlers do when, by my fourth daughter, her response to the giraffe enclosure at the zoo was to walk up and lick the full length of the railing to it.
My grandparenting is the embodiment of the meme with Ken Jeong sitting with his feet propped on a desk while wearing a sombrero, saying, “I’ll allow it.”
I’ve been through wildfires and a pandemic. No one ever died from getting dirty.
There was a minor hiccup at the beach because of this thing called, “kelp.”
She did not AT ALL like that thing one bit.
I saw her watching it from a distance, suspiciously at first, and when I told her,
“That’s just kelp, Mavie. It’s just like a leaf that lives in the ocean. It can’t hurt you. It’s just a plant.”
“It isn’t,” is all she said.
I tried to convince her that it was fine, and she could touch it, but she simply plopped herself down on the dry part of the shore, and said an unconvinced, “I like my sand normal,” to me.
For the most part, she just played around it. I’m sure she thinks she deserves a medal for bravery.
She had fun with the soccer ball, and the miniature bucket she had brought.
She made a friend around her same age just by jumping around wildly near him.
Too bad adults can’t make friends that easily…
We had made good progress, getting more brave by the minute, I thought, when my youngest daughter, Paige, took her to climb on a rocky area over by the cave on the hill.
As she was climbing, though, her footing slipped backward and she fell into an area absolutely RIDDEN with kelp with a spash.
That’s when she started wailing.
She screamed as if she was being dragged to her death.
I ran like Black Beauty down the beach towards them, thinking she’d been really hurt.
Her wails of,
I GOT KELPED! I GOT KELPED, GRAMMY” made the whole beach giggle, and made me realize I could slow my running a bit.
I’m pretty sure she thinks the scrape she got on her leg from the rock was actually caused by
kelp teeth.
When she grows she will probably remember the time Grammy took her to the beach and she was attacked, and had to be carried out as onlookers grinned, obviously as relieved as she was that the kelp hadn’t been the end of her.
We decided that seemed like a good time to pack up and head home.
You know, “Enough fun for one day.”
Once we got home, I let her come over for a popscicle to ease the blow of being kelped, even though it was far past her nap time.
I decided to text my daughter and tell her I’d bring her home for bed as soon as she was finished, and so I started voice-to-texting out loud,
“We are home, but I’m letting her have a snack period I will bring her over when she’s done period She’s pretty tired period I bet she will still fall asleep easily period send,”
And completely seamlessly,
proving she was back to her old “pre-kelped” self,
right where I left off, Mavis said loudly,
“NO SHE WON’T PERIOD.”
Back home. Back to all that “baby” stuff. Back to boring old BED.
I still think, overall, Beach Day With Grammy was a hit.
She got her sand to share, and a cake pop from Starbucks to eat on the way.
4 out of 5 stars, overall.
Points only deducted for kelp.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
