With spring break for the kids, we took a somewhat long vacation down to Charleston, South Carolina, to my father-in-law’s beach house. I actually wore a Hawaiian shirt for the first time in my life, and I really liked it. Obviously, the kids were excited to go to the beach, but I think Mom liked it most of all. My wife, Jessica, gets kind of sad if she doesn’t go to the beach at least once a year.

Since my father-in-law has his beach house and a locked-out basement (for when he rents it to guests while he’s not staying there himself) we’re able to keep a lot of beach toys we wouldn’t have room to bring otherwise.

My father-in-law, Paul, is actually pretty darn good at making sandcastles, and he was teaching the kids how to build a decent one with a moat. The moat was kind of a trick because we were just using it to tire Lily out with all her energy. She could carry five-gallon buckets of seawater all day and never fill that moat because the water just sinks into the sand no matter what she does. It was also the first time my son didn’t want to immediately destroy sandcastles but instead enjoy them.

We bought him a rather fancy life jacket this time. It’s not big or bulky, and it does the trick. I stayed with him near the water at all times, but having the jacket on made me feel a lot better about him being in the water, especially if he got a little away from me. He seemed to love it too because he gave me no resistance when putting it on, and he didn’t complain about taking it off later either. The style of life jacket is what I prefer for myself as well, so I’m not entirely surprised he felt that way.

During our weeklong vacation, we only got to go to the beach twice because the weather wasn’t great shortly after we arrived. The day before going home, we took the kids again, and it was kind of deserted because of the low temperature and wind. So we mostly sat in our beach chairs, watched the kids play in the sand, and luckily I didn’t get sunburned this time because I was wearing jeans and a jacket, lol.