Beach Expectations

The beach is great in theory. I remember a week ago the aspirations I had for the beach here in Florida. The following went through my mind…..

This is gonna be great! We’ll go to the beach every day for a few hours, come home and just hang out. Amazing!

People, I’ve been here since Saturday and been to the beach once. Once! We are going today as our last full day and I’m kinda’ dreading it. Though I’m excited to find more amazing shells, I’d rather have a colonoscopy then do the following that will have to happen:

• Pack snacks, drinks, sunscreen, towels, more sunscreen, chairs, hat, flip-flops and more sun screen. Then we haul it all down to the beach. We use only 50% of the stuff we brought but regret forgetting 3 things.
• My bikini area looks like the surface of Mars right now. I should have sucked it up and had it waxed. Instead I did exactly what they say not to do and shave right before going into the pool.
• Greasing up my sons every hour and a half sucks. They wiggle and whine that I’m blasting them with dry ice or something. It is pretty cold but it’s better than a miserable burn.
• And while we are on the topic of sunscreen there is no other feeling in the world when you have 3 layers of sunscreen on your skin. Couple that with sweating your tits off and sand sticking everywhere and it’s the same annoyance as having an itch on the bottom of your foot or a rock in your shoe.
• There’s always that one time you get cocky at the beach and attempt to make it between the saturated shore and the shower on the wooden walkway. I’ve never made it without regretting it yet we always attempt it again.

I do love the shells. I can’t get over how beautiful they are at the beach. I’ve never seen so many! I have vowed to make crafts with my shells but it will be a fine line I walk not having them turn into old lady crafts.

Despite dreading it, I followed steps on Pinterest on how to clean conch shells. Apparently there is a chance the creature is still in the shell and you need to get it out. The best way to do so is to place them in a pot of water, bring to a boil and gently boil them for 8-10 minutes. After that, you run cold water on them then comes the gross part. You take a fork and stab the creature. I don’t know what I was to bring out because there were only flakes of what seemed to be clam so maybe they’re cleaned out? I don’t know. Guess we’ll find out if my house begins to smell like ass.