Sunset Beach

Last week Ella and I were lucky enough to be invited to the beach with my parents. Hooray, I love the beach! Well, beach vacations are very different with a baby. I usually just grab my chair and book and hit the sand as soon as I wake up in the morning and just sit out there all day long. Not so much when you have a baby with you. I waited till after Ella's morning nap everyday to get her all greased up with the sunscreen (I used SPF 70- probably going a bit overboard) and into her swim diaper and bathing suit. Then load up the beach bag with the necessecities and head out. This trip was even different from when we went a couple of months ago because now Ella will not go to sleep out there- she wants to make sure she doesn't miss anything. So I could only stay out there as long as she wasn't having a meltdown from exhaustion. Anyway, we put her in the ocean for the first time and she LOVED it!! Which really comes as no surprise as much as she like to splash in the bathtub. But even the salt didn't bother her. She couldn't quite figure out the sand, tried to eat it and realized maybe she shouldn't put it in her mouth, but enjoyed digging around in it all the same.
We also figured out that Ella enjoys cold water to drink. I have tried to give it to her before and she wanted nothing to do with it out of a sippy cup... but straight out of the water bottle she was all about it. It probably helped that it was getting the taste of the seawater out of her mouth. When we got back inside the empty bottle rolled out of my bag and she scooted right over to it, and I think was a bit irritated that there was no water in it for her to drink. But she did enjoy playing with it for a while.