Life and Motherhood: Beaches and Bones

Summer is officially here!

We basically spent the whole day at the beach.

We tried out a "new" beach this morning, one that is about a 10 minute drive up the lake and even less crowded. There were only two other families on the whole beach. We enjoyed ourselves so much (well, except for one minor snafu that I'll describe in a moment), that after naps, we headed right back out to the beach for the rest of the afternoon.

These sort of beach days remind me of what drew us to Holland, MI. In the dead of winter it was getting hard to remember, but I remember now. Amongst other reasons to settle here, we liked the idea of living near the beach.

I took this picture this morning, just before "the incident".

Lovely, right?

While I was nursing Owen and therefore a little tied down, I noticed Finn walk to the side of our blanket and pick up something that he was calling a stick.

"Look Mommy, a stick."

Only, I immediately realized that it was NOT a stick. It was a bone. A rather large, probably deer, bone. It was in a pile of bones. And suddenly I realized that the smell I'd smelled when we'd laid our blanket down, wasn't just a random bad scent (Having five boys, four in diapers, I dismiss a lot of random scents). This time however, the smell wasn't coming from us. Nope, it was a rotting carcass. Basically, we'd set up camp right next to a rotting carcass with a pile of very large bones, that my sweet curious Finn had just picked up. How I didn't notice this when we arrived, I'm not sure.

"OH MY GOD! No! NOOOO! Put that down! Finn, PUT THAT DOWN!!"

Unfortunately, this has the opposite effect that I'm going for. Instead of deterring them, my words just peak everybody's interest. I could see the others starting to run over and all I could picture was them all picking up bones, or worse, diving into the bone pile. Seriously, it could happen.

Thank God our nanny, Jordyn was with me and has lighting quick reflexes. She pried the bone out of Finley's hands and blocked the others from getting into it all.

We tried wiping Finn's hands with baby wipes but the smell was just not coming off. It was disgusting. All I could envision was him putting his fingers in his mouth. OMG.

So although we'd made quite an effort to get down to the beach, we packed up our stuff and left.

I washed every, single, thing that even touched that beach. Including myself and the boys.

But we weren't deterred that much. Apparently it takes a lot more than a rotting carcass to keep us away from the beach on a bright, sunny day!

Because after naps, we headed back to the beach that's closer to our house.