Boy meets beach

We are back from our Corpus Christi vacation and had a fabulous time! The boy child absolutely astounded me this week. I had assumed the beach would be an iffy proposition, what with the sand and shells to walk on and the murky, salty seawater to swim in, but the boy took to it like ... well, a fish to water. He refused to wear his swim shoes and went barefoot the whole time, running all over the beach and splashing in the waves and generally behaving like swimming in the ocean was the most natural thing in the world for him! The girl child loved it as well, which was no surprise, and so the entire vacation was just lovely.

We saw the sights in the morning and early afternoon, then spent every late afternoon and evening on the private beach owned by the hotel. They kept it relatively clean with no big seaweed clumps and very little trash, so the sand was very nice for walking and digging and sandcastle-building. It was windy all week and the water was quite choppy, which might have kept the jellyfish away because we never saw any in our part of the beach (there were tons of them further up the coast, though). The beach was shaded by the hotel in the afternoons, so we were able to frolic without overheating or fear of sunburn. The bay itself is quite shallow, so the kids were able to wander far from shore and still only be in water up to their waists. It was altogether a fabulous beach vacation!

On the way home we stopped at Schlitterbahn, and that was probably a mistake. The boy child hated it. He liked the various pools and hot tubs and some of the more timid slides in the children's section, but got really mad at himself for bowing out at the last minute on one of the larger slides (twice). They use a burst of water to propel people down the larger slides, and he didn't like that. I think he would have done okay if the water had been at a constant rate. Anyway, that kind of killed the experience for him. Also, we had a bit of an episode while trying to get him onto an innertube for floating down a very slow, lazy "river" (no rapids or anything). Once he was on it he did fine, but again, I think his freakout over it put a damper on everything for him. The girl child, naturally, LOVED Schlitterbahn and went on some fairly fast/large slides. She scares me to death, that one! She is absolutely fearless.

So in conclusion, boy + beach = awesome! Boy + Schlitterbahn = not so much.

We are glad to be home, where the boy child is re-bonding with his ginormous Lego collection.