On Monday I took the girls to Virginia Beach to look for seashells. Since it was in the low fifties with a chance of rain all day, I made a weak attempt to talk them out of it.
"Girls, it's going to feel very cold at the beach today. Are you sure you want to go?"
"Yes daddy. If we go to the beach before it's hot, we might find some really good seashells before everyone else goes down there and gets them all."
"Ok. Let's go."
As I suspected, the wind was indeed chilling, but we took off our shoes and went walking in the sand anyway. And really, we were having so much fun that we didn't mind the cold.
Julia must have yelled out my name a dozen times: "Daddy! Look what I found!" as she would show me another half-broken shell. But I would always respond with a reassuring, "Oooh! What a pretty shell!"
Then she called out my name again.
Almost absent mindedly I gave her the reasurring words that were now almost automatic, until I saw what she had:
Wow. A seahorse. And a big one at that. Now that's a rare find, indeed!
