I have been waiting to take Emma to the beach since October of last year when she was able to sprint without using her ventilator for longer periods of times (about an hour at a time, twice a day- which is what she is back to right now), but Michael was pretty nervous about all of the things that could go wrong. Sand in her trach, water in her trach, shark attacks, tsunamis, the usual. So it wasn’t until this past Saturday, October 17th, that she was finally able to experience the beach!! Especially since I told him that Daytona Beach has wide land, packed sand, low tides creating tide pools, and most importantly: cars can drive on the beach. That is a must for us with Emma, so we’ve already had to cancel a beach trip with my parents to St. Pete in December. We talked over the weekend about how our mix between me being too fun with Emma and Michael being too uptight and worried creates a pretty good balance in our parenting overall. The opposite works in our finances as Michael is the spender usually and I stress about money a lot of the time, while wanting to save and invest for our 2047-ish retirement.
We left around 1pm and arrived at 2:15, paid our $20 to be allowed to drive onto the beach, got a spot towards the pier about ten cars down, and Michael began setting up our half-tent that was bigger than I remembered and the perfect size for Emma and her ventilator. We enjoyed some family time alone before my friend Lindsey and her family arrived at 3 o’clock and parked next to us.
Michael didn’t want Emma touching the ocean at all, which is okay I guess, because it was great that we got to come to the beach at all. He let her sit in a shallow part of a tide pool and she kicked her legs on her own. I splashed her a little bit too and she laughed at that.
I also really liked that we were able to get a picture of her with Lindsey’s boys –Luke, Logan, and Lane, even though Lane didn’t necessarily like her company, but that’s good that he is weary of strangers. He did seem more interested in her when he was near her at one point during dinner. I love this picture of me, Lindsey, Emma and Logan (who we were pregnant with at the same time, back from October 2016 to June 2017. I'll post more about that in a few days) and how we all have our eyes closed in this photo when it was still really sunny out!
I always wonder what Emma is thinking about, with all these new experiences, but we got some pictures of her smiling and she didn’t cry or do her sign language for “all done”, so I definitely take it as a fun, successful day! Michael said his favorite part was relaxing and playing in the tent with Emma while I was also enjoying my favorite part of hanging by the ocean with Lindsey and we chatting while she held her baby and watched her two older kids play in the shallow waves.
*** UPDATE-- we are very lucky that we were able to go when we did and that the weather was great. My parents are in Daytona right now (just a few days after us) with some overcast weather. I thought High Tide was at night and Low Tide was in the middle of the day, but she just sent me a picture at 2pm and the water was all the way up to the posts that say "don't park past this point". Cars are not even allowed to be on the beach this week! Just something I thought was interesting, which I passed along to Lindsey, who then passed it along to her cousin, Gill (pronounced "Jill"). And now I feel bad for not mentioning Gill in the post! She also was at the beach with us. She is the one sitting next to Lindsey at dinner and took the pictures of me and Lindsey with our kiddos in the picture where I have the dress on. Thank you!
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