First Day of Summer Break

Since I'm pretty much the coolest mom ever, I took the kids to the beach to celebrate their first day out of school.

I spent years missing school. Years, okay. But that doesn't change the fact that school is tiring! I mean, home school is tiring too, probably more tiring, but it's tiring in a different way. When you home school you're tired of being on and needed all the time. That's primarily a mental tired. But when your kids are in school, you're tired from waking up early and bringing them to school and picking them up and all the walking back and forth that's required for that. And also you're tired of never having the option to say, "You know, we've had a busy week, let's start an hour later today." It's very rigid. It's a more physical kind of tired. And although I can say pretty certainly that I prefer this kind of tired, that doesn't mean I wasn't excited to have a break when summer vacation rolled around!

So I wanted to do something to celebrate the beginning of the break. I felt like there were all these things to do here and places to explore and summer was going to finally be our chance to have the time to see some of them. And that list definitely starts and ends with water. There is so much water here. The main thing, of course, is the coast and the beaches, but I guess when a place is so surounded by water, people enjoy water more, it's a bigger part of the culture. So there are swimming pools and water parks everywhere. So I figured the best place to start would be the beach!

Now I have discussed at length how I don't like the beach. I hate the sticky and the sand and the mess you have to clean up afterwards. But even I have to admit that it's harder to dislike the beach when the beach is this awesome. I think I may have almost enjoyed myself. First of all, it was beautiful. I mean, just stunning. I couldn't make up my mind if I enjoyed looking back at the mountains more or looking out across the sea more. They were both easily one of the most beautiful landscapes I've seen. Also, the sand was MIND BLOWING. It was black. Like, really black. It seems to be common knowledge that it's from volcanic rock and that's why it's black. But it's such common knowledge that nobody can really explain it to me. Like, where are these volcanic rocks coming from? Aren't all rocks from volcanoes at some point? You know, the rock cycle. (Never heard of that? Here you go.) So why would this whole beach be black? Shouldn't all beaches have a little bit of black instead? Anyway, whatever the reason is, it was really stinking cool. Plus the texture of the sand was a little different. Like NOT STICKY. I'm telling you, it was great. It was also K's first time to play in sand! Wow he was a fast convert. We ended up staying at the beach for three or four hours and then just as we were getting ready to leave it started raining, so it was perfect! I think everyone had pretty much the best first day of summer ever!