Fun in the Sun

Pool warrior

Originally uploaded by Mike’s Flickr Account.

We had a great weekend — trying to do better at taking advantage of the Florida Lifestyle, as Mike puts it. On Saturday, we did our errands in the morning, then went to the pool in the afternoon. Mike snagged this shot of Nate on his camera phone — I was slathering him with sunscreen everywhere, and decided if it was going to go into his hair anyway, it might as well be fun (the redness of his face is a trick of the light and poor camera quality, not sunburn!). Nate, like his brother before him, has no fear of the water, and was quite happy to jump into my arms, climb back up the side, and repeat, repeat, repeat.

On Sunday, we packed lunch and headed to the beach, where Alex did an absolutely outstanding job of practicing swimming with the kickboard. Our spot was perfect for that purpose — Alex could go pretty far out and was still no deeper than chest high, which gave him a lot of confidence to not touch the bottom at all. At one point, we ventured a few hundred yards to a sand bar across the way (Nate in my wonderful-for-such-days solarveil Hotsling) and Alex kicked on the board the whole way. There was one spot where the water got suddenly deep, and it was to be honest a little scary for a moment, as Alex was over his head. But he handled it wonderfully — did not panic at all, just ditched the board and swam right to me as I quickly closed the gap between us. I was very proud of him for keeping his wits.

The only problem is that I need to figure out a better way to do sunscreen. Sunday confirmed for me that the spray on stuff just does not get even coverage (Alex had some burning on his back despite 3 applications of SPF 50 spray over the course of 4 hours). And his face — it is hard to keep sunglasses on the boys, and Alex got burned yet again on the delicate area right under his eyes. It is hard to put regular sunscreen there. Please, I am taking suggestions!

We had a waterproof camera on our excursions — I will post the water baby pictures as soon as I get them developed.