Oh, what an adventure we had.

Going to the beach with a 3 year old is quite a trip. PB and I loaded The Force up on Thursday. We took Tough Lucy Dodge to be sure we had enough room for all the accouterments a 3 year old requires for a 2.5 day trip to the beach. There are a lot. First there was the huge cooler of food. The Force can be a picky eater, and since we're trying to vacation on a budget this year (as is the whole U.S. of A.) we figured a PBJ from the cooler would be easier to find and cheaper to make than finding a $6 PBJ on the beach. There was another cooler for drinks. Then there's the beach bags full of towels, toys, noodles, sunscreen, buckets, shovels and sandforms. 3 beach chairs. And 2 beach umbrellas. A car seat, of course. Oh, and don't forget the DVD player. Let me tell you, that is a sweet, sweet invention since I was a kid. I may never, NEVER want to hear the sound of the original Batman and Robin movie again, but not hearing, not even once, "Are we there yet?" was music to my ears.

We took off in pretty good time, all things considered. About 30 seconds before we left it started to rain, and it didn't stop until some time Friday morning. We stayed at a friend's house about 25 minutes from the beach. When we pulled in Thursday night, the door that was supposed to be open was locked. That led us on an almost 2 hour long "key-hunt adventure" (no, really The Force, it IS really a REAL game! Even Dora knows about it!) trying to get the spare key from our friend's sister. Anyway, when we got out of the truck The Force promptly declared that, in fact, we were NOT at the beach, that he couldn't even see the beach, and he was not fooled. It took a while to convince him that we were a lot closer to the beach than we had been when we left FarmVegas.

When we got to the beach parking lot on Friday morning, The Force was finally convinced that we had not been lying to him all along. PB tried to take him into the ocean, and you should have heard that kid scream. Holy Toledo, has that kid got pipes. From that point forward, any time the word "beach" was spoken, he would immediately say "I only want to play in the sand, not get in the water" as fast as his little mouth would move.

Tomorrow? How the PBJ monster turned calamari into "my favorite". Seriously.