The beach

Disneyland.  Is there really any word more important to a kid?  My parents decided they wanted to do a whole family trip to California.  So in April of this year we headed to a beach house about 20 minutes from Disneyland.  The drive down wasn't as bad as it could have been, mostly because we had a DVD player in the car.  The kids slept a lot of it too.  We stopped over in Vegas for the night and the kids had a ball bouncing around the hotel room and the swimming pool.  Asher loved the hot tub and each time we took him out and dried him off he'd run back in.  Then we were back on the road.  

The beach house was AWESOME.  There is no other way to do California.  Each morning we woke to see dolphins swimming by the coast.  I got to run along the beach.  Kate and Asher just had to walk out the door to play in the sand and waves.  It was just wonderful.

Kate's first-ever view of the ocean

To Asher, the beach was a huge sandbox.  With extras.

Trying to beat the waves back to shore

Jon's favorite part of the entire vacation was body surfing.  The dolphins even showed up once and swam pretty close.  All Jon saw was the fin and swore he was swimming with sharks because he heard the "Jaws" theme playing.  

 Asher wanted to join his dad and uncle Nathan but couldn't quite get the board into the water.  Grandma helped him out a little.

Kate preferred just playing in the sand with her cousins.  They built sand castles, buried each other, and looked for shells.

I, of course, was obsessed with the camera's point of view.  The funny thing about photography is that you can think it's the most awesome picture and completely love it.  Someone (or everyone) can look at the same picture and see absolutely nothing special.  I suppose that's also part of the magic of photography.  It's very personal.  For me, the beach held new wonders to photograph, especially because of the light on the water.

Study in seaweed

I loved walking along the beach and looking at the huge variety of shells.  I'm sort of nerdy and started thinking about Darwinism/evolution, circle of life, natural beauty, etc.  Then I came upon this little crab.  I've never seen one like this and as the birds were fairly active it was even more startling they hadn't gotten to him yet.  I still haven't figured out what kind of crab it was.

My kids are such posers.  This is Asher's Blue Steel look.  Kate is sporting the windy messy hair European thing.  It works.

Maybe Jon's best picture ever.

The beach and it's many wonders were awesome to experience with the kids but the big D was calling...