Myrtle Beach at Twilight

            Recently we took a trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We drove and had a great time doing it. The kids are usually good when we travel but probably only because they each have a DS and they play games all the way to and fro. Alex and I had been to the ocean before, not together. He went on vacation with my parents a few years ago to visit my brother and his family in Vermont and I had been to the ocean when I vacationed with my parents twenty-whatever years ago. The point is that the twins, not to mention my husband, had never been to the ocean and were very excited to go. My husband handled his excitement better than the seven year-olds did. When we got to our hotel in Myrtle Beach we all got out of the van and stretched. It was about 7:00 in the evening so I assumed we would go to the beach the next day considering that it was fairly dark. That was until I looked around and my little boys were gone. I could hear them laughing and squealing so while my husband checked us in my oldest son and I followed the sounds of excited whooping. That was when Alex came upon a sandal. He picked it up and we continued to walk along, finding another sandal here and another there until we had all four of them. Two little boys, four feet, four shoes. I gathered that they were running to the water and decided to skip the preliminaries and just strip on their way. Thankfully they did leave their clothes on but as we began to find shoes I was unsure that they would. We found the boys, knee deep in water and running along the sand, laughing and marveling at the place we had just arrived at. After catching up with them and telling them that they cannot take off on us again, no matter how excited they were, we let them run and splash and be kids.

            It wasn’t long until they noticed there were about one hundred seagulls gathered along the strip of beach we were enjoying. My charming little boys are always trying to devise a way to catch a bird…or a squirrel…or a chipmunk…or a cat. It really doesn’t matter what kind of animal it is, they want to catch it and be friends. This did not work with the seagulls (and has never ever worked, period). They tried walking very quietly, they tried sneaking, they tried it all but eventually decided that they would just run after the gulls and watch them fly away from them. In the end, that was more fun than catching one.