Beautiful day at the beach

(Goblin is 28 months)

Yesterday was St David's Day and Goblin and I went with Nanny to visit Poppy's grave. This should probably have been quite a somber affair but nothing ever is with Goblin in tow. He insisted that Nanny let him use the trowel to plant a narcissus on Poppy's grave, before proceeding to try and dig at some of the other burial mounds. While I am sure Poppy would have had a good chuckle at his grandson's antics, I'm not sure what anyone else might have thought so it was just as well that we were able to divert Goblin's energies with a run along the beach that is right next to the green burial site.

We hadn't really intended to go for a potentially wet and muddy walk so I hadn't brought any change of clothes. But Goblin didn't let that stop him. He pretty much made a bee line for the sea as soon as we got down onto the beach.

And boy was it muddy. At one point I was worried I might lose a shoe. Because Goblin is lighter than me and Nanny he was able to walk out onto bits where we just sank in the mud. I spent significant amounts of time coaxing Goblin back from the shore edge with "interesting" rocks and stones - anything to stop him wading further out of my reach into what was effectively a clay marsh.

Thankfully a trowel and a rock pool is all the entertainment Goblin needs and he busied himself digging in the mud while Nanny had a rest.

Goblin and Clarrie the dog then proceeded to hurtled up and down the beach with me chasing them (mainly to take photos!).

At one point Clarrie disappeared up a sandy cliff edge and Goblin looked like he would follow.

As you can see from this picture there is quite a lot of coastal erosion and I was rather concerned that a small boy 'hoofing it' up a cliff might bring the whole thing crashing down on our heads. So again to try and distract him I started planting things in the sand and writing stuff. It made for great photos even if Goblin was still busy trying to scale the cliff with the dog.

Eventually Clarrie came back down onto the beach and Goblin was satisfied to follow her around and get about as wet and filthy as he possibly could. At this point he is "making food" with the clay soil and sand.

The photo of his trousers doesn't quite capture the full glory of how gross they were getting because it doesn't show the fact that they were also wringing wet with sea water. At one point he actually tried to pull them off - which he's never done before - so even he must have concluded that getting soaking wet and sandy wasn't the best plan in the world when we had a half mile walk back to the car.

 But it was a reasonably sunny day and he wasn't cold so neither of us were too worried. 

 We do love the beach!

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