Calm Blue Ocean

 

Ted has been, to put it mildly, apeshit.  He is defiant, oppositional, obstinate and pretty much redefining my sense of how emotionally spent I can feel at the end of a day.  During the week after his party, I greeted James with the clarion call of "Beach dinner".  Basically the idea of having to say at home and cook a dinner after the day of intense demands I had been subjected to was enough to send me screaming to an addiction of some sort.  Alcohol, chocolate, hard drugs, hey I'm easy when it comes to choosing an option to make me forget about days like those.

So despite grumblings from James I persisted, and off we drove to our favouritest, most deliciousest, most excellent beach food offerings of all time - home of the tofu burger.  With some chips to round out the experience we ate in the already waning light down at Bronte, in the company of Ted's friend the plane he received from a friend for his birthday,  

We were able to eat in peace for about fifteen full minutes, which means that was how long it took for Ted to finish his meal.  Then he was off, racing to the edge of the lawn and back until he decided to ditch the 'back' part and continue on to the sand on his own.

It was the usual affair of Ted's normal piecemeal strip down, starting with his top.  There were still quite a few people there as you can see in the background, and that's Harriet venturing in with her school top still on and a pair of undies.  Their swimming costumes were there and in a bag readily available, but nothing says midweek swimming surprise quite like wading in with your day clothes half on.

Ted managed to find this fantastic, enormous stick which he wielded with all of the wild abandon for which we had sought refuge at the beach in the first place.  Perhaps the conch shell should have been a large, hard stick?

 

Harriet had a blast.  She had brought along a doll (Boomer, a member of our family for about six years now I think) and poor old Boomer was thrown into the ocean and then fetched with screams and shouts of excitement.

Nothing really much happened this night.  But the ocean, that expanse of blue, offered up an end to our day that didn't involve us becoming a family of three.  This isn't quite SouleMama over here, but we like it all the same.