Beach combing, frisbee and messages in the sand

I have taken a complete blogging break over the school holidays. Magoo likes to be out and about as much as possible. Plus my Mother-in-Law came to stay for a week, so I wanted to give them both my full attention. Our holiday was filled with trips to the park, meeting up with friends, walks to the allotment, bike rides, ice creams and lots of trampolining.

We seem to be a little bit out of step with our Easter Holiday break. Most schools had their holidays around the bank holiday weekend. Ours started a week after the Bank Holiday weekend. Although it has been a bit grim and grey at times, we have enjoyed the occasional burst of Spring sunshine.

Saturday was a bright and beautiful day, so we decided to make the most of the sun and head to the beach near our home. We love this particular beach because there are lots of places to explore. Along the tide line you can often find interesting pieces of drift wood, pebbles in a hundred and one different shades and sometimes the odd fossil.

Due to high tides and Winter storms, the sandbanks were more exposed than usual. It looked like large chunks had been washed away. We could clearly see the exposed layers of sand, stone and shells in the bank. Magoo and Mr M couldn't resist having a dig around to see if there were any fossils or interesting stones to be found. We particularly love finding pebbles containing quartz because they glitter in the sunshine and look like jewels.

We took bucket and spades, beach mats and a frisbee. Magoo loves the frisbee, and spent quite a while throwing it into the air just for the fun of it. I really wanted to try and capture a photo of the neon pink frisbee against the blue sky and Welsh coastline in the distance.

We also spent some time collecting stones to write messages in the sand. I though it might be nice if another family or a dog walker found our 'LOVE' note later on in the day. I hope it survived the tide coming in...but if it didn't, there's plenty more pebbles to write a new message next time we're on the beach.

This week I'm linking up with these lovely blogs:

"Country Kids" over on www.coombemill.com

"Twinkly Tuesday" over on mummascribbles.com

"Point + Shoot" over on youbabymemummy.com and www.snowingindoors.com

"Whatever the Weather" over on www.lifeunexpected.co.uk and monkeyandmouse.co.uk

"Let Kids Be Kids" over on letkidsbekids.co.uk

"Blogger Club UK" over on www.cuddlefairy.com and mudpiefridays.com

Beachcombing in the sunshine

Once the weather turns a bit parky, it's all so easy to shut yourself indoors. Given half a chance, I could probably quite happily hibernate from November 1st through to, well, April 1st. But with an energetic four year old in the house and an in-built desire all Brits have to make the most of every drop of sunshine, we went for a walk on the beach on Saturday. We're really lucky to live so close to some lovely, untouched beaches, so it would be a travesty not to go down there when the sun makes an appearance!

Although we don't face out to sea, even in the Bristol Channel we get some great opportunities to do a bit of beach combing. In the past we've found all sorts of things from sea-bleached driftwood, crates, fishing nets, plastic floats right through to a US Army truck wheel.

Weston Bay has one one of the biggest tidal ranges in the world, in the Bay, the low tide mark is over a mile away from the seafront. So there's great scope for a bit of tideline rummaging, especially in the Winter when the tides are even higher and even more gubbins is bought up onto the beach.

On our beach combing excursion we found lots of strange pieces of wood, there was even a whole tree washed up on the beach. It's par for the course that my daughter has to crawl and climb all over the driftwood. Plus we had a 'strange stone hunt' and decorated the washed-up tree trunk with or finds.

I'm linking up with the Country Kids Linky (#countrykids) hosted by the Lovely Coombe Mill