How to keep playing at the beach… away from the beach

Well, we’re now in September, it keeps raining, everything around is about back to school. The summer’s officially over. This is always one of the most depressing times of the year for me. But even if you can’t stay on vacation forever and have to eventually leave the beach (or wherever else you’ve been on summer vacation), your kids can at least still pretend that they’re still off on holiday. Well, that might be a bit of a long stretch, but it tends to be easier for my kids to ease from vacation to the normal routine when they continue playing with their summer things. So, even if they can’t keep playing at the beach, they can still continue playing with their beach toys!

Ok, I know, this is sort of a silly thing to write about (but heck, I’m trying to re-transition into the normal routine, too, so give me a break!), but I discovered last year that it’s surprisingly easy to play with beach toys even in the least interesting yard, driveway or park. For example, the little plastic sieve, so helpful for finding rocks and shells on the beach?

Regular dirt goes right through it just as well as beach sand!

Sand castle molds? I never would’ve imagined that they work pretty well with dried up pine needles, too!

You can make whole pine needle villages, which is what all the kids who live in our apartment complex started doing when they saw us doing this!

You can also make some very… uncomfortable-looking… ice cream cones, too, with these sand toys from Ikea.

Which can also double as beards.

Or branching out into other materials, you can make some interesting ice cream flavors. Mmm… rosemary-stone-flower! My favorite! (That reminds me of the bizarre ice cream flavors I made with my daughter a couple of years ago.)

Old dropped clothespins and sticks also give a nice added touch! If it happens to be raining too much to play like this, you could also use beach toys indoors with homemade moonsand. My point is this: don’t let where you are stop you from dreaming and playing! Make use of what you have where you have it and, most importantly, have fun!

Question of the day: How did you spend your summer?

We actually have a pretty great vacation year in that we were able to go off to the beach for a decent number of days twice in addition to going to the United States to visit family and friends. So we’re now going through vacation withdrawal and are trying to come to terms with the fact that normal life has to eventually resume! Although, really, “normal” life is pretty much over now in our home because I’m about to start working outside the home again for the first time in years. Which is great, but also means that there’s going to be quite a bit of upheaval in our lives. Wish me luck!!