Ocean Isle Beach, Day One

I'm too tired for this. I should be writing in the morning. That's the only time that works for me. Instead, here I am trying to fill minutes as I drink my tea and wait for Berit and Griffin to come back from getting ice cream. Rowan is not doing sugar, and I am supporting her in that by also not doing sugar. Mostly. This isn't easy, but it is likely the best thing for me. There is agave in my tea, and I just ate a handful of cherries, so it's practically ice cream anyway.

Ocean Isle Beach is the sleepiness beach town on the face of North Carolina. One of the southernmost points on the Outer Banks, Ocean Isle is a stone's throw from its polar opposite across the South Carolina border - Myrtle Beach, which I imagine we'll visit sometime this week to mix it up.

We got in yesterday, utterly wrecked from the red eye from Colorado. Intact after about eight hours of sleep-deprived travel, we fell into our beds and slept into he mid-afternoon when I got up and persuaded Griffin to leave his laptops to walk to the beach with me.

"Think about the ocean, Dad. Billions of years old with all the creatures that have lived in it during all that time. Do you think it's more ocean or more pee?"'

Griffin and I go back and wake the girls before heading out for an epic food shopping spree at Walmart. It was a mistake. There's a Lowes Foods closer, but somehow I've mistakenly goten it into my head that we have o go to Walmart to shop. It took us at least an hour and a half, but we got out of here with a bunch of staples for the week, headed back to 47 Anson Srreet and ate pizza.

Today was a beach day. We swam, rode waves, played a little ocean Marco Polo, and walked the strand. Griffin became obsessed with finding the telltale air bubbles beneath the receding waves and digging up a hermit crab.Then he noticed one of the birds with a small clam and realized that it was clams that they were chasing beneath the sand. We became fascinated with digging these coquinas up and then putting them back on the sand to watch them burrow back underground with their invisible foot. Six of these - Butthole, Butthole Junior, Jethro, Clem, Goldilocks and (unnamed) came back to Anson Street with us to die in a block of hardened sand in an Altoids tin.

Tonight I bought a pound of roadside shrimp which we ate with quesadillas.