Truro 2013.

We were lucky this year.  It was hot and sunny for most of our time in Truro.  There were lobster rolls, fried clams, and there was salted caramel ice cream.  We saw dozens of seals and not one shark.  And all the moms and dads (even Jeff, who is not a fan of consecutive hours spent beside the ocean) were happy to lounge, flop around in the waves, faux-boogie board, and mostly, watch our kids enjoy Beach Life.  We realized this year that our kids are old enough to look forward to Truro.  They have a family vacation place, a place my sisters and I never really had growing up.  And for them, Truro is a place already loaded with memories: the ice cream at Sweet Escape; the big waves at Longnook and Ballston; the seafood at Arnold's; the mornings and nights when cousins are more like siblings in one big, loud house; and the stuffies, candies, and rows of Portuguese, American, and rainbow flags draped over Commercial Street in P-Town.

Riley is the only kid out of the half-dozen who can reliably swim, and we mostly trusted her when she strode out into the ocean on her boogie board to float on the lapping waves.  The other kids had fun waiting on the shore for tiny currents and their brief lifts, sometimes high enough to knock them off their feet.  Because it made supervision easier, because it allowed us to enjoy Coronas and mixed drinks in red plastic cups, we were grateful that this was the extent of their adventurousness.

At Coast Guard beach, an enormous sand bar provided our kids with a cold, shallow river of ocean water.  They gave each other boogie board rides, and later, we tugged them on the boards through deeper water to make it to the actual shore.  Here's where Jackson first ventured into the water without hesitation, most likely because it reminded him of his precious Centennial Beach.

And after that, he was able to relax ocean-side.  Instead of racing away from the waves and watching them with suspicion and malice, he frolicked in them.

Emma's come a long way from her first year in Truro, when she kept trying to leave the beach on her own.  She spent hours singing and dancing beside crashing waves.

Marley took advantage of wide stretches of sand to work on cartwheels and handstands.  She gave me a couple of cartwheel tutorials, and I am not including the picture someone took of me mid-pathetic-tumble, because it is gross and embarrassing and nowhere near as graceful as my Beanie with her toes pointed and her arms and stomach so strong.  It's like, a picture like this of Marley happens in one take, and if I want to be in a flattering photograph, I need a minimum of fifty shots and then some extensive Instagram cropping and filtering, just for starters.

I love this picture because the littlest kids are fully immersed in Beach Life, particularly Jackson, skipping along the shore, working it, in the background.

Riley celebrated vacation her own way: by throwing her long limbs into the warm sand and resting.  Riley loves naps and hot tubs; she knows how to relax.  One morning, she stretched and said, "You know what would really hit the spot?  A stuffie."  She probably already has at least one hundred in various bins and buckets in her room.  In Truro, Riley spent several mornings with a thin coating of sand covering just one side of her face.

Owen was a reliable assistant for Todd when he got our Truro kites up and going.  The first few were flimsy, plastic busts, including one that Todd tried so hard to keep flying he backed into and practically onto an unsuspecting sunbather, much to the delight of Heather's, Jeff's, and Michael's long-term memory.  And so Todd and I started our date night in P-Town by visiting The Kite Store for something more substantial, something capable of soaring high enough to launch Todd's carefully crafted paper-napkin parachutes down the length of Longnook for Owen and Marley to chase.

I feel as though Rudy outlasted and outplayed her sibling and most of her cousins on the beach, partly because I'm not entirely sure how she spent all of her time there, and not only because of the Twisted Teas.  Toot is self-sufficient, which is fantastic.  What's not so great is that when she's doing things on her own, she's usually acting without pausing to reflect on potential consequences.  At the beach, though, she was a champ.  I don't think she whined at all, or maybe she did a little, but it was nowhere near the volume we got from her older and more sophisticated big sister.  It's like this: when Rudy needed a snack or a drink, she got one.  When she wanted to play in the sand, she did.  She gamely balanced on a boogie board among the older kids; she danced in surf beside Jackson.  She continues to win at Beach Life.  Probably by next year she'll be face-first in the sand like Riley, completely soaking it in.

Marley's the only one who actually complained about having to spend sun-soaked days on Truro's perfect ocean-side beaches.  She wanted to be bayside, where the shells and the rocks are.  And granted, that's a fun trip to make, but if we're going to by the water for a while, I'd rather avoid the seaweed and the muddy sand.  I'd rather stretch out on warm, fine sand, listen to crashing waves, search for seals, and ride a freezing, rolling wave into the shore where the kids are salty and sunscreened and screaming with delight.

In the morning, when we announced that we'd be heading to Ballston or Longnook, Marley erupted into a bratty tantrum of entitlement.  She wanted to go to the BAYSIDE!  Doesn't anyone care about what SHE wants?  (When you're one of a dozen, Beanie, not that much.)  Even so, one morning, while most everyone else was still asleep, I brought Marley on her own to Corn Hill Beach so that she could search for shells to her heart's content.  I explained that shell hunting was a good morning or evening thing to do, but that the narrow, seaweed-strewn beach wouldn't work as well all-day for twelve people.  She was so happy.  And then, later that morning, when we left for Longnook, she had the same fit as the day before.  

On our last full day at the beach, even Jackson and Jeff stayed with the rest of us until the first menacing clouds of our vacation rolled in.  After that day, we spent time visiting the Red Barn Arcade, mini-golfing beneath gray skies, working on mini-scrapbooks, rehearsing a circus that never reached performance-readiness, and taking rainy trips to Wellfleet, Orleans, and Provincetown.  But most of our vacation this year was on the beach, and I miss it already.