he was born in utah but he's a pnw boy at heart

Last weekend Jon carved a golf cart race track into the tall grass in the far pastures. We spent a good chunk of our afternoon going for it, timing our races and competing against each other. Jon came in first, naturally, with Kendal second (but if you add in her off-course penalties she came in last) I came next, and then Amber brought in the rear, but with her gimpy arm we should have subtracted at least 15 seconds. Anyway, all that playing in the tall, loose grass that has gone to seed led to a massive allergy attack. Thankfully, we live on Camano Island and a trip to the beach to breath in the clean, salty air is only a few minutes' drive from our house.

As soon as we let Emory loose on the rocks, he marched straight for the water, gracefully making it over the slippery seaweed-covered rocks. He crouched and threw rocks into the water, tasted seashells, played with seaweed, got soaked, and loved every second. I'm not sure why we haven't been to the beach in the past 6 months we've been here (must have been the cold, rainy weather that lasted so long this year and the nearly freezing temperature of the water in Puget Sound), but with warm enough temperatures, we were able to just let our little boy play and get as wet and dirty as he wanted. I hope we're breeding a webbed-toed kid. And I'm so grateful to live surrounded by water and so much beauty, even if that means his diapers will be full of gravelly sand all summer.