A Sled, For More Than Ice and Snow

This sled was great fun, but we are admittedly jealous of the boogie boards.

Joseph took us to the beach on Saturday. We went to Lake Michigan Recreation Area in Manistee. Wow! Gorgeous view (of which I do not have a photo because of my general grouchiness after a day in the sun and after climbing a dune to get to the view)!

Channel out to the waters of Lake Michigan. It was a really lovely day, green water, blue skies.

I loved this place because even though there were a lot of people there (hey, it was a Saturday!), it is a wilderness area so the surroundings look totally natural. From the top of the dune you could look way down the the south and way up to the north and not see any development, houses, etc.

This location also had a channel from a river. The channel water in this case was cold as was Lake Michigan, but we always make the best of it.



I discovered that two beach trips in one week is a bit much, but we are almost all the way through Watership Down. We have two tapes left and I sit here in suspense writing, trying to plan a little trip where we can listen to the rest before the anxiety wears me down to a little nub.


Tadpoles were caught in a little area of water that we named "The bathtub." The kids had a wonderful time catching and observing these.






At one point, the older kids and Joseph climbed up to the top of a dune and did some jumping. It looked like excellent fun!



Much to my chagrin (being somewhat liberal in my environmental/ecology views), the kids decided to change the ecology of this little area by creating a channel from the cold pool of water into Lake Michigan. They were determined and worked on it for quite a while, digging deeper to ensure that they made their mark on the world. Will we come back and find things quite different the next time we are here? Who knows! How stable is the environment? Can one small channel dug make a big difference? I don't have the answer to this question. Some boys came along while we were eating our dinner and decided they'd like to make a dam in the little creek. Then they took it out, Nathan fuming all the time. It wasn't nearly as deep once they left it. We'll be back!!!!




I think it's so cool that the sand sings. I love the sound of it. Nathan couldn't produce the sound for my video, so Joseph did it for me.


Joseph likes to skip stones and this is the most perfect-est stone he's ever found. I couldn't count the times this stone skipped, but it would go all the way across the cold pool and land on the sand so it could be retrieved and re-thrown.