lessons from the beach

I’m back from our annual trek to Rhode Island where we hit the beach and spent some quality time with my husband’s extended family.

Every family has their own special set of, let’s call them traditions, that make their vacation special to them and my husband’s family is no exception.

To help families everywhere in preparation (or recovery) from their family vacations, I’ve pulled together a couple of things that I learned on our own beach week.

Because even on vacation, there are lessons.

1. Cousins are magical. One of my favorite things about spending a week with 20+ members of my husband’s family is seeing our boys with their cousins. Growing up, I worshipped my older cousins and looked out for my younger cousins, and I love seeing that for my kids. Adult cousins are nice too.

2. Orange is a food group. Cheese crackers with peanut butter, goldfish, Cheetos, Doritos….yes, you can survive on only orange food.

3. More people doesn’t always mean more help. How many people does it take to decipher the instructions to Cluster Fight? Remember the lyrics to a Rick Astley song? Figure out where the ketchup is? At the beach, everyone has an opinion. It can feel a little bit like moving through molasses. Sweet but also somewhat slow and sticky.

4. There is no good way to get everything and everyone to the beach. (See #3) No one is biting on my “take you own chair and walk” strategy. After years of trying to refine a system, we’re getting closer but there still seems to be some different factions in the area of beach set up.

5. There are options. (See #4) If you are trying to figure something out, you might want to hire my husband’s family. They always have 457 different options for handling every scenario.

6. Bring your dinner.  We take turns cooking and this year I cooked our family’s contribution at home so all I had to do was heat it up once we got to the beach. Best. Decision. Ever. Grocery stores at the beach are always mobbed and pricey. Plus beach house knives are notoriously laughable. The limes for cocktails looked like they had been prepped by a shark.

7. Lifeguards are not just eye candy. It was really rippin’ in Narragansett the first few days that we were there. The lifeguards pulled a half dozen people out of the water. This year we were really impressed by more than just their abs.

8. Sometimes you just have to do it already. The ladies of the house finally (after years of sitting on the beach talking about it) had a group SUP (stand-up paddle board) lesson. We tried something new, got a little exercise and were only mildly competitive about it.

9. Watch your back. As relaxed as I claimed to be, I came home with a knotted up neck and pinched nerve. A week of lugging around a heavy beach bag, sleeping on a weird pillow and skipping yoga left my back and neck way out of whack.

10. Every year it gets easier. A new influx of toddlers in our family left me silently thanking the beach gods that we are out of that stage. But the good news is that every year the kids get easier, have more fun, and soon we’ll be dragging them out of bed to send them on the Dunkin’ Donuts runs. Can you imagine?

11. We are lucky. Often when I tell people about our family beach week, they say what a cool tradition it is. They are envious of our annual t-shirts and sandwich making skills and sing alongs (you should really get a cousin that plays the guitar). And yes, luck does have something to with it. And maybe there’s a little bit of crazy too. But a lot of it is just showing up, making the commitment to be there and letting the beach happen to you.

Here’s one last thing for you to think on…

This year our family was in charge of designing the beach house t-shirts. Our boys came up with the tagline – Get down to ‘Gansett. These waves aren’t going to ride themselves.

And of course what they had in mind was the waves at the beach. We often have to drag them blue-lipped out of the Atlantic.

But I couldn’t get out of my head a less literal interpretation. The idea that we are always experiencing waves whether they are big, small, scary, fun – and you decide. Am I going to ride them or fight against them?  To ride them you have to embrace them, give up control and let them carry you. Or you can fight against them and end up just plain exhausted. This week I chose to ride the waves. And that might be the secret to why I had such a great time.