Labor Day

Unfortunately, for most of the beautiful holiday weekend, we were trapped inside our apartment with each of us battling different stages of a stomach bug. Today, luckily we were able to get out do some things! We had originally planned to try and go to the beach, but we didn't really want to battle all the crowds of people. Instead, we shopped around for a new car seat for Aubrey and had a late lunch at the Olive Garden. (Chad and Mindy we always think of your family when we go there!) We drove around Milford exploring a little bit and decided to stop at the beach anyway. It was getting late enough that most people were gone already. The tide was going out, so a lot of the beach normally covered by water was becoming exposed. We'd never really been on the beach to witness this so it was kind of interesting. The water had gotten really shallow and you could walk out quite a ways with it never reaching over your calf. Again, Aubrey was kind of frightened of the tiny waves. I think it is more of the sounds of the waves she's scared of. We'd try to get her to stand in the water and she'd hold her legs up as high as
she could to keep them out of the water. We started walking out of the water when Sam picked up a rock and a little tiny crab was walking across it. It was as small as an eraser on a pencil if you can imagine! We kept looking in the water to try and see more and noticed all the little pebbles, or what we thought were pebbles, were actually snails. We also noticed a couple little hermit crabs crawling out towards the ocean. When we looked back a little more there were several little crabs crawling along! The water was only a couple inches deep and they were scurrying out, following the tide. I was a little nervous to move, afraid I'd step on one. I'm sure

the remaining people on the beach thought we were silly playing with the hermit crabs, but it was entertaining to us for quite awhile. We'd pick them up and have them open up in our hands. They were so many in all different sizes and shapes of shells. Aubrey really didn't know what to think of them and we didn't let her hold one, just because she'd probably put it in her mouth. It was interesting to see so many living things in the water. I guess we're use to fresh water lakes that done really have anything crawling around in the sand, except for bugs. The tide kept moving out, so we let Aubrey play in the sand a little bit and headed home. It turned out to be a pretty fun day for us and a great ending to our weekend!

Back to work, school and daycare for us tomorrow! I'm getting started in my Robbins pathology book this week. For those of you who are not familiar with this book, it is a 1500 page (yeah, it's huge!) text book that I will eventually read from cover to cover...one page at a time!! Take care!