This past weekend, we celebrated Chinese New Year’s (Year of the Rabbit!) with Heather, Assaf, Taliana and Heather’s parents with dinner out at our favorite local Chinese restaurant, Shun Feng. Before heading out, we changed the kids into festive holiday clothes — luckily, Lola had gotten an outfit for Cameron and Taliana had a red jacket for Dylan to borrow and she wore her own lucky red dress. Totally spontaneously, Cameron and Dylan put their arms around each other and posed for a picture!
The kids got red envelopes from us, Heather and Assaf, Anyam and Grampa (Heather’s parents), and the restaurant (they are always so nice to us!)!! The kids were cool with the cash, but the sand dollars from Anyam and Grampa trumped the regular dollars.
I have a few sand dollars that I’ve explained to Dylan are very special treasures to me (kept in my treasure box of shells and rocks) and I had told him that when he’s bigger, he could have one of them and Cameron could have the other (this was long ago!). So, he was so thrilled when he got his very own that he could immediately put into his own treasure box!!
Here’s Taliana showing us her perfect sand dollar….
Cameron’s favorite part of the dinner was running several laps around the restaurant! She must have run at least a half mile!!!
Dylan was so thrilled to have a sand dollar, he wanted to go look for more, so on Sunday, we headed to the beach, in search of….
We came prepared with buckets and shovels…and binoculars for looking out at the ocean…
…and the sand dunes behind us!
And, we packed sandwiches and snacks, of course.
Cameron is still quite naturally drawn to flowers!
But, she did like collecting all kinds of stuff, especially rocks!
Dylan and I walked a long way down the beach, but I didn’t want to go to far into the water with Dylan to search for the whole sand dollars, so we collected a lot (and I mean, a LOT!) of broken sand dollars. Dylan didn’t want to pass any of them up!! Once we reunited with Tom and Cameron, he spread them out on the sand in a beautiful pattern. He spent much time in the evening cleaning his sand dollar bits off and arranging them on his make-believe beach on the back of the couch.
It is so great to see his enthusiasm, we’re already planning another trip to go collect some more!
