We spend our days at the beach: chasing minnows, building sand castles, and playing in the stream that cuts through the sand. It’s our fifth year in PEI and admittedly it’s a lot easier now that the boys are older. I remember spending the first year following our toddling 13 month old around trying to keep him from eating his weight and sand and from toppling off everything he climbed. I can now sit for hours on the beach reading while the boys play happily in the sand. There are still plenty of fights to break up because apparently throwing sand is still a thing even when you’re not 2 but I can now make it through several chapters of a book before I’m interrupted rather than 3 sentences.
On one of our few outings we had breakfast at one of our favourite PEI restaurants, the PEI Preserve Company. Even my restless bunch will sit quietly through a meal at the Preserve company: they love the food but they appreciate even more looking out over the water while they eat and getting to see the staff sterilize and jar the preserves.
We always head up the hill after breakfast to the Gardens of Hope Butterfly conservatory. They could sit for hours catching butterflies on orange slices. Even my eldest, who isn’t the biggest fan of any creatures big or small, will now happily feed the butterflies without shuddering as the flutter past him.
Our Survivor challenge, which you can read more about here, continued with an endurance test: the boys had to hold rocks on the backs of their hands and the last one standing took home the prize. Okay so there really wasn’t a prize but he won honour and bragging rights (good enough). Our challenges are providing entertainment and speculation for our fellow beach goers.
There are a whole lotta jellyfish in the water this year so we headed to a beach near Souris so the boys could swim and ride the waves. The water there is amazingly clear and the sand is white: it’s as close as we’ve come to a Caribbean-like experience.
That evening, much to the amusement of passers-by, we had three white cups on the beach for our daily Survivor challenge and three boys racing back and forth to the water trying to fill them up with spoons. When 15 minutes passed and there wasn’t a clear winner we gave them a speed round, which entailed squeezing as much water as they could out of their clothes into the cups. Watching them dunk neck deep in the shallow water and then race up the beach clutching their clothes to their bodies was priceless.
