I Have Heard The Mermaids Singing

Last weekend we had another first with Jarrah: we took her to the beach at Coronado. You can tell I'm totally inexperienced at this toddler thing by the way I decided to dress her for the occasion. It was a windy, partly cloudy day, so I figured she should have jeans and sneakers, and a warm sweater. In my totally misguided fantasy, I saw our family strolling along the wavewash like a scene from Cezanne or whichever one did the pastoral seaside family scenes in the runny colors. In my fantasy, we were all wearing straw boater hats festooned with ribbons, with our cotton trousers artfully rolled to the knee, and we collected sea shells while gazing pensively towards the horizon. In reality, of course, Jarrah sat down in a bunch of wet sand, cried, discovered she liked it, sat down some more, splashed and dug, dug some more, and finished by crawling directly into the oncoming surf, whose iciness she seemed not to mind. Coronado sparkles with pyrite specks as thickly as gold glitter, and these bits stuck tenaciously to our hands, faces, and clothing. By the time we got Jarrah back to the car, we had to strip her down to her onesie just to avoid destroying her car seat. But I think we have a newly minted water baby!