Beaches in January

Once more, I shall bore you with tales of my son. Soemtimes I would love to get into the mind of a 2 year old. For a while now, every time he sees a picture of the Fat Controller, he says 'Daddy'. It makes me giggle every time. I, on the other hand, am Peter Pan, apparently.

Also, Daniel is just getting into imaginary play. He needs a bit of encouragement but then there is no stopping him. Last night, we were looking through his photo albums and saw pictures of the beach from holiday. So, at 6.30pm in JAnuary, he declared that he wanted to go to the beach. I tried to explain the impracticalities of this, so he said 'beach later' as if we would be going in the next 10 minutes. Which was when I had a genius mummy moment.

Using 2 blankets, I created a 'beach' in his bedroom. We used sticks and his plastic snooker cue for spades and we were soon having a whale of a time on the beach. He pretended to splash in the water and kept saying 'cold.' This morning, he went on a boat to see some ducks with his grandad, apparently. We even had ice cream (a wooden whistle) which he kept licking and saying chocolate ice cream! He does get quite bossy and demanded that I 'dig castle, mummy.' Every time I stopped I was ordered back to work.

The funniest moment came last night when we put him to bed. A couple of minutes after putting him to bed, he poked his head around the door, made a dash for the snooker cue and ran back in his room. Neil went to put him back to bed and he just said, 'more digging!'

It is wonderful to see his imagination and creativity awakening. It is something I want to encourage throughout his childhood and into adulthood as it is such a precious gift. Sometimes God feels very close in these moments. I am pretty sure he likes our beach as much as Daniel.