It's a bird. It's a plane. It's...my child?

Nye Creek, on Nye Beach

This story deserves to be told.  Last month we decided to seize the day and take a walk in the sunshine.  Lars, the girls and I headed down to the beach access at the end of our street.  As it is set up, we can go down that way, walk up the beach and come back to the road a couple blocks north and head home again.  Between the two beach access points, there is a large pipe that drains the rain water back into the ocean.  It runs perpendicular from beneath the parking lot to the ocean.  Now depending on the amount of rain, "Nye Creek" can be non-existent or quite an obstacle to cross.  As it happened that it had been raining for the previous...I don't know...46 days or so, the water flow was quite ample.

I had my suspicions that this would be the case and was intending to turn around and go back the way we came, but Lars wasn't going to be stopped by a little water. :)   He had walked ahead with the older three girls and I was quite a ways behind with Heidi.  She tends to get rather distracted in the sand and likes to run all over the place like a crazy person.  When I decided to just pick her up and was able refocus my attention on other things, I looked ahead and saw Leah literally flying through the air over Nye Creek.  She landed safe and dry on the other side.  Then I watched as Lars picked up Naomi, swung her twice and then launched her over the creek.  I caught up to them as he was hoisting Emilia up for the same fate as her sisters.  I suggested maybe finding another way across...one that didn't look life threatening, for instance.  Lars reassured me they were fine and tossed E across the creek and then hopped over himself.

This left me standing on the south side with Heidi and Lars on the north side with the other girls.  You can bet I wasn't going to chuck my two year old across a creek, no matter how shallow it was!  So I walked up to the wall where the pipe was and had Heidi walk across the cement ledge over the pipe.  Lars took her down, I hopped over the water and we continued our little walk as if it was a completely normal part of our day to catapult red headed children over small bodies of water.