The original plan for the reservoir involved a motorboat. The motorboat never put in an appearance. It belonged to the brother of my brother’s neighbor. With a communication chain that long, no wonder there were miscommunications somewhere. My kids never noticed the absense of the motorboat. They’ve never been in a motorboat before and so they happily assumed that floating around in inflatible rafts was what we meant when we said “boating.”
Even without the motorboat it was a good day. All 13 kids found multitudes of ways to entertain themselves. Patches was leery of going out in a boat, but once he did it he didn’t want to stop. Then he happily helped my engineer brother create an elaborate sand castle. After that he drove rocks through the sand making roads and “vroooom!” noises.
Gleek loved the swimming and splashing, but then she got cold so she adjourned to the warm dry sand. At one point Gleek was creating little zen rock gardens with pebbles and hand brushed sand. I don’t think she’s ever seen such a rock garden before, she just liked the patterns. She also helped with a large sand castle creation that the girl cousins were making. It was a structure much devoted to be-pebbled decorations.
Link splashed and played with his same age cousins. One of those cousins seemed to feel it a personal mission to transport all the beach sand back into the water. He’d get sopping wet. Then he’d roll around in the sand until he was completely coated. Once coated, he would dash for the water, usually shedding sand across the adults as he went past. Then he would rinse and repeat. Link didn’t like rolling in the sand, but he did get his legs dirty and rinse them multiple times. He helped build the engineer’s sand castle and put some effort into the pebble decorated girly castle as well.
Kiki loved the boats. She spent most of the day out in them either with a cousin or by herself. By the end of the day she’d shanghaied my brother into functioning as a motor for the boat. The whole group of kids had an elaborate game where my brother pushed the boat and all the kids were hitchhikers who tried to pile on while the boat was in motion. That game continued even when we loaded my van full of little kids and sent me back to the house for the first round of showers-and-pajamas. Apparently my sister-in-law had to rev her engine and threaten to drive away to get my brother and the older kids out of the water. Apparently 5 hours just wasn’t enough water fun for them all.