The Beach? Sure, Why Not?

Today started out mundane - daily trip to the bottle return facility (it's going to take weeks to unload all these!!), piano lessons, school work, etc.  At 2:45, Christian asked if we could go to the beach.  He said he was in the mood to go swimming.  Normally I'd say no to the beach that late in the day, but we didn't have any other plans and I loved that he wanted to do something away from the screen.  So, we packed up as quickly as we could and drove to Island Lake Park.  We got there just before 4 and swam for an hour.  One hour doesn't seem like much but the weather was a bit cloudy and windy - just the low 70s - and so an hour was just perfect.  By the end of it, we were all shivering a bit and Peter was getting fussy, so we didn't mind leaving.  It was perfect.  We were home by 6 to have dinner and everyone had a great time.  I'm really glad we went.  Sadly, I didn't remember to take a single picture AGAIN! 

Peter is getting better and better at eating solids but his way of telling me he's done really leaves much to be desired.  I mentioned that if I'm spoon feeding him, he'll slap the spoon and send food flying.  If he's self feeding from his tray, he will just start swiping all the food to the floor.  Today I tried a couple new foods - pears, pinto beans - and he wasn't a fan.  So after he'd thrown them all to the floor, I tried some favorites - carrots, chicken, cheese.  He was on a destructive roll and swiped them to the floor without trying them.  Pretty soon the floor looked like this:

I gave up trying to feed him anything and just set him on the floor.  I hoped maybe he'd eat the food if it was on the floor since he eats everything else on the floor.  It actually kind of worked.  He immediately ate a few of the items and over the next 30 minutes, he ate about another half of them.  After that he'd crawled through so much of it, that I simply had to clean the rest up.  It's times like that (and only times like that) when I wish we had a dog to clean up these messes for me.