Our haul

Every kid likes treasure hunts. There’s something about the quest, something about the thrill of the hunt. Of course there’s also the sheer excitement at those moments of discovery—the very seconds the kids find what they’re looking for and practically jump for joy.

Friends tell me this is one of the things that makes Pokemon Go so popular. In our family, it explains why the girls love combing our local coastline for beach glass.

Beach Glass Hunts are one of our favorite activities—a go-to agenda item for those days when I want to get the kids fresh air but don’t want them to realize that they’ve spent the entire day outside. Luckily, we live about an hour from the Sonoma County coast, and many of the beaches out that way are veritable goldmines for beach glass.

I took Little R and Baby G earlier today, to Goat Rock State Beach. G spent the hunt (freezing her buns off) in the child-carrier backpack and R traipsed along the beach on foot. It was one of our the most epic days ever—we tallied more than 30 pieces in all.

Granted, many of these pieces were about the size of individual fish-tank gravel. But the kids didn’t care.

Our hunt started out slowly—it took us a while to walk from the parking lot over the dunes to the water’s edge, and a while longer to head up the beach to find rocky sections of sand. Eventually, however, R honed in on a section that provided the motherlode: more than a dozen green pieces, a few clear ones, two reddish-brown specimens, and a few blues.

Every time my kid found a piece, she’d scream BEACH GLASS BEACH GLASS BEACH GLASS at the top of her lungs. Every time she screamed it, the seagulls lingering up ahead flew off, scared for their lives.

Time on the beach went quickly; I thought we were out for 45 minutes but really it was about 90. The two (or three, I guess) of us could have kept going but the baby needed to eat and we needed to allow enough time to walk back to the car and drive back to pick up Big Sister L from school.

The itinerary didn’t matter one bit. R was happy to get time on the hunt and delighted to have a stash to show for it. G liked watching waves and birds, and hearing her sister scream and run around like a spaz.

In short, our coast time today was pure and total bliss. Beach glass never disappoints around here.