By Wednesday, Thomas was mostly recovered - just in time for his Aunt Heather to show up for a long weekend. Her birthday was on Friday and she decided that she would rather spend it with "the cutest nephew ever" than anyone else. (Can't say I blame her!) Mom and Dad came in Friday night and we all packed up Saturday morning and headed to the beach at Galveston. Technically Thomas has been to the Galveston beach before, but I think he was only 4 months and not terribly sure what was going on...

This time he was ready for fun! Mom and I failed to communicate prior to the trip and both ended up buying a bunch of beach toys, so I think we had the most prepared beach toy arsenal of anyone on the beach. Since we went to Stewart (the beach we went to *all* the time as kids), I even paid for us to have beach umbrella and chairs. I was more worried about Thomas getting sunburned than the rest of us. (And it showed - I got sunburned and he was fine!)

Not surprisingly, it wasn't actually Thomas who did all the sand castle building:

I even helped - look at the awesome sand mold I found when I went a little crazy buying him beach toys! How could I resist that??

After a snack break, we finally coaxed him down to the water. As long as he was with me, he didn't care about the size of the waves, but once I handed him off to mom - he had a different opinion about even the small ones!

After splashing around in the ocean for awhile, we went back to the shade and Thomas found something even more exciting that a big ocean...! A plastic bucket filled with water!!

You take the boy to see a ocean and he crawls into the plastic bucket of water. Yup - he's obviously has my genetics... crazy kid!