This week we have spent a couple days at our favorite beach. This beach is just fabulous! It is so well maintained and sits in a nature preserve, so it is surrounded by native foliage with plenty of wildlife to connect with.
It’s seaweed time right now, which means the shore is filled with lots of seaweed that is continuously washing up on the beach. I like it. It’s really pretty. Just another part of the ever changing beaches. Yesterday we arrived to find our beach littered with garbage! It is tangled up in the seaweed and truly is everywhere! 
We met a wonderful couple who walked this end of the beach today and cleaned up while they walked. 
Today we too came equipped with our clean up gear! Just some bags, but we all pitched in and got to work to make our beach beautiful again!
This month marks the beginning of nesting season for the loggerhead sea turtles. It would be so terrible if they came on the beach only to be tangled in trash. I love nesting season! Soon the dunes will be lined with markers, noting where the new nests have been made. The mother turtles who lay on the beach were also born on this exact beach. They make their trek all the way back to this beach, which they memorized on the walk they made as a baby going from the nest to the water. Last year we got to see a couple of baby turtles make their way to the water and hopefully this year we’ll get to do that again. 
While we were looking for trash to pick up, we had to be on our guard because man of war were also tangled in the seaweed! They are not something you want to accidentally grab or step on. The kids are pretty good about looking before they step, although I frequently have to say, Watch where your feet walk!
What’s this?? You are in luck!!! This post is riddled with rare pictures of me. Thanks to my wonderful husband who joined us today. You actually get more than one. 🙂
And of course, my mama. So, we walked only a short way down the beach and in that time we filled two bags with garbage!
I’m fairly certain the trash came from a boat. Just about everything was sun bleached and looked like it had been tossed around in the waves quite a bit.
Here is our youngest environmentalist hard at work. 
My sweet Willow immersed herself in her wonderful world of ballerinas and wagons and magical moments. She didn’t help us with the clean up, but she also is not comfortable being close to the water. She had so much fun with her wagon today. And now the beach is beautiful again–perfect for playful and relaxing moments.
