A Girl And Her Bucket

I know a girl who can do wonders with a bucket and some sand. Fortunately for her and for us, we have plenty of both here.

I have dozens of pictures of her with a bucket by her side, evidence of her recent engagements.

For her second birthday, we bought our little girl a Disney princess kitchen. It’s positively dreamy from a little girl’s standpoint, dripping in pink and complete with pots and pans, dinnerware, utensils, and sound effects. Yet, she has spent far more time cooking on the beach with a dollar store bucket and a shovel.

Protocol dictates that everyone on the beach sample her fine cuisine upon its completion. We learned quickly to wait for the chef to name her cuisine before sampling, so that we can give it the proper praise after tasting it. Otherwise, this could go badly. She takes confusing soup with scrambled eggs, for instance, as a grave insult. As would I, now that I think about it.

Also noteworthy is how much of the food ends up embedded in the chef’s hair.

I’ve never known my daughter’s cooking not to require a bath at its conclusion. (Now that I think about that, my husband, an excellent cook in his own right, probably should bath after he cooks too. Sometime I should do a post about the widespread destruction of our kitchen after he cooks anything with red sauce. Or red wine. Or flour. Or really sauce of any sort. Or butter. Or salt. But I digress.)

As expected, she also builds castles, in varying shapes and sizes. This she usually prefers to do this with company. In fact, I suspect that she prefers my company for such royal endeavors. With her brothers, the castles often abruptly become the stage for their latest battles. She’s largely unsympathetic about their need to slay things, since it tends to wreak havoc on the overall structure, as you can imagine.

When I was going through my pictures this morning, I realized that I really don’t have any pictures of any of the castles I’ve made with her. Why? Sadly for her, my castle building skills, from an architectural standpoint, leave all to be desired. Basically, I have a moat fetish, so every castle I build starts with a moat. Usually, by the time we have finished the moat, we are a bit tired, and sort of slap the castle itself together. The castle being constructed in the picture above, in case you are wondering, was one she made with her cousin, a girl clearly unmoved by the seductive nature of the moat.

Some day, when she’s a little older, she’ll wake up one day and wonder if the fun of playing in the sand, with just a bucket and a shovel, will be worth the clean-up efforts afterward. And maybe she’ll decide not to cook or build that day. But for now, we’ll cook and build sand creations with abandon, enjoying her four-year-old always-in-the-momentness.