This weekend, my family and I will be spending time in Treasure Island with friends for our annual beach weekend getaway.  Since our other mini-vacations were canceled this year due to allergies and illness, Allan and I chose to turn our weekend away into a mini vacation and arrived at the beach on Wednesday.

On our vacation agenda, Allan wanted to take the girls fishing at sunrise.  I’ve never known my husband to get up at the crack of dawn and I was pretty impressed with his initiative.  Thursday morning, the girls woke up before the crack of dawn and their excitement and a cup of coffee was all Allan needed to get moving.

I tagged along to capture the moment in photos.

It seemed it was going to be a while before anyone caught anything, so I decided to take a little stroll along the shore for some shelling and to fit in some fitness for my Juneathon efforts.  Thinking I would only be gone for a little while, I left my flip-flops and water with Allan and the girls and headed south along the shore.

My shelling stroll quickly turned into a beach clean-up when I found several empty beer cans in the sand.  Finding the beer cans infuriated me.  With the blankets of oil arriving on the shores of Pensacola and the rest of Florida watching and waiting for the sludge to hit our shores, some drunken idiot must have interpreted the oil spill on our beaches as a landfill.

Even though bending over to pick anything up in the last few weeks of my pregnancy has been pretty painful, it felt good to clean up this small stretch of the beach.  After my mini beach clean-up, it was time to return to my family.  In the distance, I could see some hot pink and brown, so it seemed they were still casting away.  But as I came closer to their fishing spot, I realized my shoes and water bottle were missing and the hot pink person appeared further in the distance.  I assumed my family chose to try another fishing spot at the pier.

As I made my way to the pier to join my family, I chuckled how my husband left me barefoot and pregnant on the beach, but the morning heat was no laughing matter.  As I waddled along, I began to feel dehydrated and tired.

When I arrived at the pier, there were no signs of family but plenty of other signs.  I’ve never known groins to wave, but much like the Gulf, my pelvic muscles and my feet were beginning to swell.

It then dawned on me that my family must have returned to the hotel room.  After reading all the warning signs on the pier, I contemplated waving down Turtle Patrol or the beach police for a ride back to my hotel.

Swallowing down my tears, my cotton mouth, the pelvic pain, my aching bare feet and my frustration for not taking my water with me or my phone, I had no other choice but to begin walking back to the hotel room.  As I added the distance in my head, the numbers and the heat made me woozy.  Visions of headlines flashed in my head.  Passed Out Pregnant Mom Mistaken for Beached Whale

I passed a nesting sanctuary and I wished my own nesting had been sanctified.  Why didn’t I take my water?  Why didn’t my husband leave my water bottle? Maybe he did but some other self-righteous beach lover threw it away.  Why didn’t he scratch a note in the sand for me? I realized once again that my husband and I need to work on our communication skills since sand sketches and skywriting are out of the question although texting is definitely his strength.

I finally arrived back at the hotel two miles and two hours later swollen, overheated, thirsty, tired and tearful but much wiser.

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