Sea Shells

This past weekend my husband, daughter, and I were at the ocean as leaders for a youth retreat.  On Saturday morning I took a break and went for a prayer walk along the beach.  There was almost no one around, and the ocean was so beautiful.  I looked down and suddenly noticed that there were all these beautiful shells!  Not, like, super fabulous big shells, but there was quite a variety in terms of size and shape and color, and so I gathered a number of them to show to my daughter.  Today we played with them.  She broke some of the neater ones, but that's okay.  I'd rather them be used and broken than sit uselessly as clutter in some box.  We put them in and out of the sand bucket.  I started a game where we scooped the smaller shells with the bigger shells to put them in the bucket.  She liked the game, but she liked it best when I was the one scooping the shells, which wasn't exactly what I was going for.  We sorted them according to their similarities.  We looked at their colors, we felt their smooth texture against our fingers and cheeks (she thought the cheek thing felt a little weird), and I made up a song that she loved (to the tune of 'I'm a Little Tea Pot'):

I'm a little sea shell, I come from the sea.

Little fishies swim there and they live inside of me.

When the water rises I go high on the sand.

The water goes back in the sea, and I am left on land.

We just basically handled the shells and put them in and out of the bucket, singing the song, for quite some time.  It became today's favorite game.