Rainy Day Forts & Lighthouse Beach

It's raining like crazy the past 24hours.  We didn't realize how spoiled we are with outdoor activities for our toddler and dog until we were forced to think of rainy day activities.  Last night used diaper boxes to race around the house and then made forts from dining room chairs and beach towels.

This morning I was going to enjoy some quiet time by myself to go shelling at low tide, but with thunder and lightning making it less safe, I stayed home with Doodles and Brian took Keiki to the stores to buy a child's Sanibel Island T-shirt with cute glow-in-the-dark cartoon sea turtles on it.

Sitting at the Blue Giraffe Cafe

Rainy-day lunch: complete with party hats just for fun!

What's better on rainy days then party hats for no reason at all except that it's just super fun?!  It's the simple things that I appreciate the most on our family adventures.

After naptime, I took Keiki for an afternoon at the Lighthouse beach.  It was still drizzling, but when you are already in the ocean water, a few rainy water drops from the sky don't matter.  My motto while down here in Sanibel Island has become "the ocean is magical" because the availability of shells here have been nothing like I've seen before!  And tonight was no exception, with two very cool gifts from teh ocean for our toddler (and me!) to see:  We saw and a hermit crab that moved into a Apple Murex shell and a Lightning Welk.  After taking a few photos on our beach towel, we "thanked the ocean" for it's gifts by bringing them back to their ocean home.  It's so nice to teach Keiki to respect her "friends" and "puting them back in their home."  She  does really well at not trying to keep the shells that need to stay at sea, so proud of her! 

Lakes Regional Park

We ventured off Sanibel Island today to Fort Myers, FL to seek out Lakes Region Park.  It was highly recommended by the Sanibel children's' librarian for little munchkins.  SUPER glad we took her recommendation because this place was great!  My only regret was we didn't come over a weekend when the train was running, being that we are in the area during off-season.






The playground was enormous and so much fun even for us to explore!  The best part was there was other children about 2-3years old also for Keiki to play with.  We didn't realize how much she was missing playing with her friends so this interaction was perfect!




We will certainly come back for a $5 train ride this weekend!  This place is SO awesome!  After running around the playground for a while and getting hot and tired, it was refreshing to see there were not one, but TWO splash pads to play in!  No joke!! We choose the one with other kiddos to play with.  They shared a beach ball back and forth and showed us parents just how easy it can be to make new friends in a new place.  :)  Just add a fun water park and everyone is entertained!

On a side note, we are also glad that we came in the morning before all the rain coming this week. But we still found it funny how the park rangers claimed the area to be closed in the afternoon due to "inclement weather" (I love how they think a little rain and 86* is considered "cold & wet"... ha!)

Sanibel Library

It was a rainy morning so we decided to check out the Sanibel library.  The entrance has these great displace cases for shell identification and there was so many toys for kids to play with!

After naptime, we usually enjoy swimming in the pool.  Keiki is growing like a weed on this trip and we figured out today that she can stand in the shallow end on her tip-toes!  She likes to exclaim "touch!"
Even Doodles liked being pool-side in this heatwave!  After dinner and Keiki's bedtime, we enjoyed sunset down by the docks.  No longer fearing giant alligator attacks and searching for manatees now, we enjoyed watching the fish jumping in the clam bayou.  Look closely at the sunset picture and you can see it jumping!

Manatee

It didn't take us long to get ourselves back down to the dock.  This afternoon around 3pm we saw manatees!  It started off scary since we thought we had alligator sightings a few days ago, but today it was many manatees without a doubt.  There was a very distinct prop-propeller tail and long wide smooth body and a double nostril snout.  And there was multiples!!  I would definitely say more then three different sightings at the same time in front of us on the dock and both up and down river.  What luck to be able to spot these amazing creatures in the wild!